“I knew it; I knew it all the time. Say! Jonas has not used up all that thousand dollars that the old man gave him?”
“What do you know about that?” asked Nat, in surprise. “Has Jonas been talking about it?”
“I won’t say that he has or that he hasn’t,” said Peleg, with a knowing shake of his head. “I don’t mind telling you, for I know it won’t go any further, that I have heard something about it. You would not expect me to say more without breaking my word, and that is something I never do. But I tell you that he has got a heap of that thousand dollars left.”
“That’s what I have often thought. Where has he got it hidden?”
“That’s another thing I must not tell you, but I know where, or at least I can come within a thousand miles of it, where he hides it. You see I know a heap of things that people don’t think I do. If you should tell me that you know where that money is—”
“But I don’t,” said Nat. “I know where some of it is—that is the most of his fortune is concealed.”
“Aha!” said Peleg while a smile, a very faint smile which nobody would have noticed, overspread his face. He did not give utterance to this expression but said it to himself, while Nat himself, always on the lookout for some such signs, did not know how extremely delighted he was by it. Peleg was in a fair way to learn all about it. “If you should tell me where this money is hidden,” he went on after controlling himself, “I would die before any one should find out from me the exact spot. You see the way the thing works with me is this: If a person tells you a secret, that is yours to keep. Don’t tell any body of it; and in a very short time people will learn that you can be trusted.”
“I don’t know just where this money is,” said Nat, and he hesitated a long while before he said the next words. “I know where the papers are.”
“What papers!”
“The papers that tell where the money is hidden.”