“Don't you think we'd ought to get him committed to an asylum right off, and not wait?” says Miller, anxious. “I got a house full of children, and he's my nearest neighbor. I've had new strong locks put on my doors and windows, and I've told my wife if she ever hears Silas give a whoop, not to wait for nothin', but to go inside and lock all the doors.”
Well, we kept on investigatin' Silas, and we got on the track of something like fifty thousand acres of mountain land he was holdin' on option! When me and Miller footed it up, Miller turned white as a sheet, and I felt sick all over.
“Poor, poor Silas!” I says.
“Fifty thousand acres—think of that!” gasps Miller. “Why, you couldn't give it away in an ordinary lifetime. There's never been any one crazier than him, and here he is walkin' the roads without a keeper! It's awful!” The sweat was pourin' off Miller's face. “George,” he says, “with a madman like him, even a strong fellow like you wouldn't be safe. They have awful unnatural strength, these maniacs. Why, you'd be a child in his hands. I bet there ain't no twenty men in the valley could handle him, thin and peaked as he looks. George, it's awful; we're living over a slumberin' volcano.”
“Poor Silas!” I says. “His mind's diseased, all right.”
But we could see plain that Silas had all that terrible cunnin' the mad has. He talked just as rational and simple like he'd always done. He seemed still to have plenty of hen sense, which was the only kind of sense we'd ever credited him with havin'. Yet me and Miller was like men setting over the crater of a volcano,—if that's where you set,—which we was expectin' any moment to bust wide open.
Then one day a stranger drove into the valley. He was a lightnin'-rodder, and he came to me to talk rods. I was cold on the proposition, but he was a clever sociable chap, and one thing led to another, and before long he says.
“You've got a lovely valley; what's land worth here?”
I told him all the way from two an acre for stumpage up to thirty for the best valley farms. He seemed to think them figures mighty reasonable, for he asked me if I had any broke land that 'u'd do to clear for sheep. The upshot of it was that I told him about that six hundred acres I'd been tryin' to sell for such a time, and he made me an offer of two an acre cash out of hand. I wanted to kick myself, for I remembered that fool option I'd give Silas.
“Wait,” said Silas, when I'd hunted him up and explained matters. “Don't be too hasty.”