"You cayn't rile me thataway, boy," he said. "I've knowed you a heap too long. Git in the fu'ther rut and take your medicine like a man."
Since there appeared to be no help for it, Tom set his horse in motion again, and Japheth gave him a mile of silence in which to cool down.
"Now you listen at me, son," the horse-trader began again, when he judged the cooling process was sufficiently advanced. "I ain't goin' to tell no tales out o' school this here one time. But you got to let Nan alone, d'ye hear?"
"Oh, shut up!" was the irritable rejoinder. "I'll go where I please, and do what I please. You seem to forget that I'm not a boy any longer!"
"Ya-as, I do; that's the toler'ble straight fact," drawled the other. "But I ain't so much to blame; times you ack like a boy yit, Tom-Jeff."
Tom was silent again, turning a thing over in his mind. It was a time to bend all means to the one end, the trivial as well as the potent.
"Tell me something, Japhe," he said, changing front in the twinkling of an eye. "Is Nan coming back to the dog-keeper's cabin when the family leaves the hotel?"
"'Tain't goin' to make any difference to you if she does," said Pettigrass, wondering where he was to be hit next.
"It may, if you'll do me a favor. You'll be where you can see and hear. I want to know who visits her—besides Miss Ardea."
Brother Japheth's smile was more severe than the sharpest reproach.