“It was just as easy as falling off a log,” replied Silas, resuming his seat and resting his double-barrel across his knees. “When you and Dan went away this morning, I just naturally shouldered my gun, walked up the road to the foot of the mounting, and set down on a log to wait for game to come a-running past me, just the same as if I was watching for deer, you know.”
This was all true; but there was one thing he did that he forgot to mention. The only “game” Silas expected to see was Dan Morgan, when he returned from the mountain at night, and the ferryman was prepared to give him a warm reception. Before he devoted himself to the task of holding down that log by the roadside, he took the trouble to cut a long hickory switch, and to place it beside the log, out of sight. He meant to give Dan such a thrashing that he would never play any more tricks upon him.
“Well, about one o’clock, or a little after, while I was a-setting there and waiting for the game to come along, I heared a noise in the brush, and, all on a sudden, out popped this feller. He was running like he’d been sent for, and that’s why I suspicioned him. Of course I didn’t know him from Adam, but I asked him would he stop a bit. And he ’lowed he would, when he seed my gun looking him square in the eye. I brung him home, and your mam she passed out the clothes-line, and I tied him up.”
“Where is mother now?” asked Joe.
“Gone off after more sewing, I reckon,” replied Silas, in a tone which seemed to say that it was a matter that was not worth talking about. “She helped me figger up what I would get for catching him, and then she dug out. I’m worth almost as much as you be now, Joey, and that there mean Dan, who wouldn’t stay by and help me, he ain’t got a cent. Now don’t you wish you hadn’t played that trick on me this morning?”
“Never mind that,” interposed Joe, who did not care to stand by and listen to an angry altercation which might end in a fight or a foot-race between his father and Dan. “If we are going to deliver
this man to the sheriff to-night, we had better be moving.”
“Do you reckon the sheriff will hand over the twenty-five hundred when I give up the prisoner?” inquired Silas, as the party walked down the bank toward the flat.
“Of course he won’t.”
“What for won’t he?”