At the proper moment the "apron"—a movable gangway which could be raised and lowered at pleasure—was dropped upon the bank, and in five minutes more the team and the passengers were all aboard, and the flat was moving back across the river.
CHAPTER III. THE MYSTERIOUS LETTER.
Having landed his passengers and pocketed his money, Silas Morgan made his way toward the cabin with so much haste that he again drew the attention of the boys, who gazed after him with no little surprise and curiosity. Silas was as lazy as a man ever gets to be, and Joe and Dan could not imagine what had happened to put so much life into him.
"I knew that something or 'nother had come over pap when he yelled in that good-natured way to let them fellers on t'other side know that he was coming," observed Dan, who walked back to his seat on the bank, and sunned himself there like a turtle on his log, while Joe hauled in the sweeps and made the flat secure. "He's got another of them money-making plans into his head, I reckon."
Those who were well acquainted with Silas Morgan knew that he always had plans of that kind in his head. He was full of schemes for getting rich without work, some of which, if carried into execution, would have brought him into serious trouble with the officers of the law; but the idea that occupied his busy brain on this particular morning was a little ahead of anything he had ever before thought of. You will probably laugh at it when you know what it was, but Silas didn't.
Of all the thousand and one plans which he had conjured up and pondered over, this one, which had come into his possession by the merest accident, seemed to hold out the brightest promises of success.
"But it wasn't accident, neither," Silas kept saying to himself. "There isn't a day during the shooting season that them mountings ain't just covered with hunters, and how did the man that put this letter into my wood-pile know that I was the one who was to take it out? He didn't know it. I found it 'cause it was to be so, that's the reason."