"It's no joke, Jack, my dear fellow, but sober earnest. Sometimes, though, I feel tempted to wish it was a joke."
"Duplin!"
"A fact. I don't know why, but there seems to be a cloud over me—I feel as though some great calamity was impending. Boys, you may laugh at me, but while I was thus stupefied, I saw my mother's spirit before me, beckoning me to leave the spot. She—it was crying, I thought, as though I was in peril. I saw it as plain as I see you now. I flung down the nugget and fled. Not far, though. Then I stopped. The bright, yellow devils seemed to beckon me back. I took a step forward, and she vanished. Then I went back to the hole," and as he spoke, Duplin trembled violently.
"And you found it then—the hole, I mean? It hadn't vanished?" whispered Jack, breathlessly.
"No," smiling faintly. "It was still there. I dug then, like a madman. I tore up the ground for a dozen feet around. Look—my fingers are worn to the quick. I found more nuggets—I found a dozen more, all larger than that, lying close together. I don't know how large the pocket may be, but I saw enough to feel sure that there is a great fortune there for each one of us; enough, at any rate, to make us independent for life."
"You thought of us, then, as sharers in the pocket with you?" queried Burr Wythe.
"No, not then. I only thought of myself, and of how I could secure the treasure without being suspected and robbed—for I believe that, in my madness then, I would have denied my own father a nugget from all that store. It was horrible—that sensation. I can realize now what a miser feels. God protect me from another such attack!" shuddered Duplin.
"But your plan—what do you intend doing?"
"I've weighed the matter well, and this is what I've decided upon. We three are enough. I selected you two, because I knew that I could depend upon you. Our first move will be to desert the wagon-train."
"Desert?"