Had Luke breathed a word about Burns, half a dozen miners would have volunteered to stand guard, and would thus have interfered with Tom Burns’s visit.
“I want to keep all the fun to myself, Ernest,” said Luke. “We’ll give him a lesson he won’t soon forget. If I told the boys they’d hang him up in short order. I don’t want to take the fellow’s life, but I’ll give him a first-class scare.”
It was about ten minutes of twelve when Tom Burns, leaving his place of concealment, walked with eager steps toward the mining settlement. The one street was not illuminated, for Oreville had not got along as far as that. The moon gave an indistinct light, relieving the night of a part of its gloom.
Burns looked from one cabin to another with a wistful glance.
“I suppose some of these miners have got a lot of gold-dust hidden away in their shanties,” he said to himself. “I wish I knew where I could light on some of their treasure.”
But then it occurred to him that every miner was probably armed, and would make it dangerous to any intruder.
So Tom Burns kept on his way. He was troubled by no conscientious scruples. He had got beyond that long ago. Sometimes it did occur to him to wonder how it would seem to settle down as a man of respectability and influence, taking a prominent part in the affairs of town and church.
“It might have been,” he muttered. “My father was a man of that sort. Why not I? If I hadn’t gone wrong in my early days, if I had not been tempted by the devil to rob the storekeeper for whom I worked, and so made myself an outcast and a pariah, who knows but I might have been at this moment Thomas Burns, Esq., of some municipality, instead of Tom Burns, the tramp? However, it is foolish to speculate about this. I am what I am, and there is little chance of my being anything else.”
So he dismissed the past, and recalled the work he had set for himself.
Everything was still. In the mining village probably there was not a person awake. It was like a dead town. Everything seemed favorable to his designs.