Sorely disappointed, however, he skulked back to the barn, and there another misfortune overtook him—his own clothes had disappeared.
For a moment or two this startling discovery was too much for his intellect to grasp. He searched here and there desperately, overturned the hay, upset a barrel of oats, frightened the hens from their roosts, and got the horse to neighing. Then, scared and bewildered, he rushed outside, undecided what to do.
Surprise, however, awaited him here again. In a moment he saw himself—or at least somebody, with a black face and his clothes on—steal out from the wood-shed near by, and hurry down to the road.
If he wasn't himself, who in de world was he? dat's what he'd like to know.
But in about three minutes, when he saw the mysterious personage and the Deacon meet unexpectedly near a great tree that stood in the yard, he was never so glad in his life to be in some other fellow's clothes.
Seph ran over to the wood-shed, climbed up the ladder to the chamber above, and began to disrobe himself of Job's clothes in a hurry. He had got them all off, when the personage came scrambling up the ladder also, and the two confronted each other in the straggling moonbeams that found their way through a cobwebbed window.
"What yer gwine to do wid my clothes on, Job Potter?" Seph asked, wrathfully.
"Nothin'. Pa's spoilt it all! He fust thought that you was me, and then that I was you. There's no goin' to the party, anyway."
Seph dropped down on the floor, and let out the laugh that had been tickling him several times during the evening.
"It am all on account ob de Deacon bein' so onreasonable," he said. "We's had a perdicament for sartin."