"What do you reckon that stingy Joe of our'n has come back here to tell mam?" continued Dan.
Silas was obliged to confess that he didn't know, and followed it up with the suggestion that it might be a good plan for him to creep up and find out.
"Creep up yourself, if you want to know wusser'n I do," was Dan's reply. "Can't you see that the door is wide open?"
"What of it?" said Silas. "Can't you creep up behind the chimbly! There's a crack there atween the boards that you've often listened at, 'cause I've seen you. Who knows but Joe may be telling her something about the money that's in the cave?"
Dan said it was not likely that Joe knew anything about the cave, beyond what he himself had told him; but still his father's words aroused his curiosity, and awakened within him a desire to learn what Joe had to say to his mother.
He waited a moment or two to bring his courage up to the sticking point, and then threw himself upon his hands and knees and crept away from his father's sight. He was gone about twenty minutes, and when he returned, he acted so much like a crazy boy that Silas was really afraid of him.
"What's the matter of you?" he demanded, in an angry whisper. "Did Joe say anything so't you could hear it?"
"You're right he did," Dan managed to say, at last. "Oh, pap, we'll never in this world have another chance like that. We had the best kind of a show to get rich, and we let it slip through our fingers, fools that we was."
Silas fairly gasped for breath. He stared fixedly at Dan, who sat on the bank, rocking himself from side to side; but he was too amazed to speak.
"The money was there all the time," Dan went on, "and that Joe of our'n he went and got it, dog-gone the luck!"