Dick hesitated as to whether he should follow, and as he hesitated he reached the door of the hut and peeped in, to make sure that the dog was not there asleep.
The place was vacant, and as untidy already as the old hut. In one corner there was a heap of feathers plucked from the wild-geese he had shot; in another a few skins, two being those of foxes, the cunning animals making the fen, where hunters never came, their sanctuary. There were traces, too, of Dave’s last meal.
But it was at none of these that Dick looked so earnestly, but at the ’coy-man’s old well-rubbed gun hanging in a pair of slings cut from some old boot, and tempting the lad as, under the circumstances, a gun would tempt.
Hickathrift had refused to lend him one, badly as he wanted it; and here by accident was the very thing he wanted staring at him almost as if asking him to take it.
And Dave! where was he?
Dave might be anywhere, and not return perhaps for days. His comings and goings were very erratic, and Dick tried to think that if the man were there he would have lent him the gun.
But it was a failure.
“He wouldn’t have lent it to me,” said Dick sadly; and he turned to go. But as he glanced round, there was the old powder-horn upon a roughly-made shelf, and beside it, the leathern bag in which Dave kept his shot, with a little shell loose therein which he used for a measure.
It was tempting. There was the gun; there lay the ammunition. He could take the gun, use it, and bring it back, and give Dave twice as much powder and shot as he had fired away. He could even clean the gun if he liked; but he would not do that, but bring it back boldly, and own to having taken it Dave would not be very cross, and if he were it did not matter.
He would take the gun.