“They didn’t, so they might as well have left me my house. However, it don’t matter much now. I shall never live in it again. You can tell where the house stood, even if it isn’t there now, can’t you? You go to the corner of that house nearest the woods, hold this paper before you and follow as straight a course as you can down the hill and across the break until you come to a brier patch. It is made up entirely of briers, for I cut them down and put them there. Then leave that to your right and go thirty yards and you will strike a stone, as big as you can lift, which does not look as though it had ever been touched. But it has been, and you can pry it up if you want to. When you get that stone out of its place, you dig down about two feet, and there you will find it.”
Nat listened with all his ears, but there was one thing that did not look right about it: The old man talked about the place and the way to find it as though there had never been anything the matter with him at all. If there was something wrong about his mind, Nat failed to see what it was. He talked as though he were reading from a book.
“But what makes you give all this to me?” said Nat at length. “You don’t act as though you had any interest in it at all.”
“I am not going to last long, and I know it,” said Mr. Nickerson. “I have neither kith nor kin in this land, or in any other so far as I know, and since Jonas does not want the money, why you can have it. I know enough about law to know that there is nobody can take it away from you. If you could, I say if you could without too much trouble, call and see Jonas’s wife after you get the money, and give her one thousand dollars, I could rest easy. Could you do that much for me?”
“Of course I can. I will give it all to her if you say so.”
“No, I don’t want you to do that. I know you would give it all to her, because you are an honest boy. You have been good to me during the years I have been here, never had anything cross to say to me, you don’t like Jonas, and neither do I. Mandy has been good to me, too, but you see if I give her this money Jonas will have a chance to take it. I don’t want him to see a cent of it.”
“But Mr. Nickerson, what was your object in pasting your description in the book this way? The book might have been stolen.”
“But it was not stolen. As many as fifty soldiers, Union and Confederate, have had that book in their hands, and when they came to turn it up and see what the title was, they threw it aside. No soldier wants to read a book like that. It is growing late and I must lie down somewhere.”
“Come into my room and turn into my bunk,” said Nat. “You will sleep well there.”
“Jonas has turned me out of his house and I am going to stay out,” said Mr. Nickerson, with more spirit than he usually exhibited. “I will lie down here and die in his barn.”