"You keep saying 'we' all the time," interrupted Dan, "and I tell you, once for all, that I ain't going to have nothing to do with it. You can have all the money, for I won't go nigh the cave."
"I don't ask you to," Silas hastened to assure him. "That's the trick I was telling you about. All I want you to do is to walk up and down the road to-morrow—it's getting too late to do anything to-day—and make the hant believe that you're looking for the letter you lost."
"Well, I won't do it," said Dan, promptly.
"That'll keep him away from the cave," continued the ferryman, paying no attention to the interruption, "and while he is watching you, I'll slip up and gobble that fortune without asking any other help from you. And I'll give you half, the minute I get my hands on to it—the very minute."
"Well, I won't do it," said Dan, again. "Why don't you stay and watch the hant, and let me go after the money?"
This proposition almost took the ferryman's breath away. He wouldn't have agreed to it if the robber's treasure had been twice twelve thousand dollars.
"Why, you don't know where the cave is," he managed to articulate.
"No more do you," retorted Dan.
"Yes, I do, 'cause I looked at the map. I can go right to it on the darkest of nights."