“They needn’t trouble themselves about me. Let them attend to their own business, and I will attend to mine.”
“If you git into trouble through your mulishness, you mustn’t blame me for it.”
“I won’t. Good-by!”
“He’s a bad boy—a monstrous bad boy!” soliloquized Uncle Ruben, as he mounted his horse and rode away; “an’ he’ll surely come to some bad end, jest as his father did before him. He shan’t stay up here wastin’ his time when he had oughter be at work, an’ that’s all there is about it.”
George watched his uncle as long as he remained in sight, and then went to work to get his scow into the water. He was surprised and bewildered, but he was not frightened, for he could not bring himself to believe that the man had told him the truth. What reason could anybody have for saying that he was the thief whose depredations had caused so great an excitement in the village?
“Uncle Ruben made it all up out of his own head,” said George to himself, as he pushed the scow into the water and made the painter fast to a convenient tree, “and it is only one of the many mean tricks of which I know him to be guilty. The village people know where I live, and if they suspect me, let them come up here and find some of the stolen goods in my possession. That’s a thing they can’t do.”
Consoling himself with this reflection, George went into the cabin again, and when he came out he brought out with him the oars belonging to the scow, and also a stout fishing-rod. It was not a jointed lancewood rod, with German-silver mountings, wound butt, and nickel-plated reel-seat, but simply a hickory sapling he had cut in the bushes.
George could not afford a fancy outfit, and this rod, which had cost him nothing at all, answered the purpose for which it was intended, and if he chanced to break it while playing a heavy fish, he could in five minutes provide himself with another just as good.
Having filled his box with bait, which he found under a log behind the cabin, George stepped into his scow and pushed her off from the beach.
Just then a loud peal of thunder echoed among the hills, and the smooth surface of the lake was ruffled by the first breath of the oncoming storm. A thick, black cloud which had been hanging in the horizon all day long, was now rising rapidly, and, during the five minutes that George had been employed in getting his boat into the water and digging his bait, it had covered the whole sky.