This bothered Nat more than any thing else. He wanted some little time to think seriously about the way to beat Jonas at his own game, and went into the barn, drew a milk-stool to the threshold so that he could see anybody that approached him from the house and sat down to go over the points again.
“I have got to have help,” thought Nat, “and there is only one boy in the settlement that I can trust; and when it comes to that, I can’t trust him, either. He is a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow, and worse than all, I dare not tell him what I am looking after. I must go it alone if I can; but if I find that I can’t do it, I must see Peleg Graves about it.”
Come to look at the matter Nat was in bad straits, and that was a fact. Of course there were plenty of boys he could have got to assist him, but the trouble was he did not know any of them. He and Caleb were much alike in this respect. The families around them were a little better off than they were, nobody liked Jonas on account of his shiftless ways, and his boys, Nat and Caleb, had been brought up to follow very much in his footsteps, and his bad example had a deteriorating effect on their character—they were like dogs without a master. That was the way Nat looked at it, and it was the source of infinite annoyance to him.
“Whenever I go down town I can just go alone,” Nat had often said to himself. “All the boys there have their friends who are glad to see them. It is ‘Hello, Jim!’ or ‘Hello, Tom!’ here and there and everywhere; but if any one looks at me he seems to say: ‘What you doing here, Nat? You have not any business to come to town.’ And I have more money to spend than any of them. But Peleg has never been that way. He has always seemed glad to see me, but I think the candy I was eating had something to do with it.”
After long reflection Nat finally made up his mind that he would call upon Peleg and see what he had to say about it; but there was one thing on which he was fully resolved: He would not let Peleg know what they were searching for until they found the money. He was not going to stay about Jonas’s house any longer—that was another thing that he had decided upon; and something happened just then to make him adhere to this decision. The door of the house opened at this point in his meditations and Caleb came out. Of course he was very solemn, almost any body would be if one had died so near him, but he came along toward Nat as if he had something on his mind.
“Well, Nat, your friend has gone at last,” said he, by way of beginning the conversation.
“That is a fact. He was the only friend I had about the house.”
“You will not have any more money to buy tobacco for him, will you?” asked Caleb. “What are you going to do?”
“How did I get any money to buy any tobacco for him?” inquired Nat. That was just what Nat had been doing for a number of years, but how did Caleb find it out?
“Oh, you can’t fool me,” said Caleb, with a laugh. “I saw him go into the fence corner the day before he died and take a plug of tobacco out of there. I did not say any thing to pap about it, for I did not know but it was some secret business that you and old man Nickerson had. I did not want to go back on you—”