“Sure you didn’t dream it, Eph?� asked Seneca kindly.
“It is a good yarn, anyway,� said Martin who had a taste for fancy sketches. “And it hangs together as well as most. I believe it is as true as any of us could make up unless we had facts or some little conveniences of that kind to go upon.�
The little boy straightened up and leveled a look of indignant protest at the scoffers. Then, turning to Ethan Allen, he said, “You go on—you know about the rest of it.�
“No chaffing about this not being true,� said Ethan, “we haven’t the time for it. Eph wakened me up at two o’clock this morning with a handful of gravel on my window, and I was over at Smith’s hill before daylight, and I found the crowbars rammed up a hollow tree just as he told me, and the gun is there by the roadside, tipped over in a kind of gully, and there is some gravel on top of it, and a pile of dry brushwood, so that any one driving along the road would not notice it, and I fished the ramrod and old Basset’s traces out of the brook. I reckon the Ogden boys are coming over for the gun to-night, and we want to get in ahead of them. I can go, for one. Who else?�
“Me, too,� piped in little Eph.
“Oh, of course,� said Ethan.
“Me, three—that makes six,� said Martin.
“I will go,� said Seneca Goodyear in his slow, heavy way, “and I reckon that father will let me have a team—our horses won’t have to work to-morrow.�
“Will your father make you tell what you are going to do with it?� asked the conservative boy.
“Well, no—not if I had rather not,� said Seneca. “He’ll trust me—and that is the tightest tether I want to be fastened with. Sometimes I wish he didn’t. I wouldn’t like to get home minus the traces and linchpin and crowbars as Phil Basset did.�