"What's a Leper John?" demanded Hannah.
"A fairy shoemaker," explained Kenny absently, "in a red coat and he wears buckled shoes and knee-breeches and a hat with a peak and always he's mendin' a shoe that he doesn't finish, find him and never once let him trick you into lookin' away and he'll tell you where treasure is hidden, always."
Hannah blinked.
"What ye need most to my mind, Mr. O'Neill," she said earnestly, "is a regiment of grave-diggers and stone-cutters to help you and Hughie get the thing done."
Night came upon them with Hughie digging up a dot beside the well and Kenny again in the orchard. Everything led back somehow to the orchard, his memory, the chart, even his own conviction.
That night in a dream Kenny distinctly saw the weary little doctor with a bag of mystery in his hand and a spade over his shoulder walking down the orchard hill.
He awoke at dawn with a shiver of excitement. The doctor! What could be more reasonable? Adam had known him for a lifetime. Whom else would he trust? The thought nerved him to heroics.
Kenny climbed out of bed and dressed, shiveringly conscious that the morning was cold enough to turn his breath to steam. It was that period of indistinctness moreover when farmers and roosters, he knew, were getting up all over the dawn, but Kenny, with little time and no inclination at all for melancholy rebellion, tip-toed down the stairway with his shoes in his hand. He put them on by the kitchen fire. There was water by the window in a milk-pail. He poured some in a basin, washed his face and hands and found the water cold enough to hurt his face. Still his excitement kept him keyed to a pitch of singular and optimistic hilarity. Through the kitchen window came the pale glimmer of snow. He hoped Hughie wouldn't hear him harnessing Nellie, and shoot at the barn. The possibility sent him to the kitchen stairway. It wound upward in an old-fashioned twist to the room above.
"Hughie!" he called in a low voice. "Hughie!"
There was a noise of many creaks overhead.