"I tell you there is, too," Dan protested. "I seen it with my own two eyes, and so did pap. If he was here he'd tell you the same thing, pervided he told you anything at all. We heard it yelling at us, too, and such yelling! Oh, laws a massy! I don't never want to listen to the like again," cried Dan, covering his ears with both hands, and rocking himself from side to side, as if he were in the greatest bodily distress.
Joe now thought it time to hurry matters a little. He was really anxious to hear his brother's story.
"I should like to know just what you and father saw and heard this morning," said he; "but I can't waste any more precious moments with you. You know my time is not my own any longer. It belongs to Mr. Warren."
"Do you mean to say that you're going back?"
"Yes. I am going to start this very minute."
These words seemed to arouse Dan from his lethargy.
"Set down, Joey," said he, at the same time casting apprehensive glances on all sides of him. "Come clost to me, so't that hant can't tech me, and I'll tell you everything."
"Will you be quick about it?"
"Just as quick and fast as I know how, honor bright," replied Dan. "And will you promise, sure as you live and breathe, that you won't lisp a word of it to nobody? 'Cause why, I'm afeared that if you do, he'll show himself to me again, and I don't want to see him no more."
"I shall make no promises whatever," answered Joe, who saw very plainly that he could say what he pleased, since Dan would not permit him to depart until he had eased his mind by confiding to him everything there was in it. "If there is any dangerous thing up there in the gulf, I am going to hunt him or it out the very first thing I do."