Rudolph heard this conversation with no little pleasure.
"It's the very chance I was waiting for," he said to himself. "I'll lie in wait for him as he comes back. I can easily hide in the woods."
CHAPTER XXIII. THE NEGLECTED WELL.
Rudolph took care to breakfast in good season the next morning. He felt that this day was to make his fortune. The deed which would entitle him to a life support was to be perpetrated on that day. He shuddered a little when he reflected that in order to compass this a life must be sacrificed, and that the life of the boy who had been for years under his guardianship, who had slept at his side, and borne with him the perils and privations of his adventurous career. He was a reckless man, but he had never before shed blood, or at any rate taken the life of a human being. He would have been less than human if the near approach of such a crime had not made him nervous and uncomfortable.
But against this feeling he fought strenuously.
"What's the odds?" he said to himself. "The boy's got to die some time or other, and his dying now will make me comfortable for life. No more hungry tramps for me. I'll settle down and be respectable. Eight hundred dollars a year will relieve me from all care, and I shall only need to enjoy myself after this."
Rudolph must have had strange notions of respectability to think it could be obtained by crime; but in fact his idea was that a man who could live on his own means was from that very power respectable, and there are plenty of persons of a higher social grade who share in this delusion.
At a few minutes after nine Tony set out on his journey. It never occurred to him that the old Quaker in suit of sober drab, who sat on the piazza and saw him depart, was a man who cherished sinister designs upon him. In fact, he had forgotten all about him, and was intent upon his journey alone. Most boys like to drive, and our friend Tony was no exception to this general rule. He thought it much better than working about the stable-yard.