“Why, that's all right, Silas; I trust you,” I says, humorin' his fancy.
He made me promise I'd not tell a soul about the option. But that was reasonable, because if anybody in the valley could have got hold of his buyer, first thing they would have done would have been to tell him he'd starve to death on that land, that it was so thin a turkey-buzzard didn't make a shadow flyin' over it. Yes, it was some poor as far as fertility went.
Of course I kept still, but one night as I was walkin' home from the store with the youngest of the Miller brothers,—we married sisters,—it sort of come out that Silas had been to him about land, and they'd give him an option on two thousand acres of cut-over mountainside.
“We'll watch Silas,” I said. “He's losin' his mind.”
“Well, it ain't much to lose,” says Miller. “He's got nothing he'll be less likely to miss.”
“Yes, but he's such a simple soul,” I says. “I don't know but we'd ought to make up a purse and send him off to see a brain specialist. It's a mania he's sufferin' from, for no man in his health would ever think he could sell twenty-six hundred acres of this cut-over land,” I says, appalled at the extent of Silas's hallucination.
“We must watch him,” says Miller. “He may turn violent any moment. These manias grow on a man until he ain't any control over himself. We must watch out for Silas,” he says.
The next day Miller took me aside and told me that Joe Whittaker had told him in confidence that Silas had got an option out of him for his farm.
“What did I tell you?” says Miller. “He's mad, stark starin' mad.”
“That's it, Miller; his poor simple nature has give way at last. Associating with multi-millionaire's was too much for him. I knew his brain was thin in spots, and it's let him through at last. That's over three thousand acres he's goin' to sell—more land than's changed hands in the valley in eighty years.”