And then he raised a yell to let the men on the other side of the river know that he had at last made up his mind to respond to their signals. But before he did so, he shaded his eyes with his hand, and took a good look at the group on the opposite bank, after which he walked around the cabin, snapping his fingers as he went. This was a signal to the dogs that it was time for them to retire from public gaze for a short season; in other words, to go into a miserable lean-to behind the cabin, which Silas called a wood-shed, and stay there until the hunters, who were now on the other side of the river, should have passed out of sight. They went in in obedience to a sign from the ferryman, and the latter closed the door and put a stick of cord-wood against it to hold it in place.
"If them setter brutes was a present to pap, like he says they was, it's mighty comical to me why he takes so much trouble to hide 'em every time some of them city shooters comes along and toot that horn," soliloquized Dan, as he slowly, almost painfully, arose from the ground, and, after much stretching and yawning, followed his father and brother down the bank toward the flat. "He says he's scared that somebody will take a notion to 'em and steal 'em; but that's all in my one eye, 'cording to my way of thinking. Now, I'll just tell him this for a fact. If he don't quit being so stingy with the money I help him earn with this ferry, I'll bust up the plans he's got into his head about them dogs—I will so. I wonder what's come over him all of a sudden? Here he's been clear up the mounting and come back with only an armful of wood on his wagon, and he don't generally whoop in that there good-natured way, less'n he's got something on his mind."
That was true enough. The ferryman's replies to the hails that came to him from over the river, usually sounded more like the complaints of a surly bear than anything else to which we can compare them. The tone in which they were uttered seemed to say, "I'll come because I can't help myself," and he was so long about it, and made himself so very disagreeable in the presence of his passengers, that those who knew him would often go ten miles out of their way to reach a bridge rather than put a dime into his pocket. But on this particular morning, his voice rang out so cheerily that it attracted Joe's attention as well as Dan's.
Silas was always good-natured when he had something besides his poverty to think about, and Joe would have known that his father had some new idea in his head, even if he had not said a word about it.
"Lively, Dannie!" exclaimed Silas, seizing the steering-oar and pushing the flat away from the bank. "Put in your very best licks, 'cause there won't none of us have to follow this miserable business much longer. There'll be a day when we won't have to go and come at everybody's beck and call, and that day ain't so very far away neither."
The two boys took their places at the sweeps, and the flat moved out into the river. Joe did his best to make a quick passage, as he always did, while the lazy Dan, who had the current in his favor, merely put his oar into the water and took it out again, without exerting himself in the least. His father's hopeful and encouraging words did not infuse a particle of energy into him. He had heard him talk that way too often.
"It ain't right that we should be so poor, while other folks, who never did a hand's turn in their lives, have got more than they know what to do with," continued Silas, as he dropped the steering-oar into the water. "I've got just as much right to have money, and the fine things that money'll buy, as anybody has, and I'm going to have 'em, too. I ain't going to live like the pigs in the gutter no longer. Just think of the hundreds and thousands of dollars that's spent down to the Beach every summer by the city chaps who come there to loaf! I can't lay around under the shade of the trees or swing in a hammock just 'cause the weather's hot. I've got to work. I've got to cut cord-wood in winter and run this ferry during the summer, in order to make a living; but other fellows can stay around and do nothing, just 'cause they've got money. I say again, that such things ain't right."
"It makes me savage every time I go down to the Beach," chimed in Dan, "when I see them city folks, who ain't a cent's worth better than I be, wearing their good clothes, and walking around with their fine guns and fish-poles on their shoulders—"
"Like them over there," said his father, nodding his head toward the bank, which was now but a short distance away.