“Can you eat anything at all this morning?” he asked Bond.
The man shook his head, said he felt tired, turned over, and tried to go to sleep again.
CHAPTER VII.
DICK’S FIRST SPECULATION.
Dick spent the entire morning gathering apples, making selection of the best that he shook down or knocked from the limbs.
“It’s like picking up money,” he mused as he gathered them into one of the bushel baskets and then carried them to the wagon, which he had drawn out into the yard, and dumped them inside.
“I wonder how many bushels I can get away with,” he figured, after a careful estimate of the load he had already secured. “I believe this wagon will hold close on to forty bushels, but it’ll be an all-day job to gather that many. I’m afraid I’ll have to be satisfied with twenty, if we’re going to leave here early this afternoon. That ought to give me fifty dollars out of the spec. Gee! That’s better than working like a slave for Silas Maslin at nothing a week and skimpy board.”
Dick looked in on Hiram Bond every little while, but the man appeared to be sleeping right along.
Noon came, and the boy began to feel decidedly hungry.
“I guess I might as well clean up Mr. Bond’s basket,” he argued. “It isn’t likely he’ll care for any solid food to-day. I’ll get him some milk at the first house I see along the road.”