“You can’t fish here, ’cause it’s agin the law, an’ you might as well understand it first as last. Want to speak to me? Hurry up, then, for I ain’t got no time to fool away.”
Imagine the watchman’s surprise when he learned that Sam had come there with the same proposition that his brother had made him a few minutes before. He gave the very same reasons for it, made the same stipulations regarding the division of the reward, and exacted the same promise of secrecy; but he did not tell Rube where the guns were concealed. Just as he got to that point a step sounded within the superintendent’s room, and a hand was laid upon the latch. Before the door opened Sam, who had reasons of his own for not wishing to meet the superintendent face to face, had vanished in the fast-gathering twilight.
CHAPTER IV.
A NIGHT ADVENTURE.
“I don’t see no trout to go with the bacon an’ ’taters that your ma is cookin’ fur supper,” observed Matt Coyle, who was sitting in the doorway of the shanty smoking his pipe. “You don’t often come back without something to show fur your time an’ trampin’.”
“No, ’cause I don’t often have a watchman to tell me that I shan’t fish where I please,” replied Jake, as he leaned his pole against one end of the cabin and disappeared through the door. “Rube’s down there to the hatchery, an’ he’s mighty pertic’lar fur a man who says he’s down on every body, same as we be.”
“Don’t you b’lieve a word of that story,” said Matt, earnestly. “’Cause if you do, you will get into trouble, sure’s you’re a foot high. There ain’t a word of truth in it.”
“Then what made him tell it?” asked Jake.
“I don’t know, less’n he’s been sent out by Hanson or some of the summer boarders to keep an eye on us,” answered Matt. “I b’lieve that if he could find them guns he’d have the hul kit an’ bilin’ of us ’rested before mornin’. See Sam anywhere?”
Jake replied that he had not.
“Well, he’s went up there too, I reckon, ’cause I saw him goin’ off with his pole onto his shoulder. He’ll come pokin’ back directly.”