“If you’ll help me get my boat off in the morning, and we succeed in floating her, I’ll give you whatever you choose to take for your services.”
The old man exploded.
“Sho, boy! Kain’t I do a good turn ter my neebor?” he asked. “Pay me, indeed! My fishing and the work I do for the cottagers once in a while gives me all I want. Pay me, indeed! Git right into that bunk now. Sleep your head off. I’ll call you when I’m ready in the morning.”
Ralph was nothing loath to turn in on the rough sleeping shelf assigned to him. But before closing his eyes he thrust the wallet containing the gems under his pillow.
“It’ll be safe there,” he muttered drowsily to himself.
But in the morning when he awakened the wallet with its fortune in gems was gone.
And also among the missing was old man Whey.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE STOLEN SKIFF.
The sun streamed into the miserable old shanty. It had looked unattractive enough by night. Seen by day it was ten times more shabby and ramshackle. Old fish nets, ragged, frayed lines, all the paraphernalia of a river fisherman lay scattered about.
On the crude table stood some unwashed tin dishes, great shad-flies and eel bugs buzzing about them with a whirring sound. Against the wall hung some of old Whey’s clothes, queer, homemade garments, half patches and half the original material; it was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. The sunlight that streamed into the squalid place, which had an untidy, dirt floor, came from the same window through which Ralph had observed the light the night before.