“Good gracious! Ain’t that what I have been doing ever since he has been here?” demanded Jonas in a heat. “I tell you that his tobacco money is pretty near gone, and when it is all gone he will not get any more. It is high time he was quitting that bad habit.”
Mrs. Keeler made no remark when she heard this. The idea that a man ninety years old could cease a habit that he had been accustomed to all his life, was absurd. Jonas himself really delighted in a good smoke. How would he feel if he were deprived of that privilege? Furthermore, his wife did not believe that all Mr. Nickerson’s money was gone. She was certain that Jonas could find a good deal of it if he looked around and tried.
This conversation took place some time previous to the beginning of our story. Mr. Nickerson’s thousand dollars were nearly gone, at least Jonas said so, and at the time we introduce them to the reader it was all gone, and the old man did not know what he would do next. He had not a bit of that staff of life, as he regarded it, remaining, and now Jonas wanted to know where he had hidden the rest of his money. He had held a long talk with the old man down to the stable but could not get any thing out of him. That was one thing that put him in such bad humor.
“What did you do with all that money, old man?” repeated Jonas, when Mr. Nickerson looked up at him with a sickly smile on his face.
“What money?” inquired the old gentleman, as if he had never heard of the subject before.
“Aw! what money!” said Jonas; and when he got into conversation on this matter he nearly always forgot himself and shouted out the words as if the man he was addressing were a mile away. “I mean the money you had stowed away in your pocket-book where the soldiers could not find it; the money we were talking about down to the barn. Where did you put it?”
“I gave you every cent I had left,” was the reply. “If there was any more the rebels have got it. Say, Jonas, are you going to get me a plug of tobacco when you go down town?”
“There it is again. No, I ain’t. Your money is all gone, and you will have to do without it from this time on.”
Jonas started toward the door as if he were in a hurry to get out, but before he had made many steps he suddenly paused in his walk, gazed steadily at the dirt floor and then turned to Mr. Nickerson again.
“Don’t you remember where a dollar or two of that money went?” said he; and he tried to make his voice as pleading as he knew how. “If you could remember that, I might find you a plug or two of tobacco while I am down town.”