"And all along of your telling him about it, you idiot," snarled Silas. "If you had kept your mouth shet, that Joe of our'n wouldn't never have known that the money was there. I have the best notion in the world to—"
"Now, can't you wait until I tell you?" exclaimed Dan, whose senses came back to him very speedily when he saw that his father was pushing up his sleeves. "It wasn't all along of my telling him, nuther, that Joe found out about the cave. Tom and Bob told him, for they were the ones that writ the letter you took outen your wood-pile."
The ferryman's astonishment quickly got the better of his rage, and he listened in a dreamy sort of way to the story that Dan had to tell him; but when the latter reached the end of it, and Silas found out that he had really been within a few yards of a valise whose contents could not be purchased for less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and that the white thing that frightened him was not a ghost, after all, but a dummy, managed by a man who might have been disabled by a single charge from his double-barrel—when Silas heard this, he was ready to boil over again.
The fact that a third of the handsome reward that had been offered for the recovery of the stolen bonds would come into his family did not serve as a balm for his wounded feelings. He wanted the money himself; and the reflection that after coming so near to securing it, he had allowed himself to be frightened away by—
"Oh, my soul!" groaned Silas, jumping to his feet, and striding up and down the bank, with both hands tightly clenched in his hair. "Here's me and you, as poor as Job's turkey, while that Joe of our'n has got more'n twice as much as he oughter have. He's rich, and after this he won't do nothing but loaf around and spend his money, while me and you— Now, wait till I tell you! Did you ever hear of such amazing mean luck before? Toot away!" he cried, shaking both his fists at the opposite bank. "I wouldn't go over after you if I knew I'd get five dollars for it. What's five dollars alongside the ten thousand we might have had if we hadn't been such fools? Oh, Dannie, why didn't we shoot a little lower?"
While Silas was talking, the blast of a horn sounded from the other side of the river. It was a notice to the ferryman that there was some one over there who wanted to cross the stream, but Silas was in no humor to respond to it. Again and again the signal was given, and finally a hail came through the darkness.
"Hallo, there!" shouted a familiar voice. "Is Joe Morgan at home?"
"No, he ain't!" growled Dan in reply.
"Yes, he is!" shouted the owner of that name, who had come out to assist in taking the flat across the river. "Is that you, Tom Hallet?"