“Yes; but you know how good Nat was to the old man when he was alive. If I had been that way, I could have gone, too.”
Jonas evidently did not hear this last remark of Caleb’s, for he seized the harness and went in to fix up the horse which did not look able to travel twenty miles to save his life. But then that was the way that Jonas’s stock all looked. In a few minutes he had the harness on and led him out of the barn to hitch him to the wagon. It was just at this time that Mr. Graves and his party were going outside the bars and his wife was coming down the walk to meet him. She was coming with long strides, too, as if she had something on her mind.
“Say, Jonas,” said she, as soon as she was near enough to make him hear.
“Well, say it yourself,” retorted Jonas. “I know all about it. I am going down to old man Nickerson’s woods, me and Caleb are, and we are going to have that money. Have you anything to say against it?”
“Oh, Jonas, don’t you know that there are ghosts down there?” said Mrs. Keeler, almost ready to believe that the man had taken leave of his senses to propose such a thing.
“Then that’s what his wife stopped in the house for,” said Jonas, and he shouted out the words so that Mr. Graves could hear them. “What does she know about ghosts? Now I heard all Peleg’s story, and I listened to it as though I believed it; but if Nat is down there and can stay there all night without the ghosts troubling him, why can’t other people do it, too? There ain’t no ghosts there.”
“Do you really think so, Jonas?”
“I know it. You see by going with the horse we’ll get there in the daytime, and everybody knows that ghosts can’t hurt you then. I will make him get that money and then me and you will have good times.”
“But maybe Nat won’t do it. He would be a fule to tell you where that money is hidden.”
Jonas was by this time engaged in hitching one of the traces to the whiffletree of the wagon. He stopped in his work, leaned against his horse which did not seem able to bear any weight but his own, and put his hands into his pockets.