“All right, Phil, we’ll do so. My! I wish—it doesn’t sound very complimentary—but I wish your father would stay away another week. I believe we can do this work in a week, and wouldn’t it be grand if we could have the stream headed off before he got home! But how about the plowing, Phil? I was forgetting that.”
“Why, the only plowing left,”I replied, “is the potato land, and that, fortunately, is not urgent; whereas the turning of this stream is urgent—extremely urgent—and my opinion is that we ought to get at it. Anyhow, we’ll begin on it, and if my father thinks proper to set us to plowing instead when he gets home—all right.”
“Well, then, we’ll begin on this work as soon as we can. And now, Phil, let us get along home.”
We had been seated on a big stone while this discussion was going on, and were just about to rise, when Joe, suddenly laying his hand on my arm, held up a warning finger. “Sh!”he whispered. “Don’t speak. Don’t stir. I hear some one moving about!”
Squatting behind the rocks, I held my breath and listened, and presently I heard distinctly, somewhere close by, the tinkle of two or three chips of stone as they rolled down into the crater. Some one was softly approaching the place where we sat.
Though to move was to risk detection, our anxiety to see who was there was too strong to resist, so Joe, taking off his hat, slowly arose until he was able to peep through a chink between two of the big fragments which sheltered us. For a moment he stood there motionless, and then, tapping me on the shoulder, he signed to me to stand up too.
Peeping between the stones, I saw, not fifty yards away, a man coming carefully down the crater-wall on the side opposite from that by which we ourselves had entered. In spite of his care, however, he every now and then dislodged a little fragment of stone, which came clattering down the steep slope. It was one of these that had given us notice of his approach.
There was no mistaking the tall, gaunt figure, even though the light of the sunset sky behind him made him look a veritable giant. It was Long John Butterfield.
He was headed straight for our hiding-place, and it was with some uneasiness that I observed he had a revolver strapped about his waist. In appearance he looked wilder and more unkempt than ever, while the sharp, suspicious manner in which he would every now and then stop short and glance quickly all around, showed him to be nervous and ill at ease.
While Joe and I stood there silent and rigid as statues, Long John came on down the slope, until presently he stopped scarce ten steps from us beside a big, flat stone. There, for a moment, he stood, his hand on his revolver, his body bent and his head thrust forward, his ears cocked and his little eyes roving all about the crater—the picture of a watchful wild animal—when, satisfied apparently that he was alone and unobserved, he went down upon his knees, threw aside several pieces of rock, and thrusting his arm under the flat stone, he pulled out—a sack!