“I heared all about it, an’ about them guns, too,” drawled Rube. “Do you know that there’s been a big reward offered fur ’em? Well, there has. The man who ketches you an’ finds the guns will get two hundred dollars for it; an’ if he finds the guns without ketchin’ you he’ll get half as much.”
“That’s enough to turn every man in the woods agin me,” said Matt, anxiously.
“All except your friends,” Rube hastened to assure him. “They won’t go agin you for no money.”
“Well, I’ll bet you they don’t ketch me agin,” said the squatter, confidently. “They done it once, but I’m onto their little games now. They thought they had us all in their grip, Swan an’ his crowd did, when they burned our camp up there in the cove; but we knowed they was comin’ long afore they got there. I ain’t afeared of their ketchin’ me.”
“An’ I ain’t afeared of their findin’ the guns nuther,” chimed in Jake. “They’re hid where nobody wouldn’t never think of lookin’ for ’em.”
“Whereabouts is that?” asked Rube, carelessly.
The boys grinned, while Matt and the old woman looked down at the floor and said nothing. They were perfectly willing that Rube should know how the guns came into their possession, but they were not so ready to tell him where the stolen weapons were concealed. How did they know but that Rube, tempted by the promise of so large a reward, would hunt up the guns, restore them to their lawful owners, and hold fast to all the money he received for it? Perhaps we shall see that that was just what Rube wanted to do. He was by no means as good a friend to the squatter as he pretended to be, and Matt suspected it all the while.
“What made you turn agin them folks up there to the lake?” said the latter, suddenly. “The last time I seen you, you told me that you had a good job at guidin’, an’ that you was gettin’ two an’ a half a day.”
“So I did, an’ it was the truth,” replied Rube. “But he didn’t stick to his bargain, Hanson didn’t. The last feller I went out with told him that I was a powerful lazy chap, an’ that I wouldn’t do nothin’ but jest roll around on the grass an’ leave him to pick the browse for the beds an’ cook his own bacon an’ slapjacks. He told him, furder, that I wouldn’t take him to the best troutin’ places, ’cause there was too many ‘carries’ in the way. Well, that was a fact,“ added Rube, reflectively. “He had so much duffle with him, my employer did, that I had to make two trips to tote it all over the carries, an’ two an’ a half a day is too little money for doin’ sich work as that. I hired myself out to the hotel for a guide, an’ not for a pack-horse. So Hanson, he allowed he didn’t want me no longer, an’ that made me down on him an’ all the rest, same as you are. If that ain’t a fact, an’ if I ain’t a friend of your’n, what made me tell you to come into my shanty an’ make yourselves to home, an’ use my things till you could get some furnitur’ of your own?”
So that was the way Matt came to be so well fixed, was it? The shanty and every thing in it belonged to Rube, and he had told Matt to step in and make himself at home there. I thought that looked like a friendly act on Rube’s part.