“Wal, dog-gone my buttons, wasn’t they mine?” shrieked Godfrey, jumping up and knocking his heels together. “Haint he my son an’ haint I his pap? Haint I older an’ don’t I know more’n he does, an’ haint it the properest thing that I should have the handlin’ of all the money what comes into the family? Whoop! Don’t the law give me all the airnin’s of my scamps of boys till they’re twenty-one years ole?”
“Hold on, now,” exclaimed Bob, who, although he was not a little startled by Godfrey’s exhibition of temper, tried to look quite unconcerned. “Don’t smash things. Everybody knows that it was your money, and that you had a perfect right to take it.”
“That’s jest what makes me so pizen savage,” yelled Godfrey, throwing down his rifle, burying both hands in his hair, and striding back and forth like an insane man. “It’s mine, an’ I had oughter have it; but, dog-gone it, I haint got it now.”
The last word was uttered with a wild shriek that made the words ring again. Bob looked and listened in great wonder, and stepped back a pace or two.
“Jest look a yer,” cried Godfrey, thrusting his hand into his pocket and bringing it out through the hole which Dan had cut with his knife. “I give half the money to that thar mean Dan o’ mine, but he got mad jest kase I wanted to take keer on it fur him; so when I was asleep he cut out the box an’ tuk hisself off to the swamp!”
Here Godfrey went off into another wild paroxysm of rage, and Bob sat down on the log and looked at him.
CHAPTER VIII
BOB IN A QUANDARY.
“YES, sur, that’s jest what that mean Dan o’ mine done,” shouted Godfrey, swinging his arms about his head. “I didn’t find it out until this mornin’, an’ then I cut a big hickory, and tuk arter him mighty peart, I tell ye; but somehow I couldn’t ketch the trail. I’ll take arter him agin bright an’ ’arly to-morrer, howsomever, an’ I’ll ketch him if I have to hoof over the hul state of Mississip. I jest come back here to take a leetle rest an’ kinder plan my movements, like the generals do afore a battle, ye know.”
This was not the real reason why Godfrey came back to his old camp. He believed that Dan was hiding somewhere in the swamp; and as that covered a large section of country, where plantations were few and far between, Godfrey thought it would be a good plan to replenish his haversack before starting in pursuit of his graceless son. The bacon and meal he had stolen from Mr. Owens’s smoke-house (Godfrey wondered why Bob did not say something to him about that affair) had all been eaten or wasted, and when night came Godfrey intended to go out on another foraging expedition. He was well acquainted in the settlement, all the dogs knew him, and it would be much easier and safer for him to break into a smoke-house there, than it would be in a strange neighborhood.