"Now don't it bang you what mean luck some fellers do have? Here's a—"
Dan checked himself very suddenly when he became aware that he was shouting out these words with all the power of his lungs. Filled with apprehension he looked up and down the road again, but as there was no one in sight, he resumed his seat and went on with his soliloquy; but this time he spoke in a much lower tone of voice.
"There's a fortune up there in the mounting, as much as two or three hundred dollars mebbe, but I dassent go after it on account of the hant that's up there," said Dan, to himself. "I've heared 'em say that them hants cuts up powerful bad when anybody comes fooling around where they be, and it ain't no use to think of driving them away, 'cause bullets will go through 'em as slick as you please and never hurt 'em at all. How come this dockyment in front of the wood-shed, do you reckon?"
Dan was greatly confused and excited, and it was a long time before he could control himself sufficiently to pick up the envelope, take out the inclosure and read it through to the end—or, to be more exact, nearly to the end; for, as we shall presently see, Dan never had a chance to read the whole of it. He kept up a running fire of comments as he went along, and to have heard him, one would suppose that he had long been looking for something of this sort.
That was hardly to be wondered at, for he had often heard his father indulge in the most extravagant speculations concerning the future, and Dan certainly had as good a right to waste his time in that way as Silas had.
But when he came to read about the "hant" which bothered the writer so persistently that he was obliged to jump into the lake in order to get rid of him, Dan could stand it no longer. He got upon his feet, at the same time returning the letter to the envelope and making a blind shove with it at his pocket, and drew a bee-line for home.
He was so badly frightened that he could not run, and he was afraid to look behind him. He glided over the ground with long, noiseless footsteps, his lank body bent nearly half double, and his wild-looking eyes roving from thicket to thicket on each side of the road in front of him.
Presently the climax came. A squirrel, detecting his approach, sought to escape observation by jumping from one tree to another, and he made a great commotion among the light branches as he did so. The noise was too much for Dan's overtaxed nerves.
"It's the hant, as sure as I'm a foot high," said he, in a frightened whisper. "He can't pester t'other feller any more, 'cause he's gone and drownded himself in the lake; but he's going to foller whoever has got the letter telling where the fortune is, and that's me. I wonder could I out-run him?"