ng at them
with mingled inquisitiveness and envy.

"Guess ye don't know what happened down the run last night," he
continued impatiently. "'Lige Curtis got killed, or killed hisself!
Blood all over the rock down thar. Seed it, myseff. Dad picked up his
six-shooter,--one barrel gone off. My dad was the first to find it out,
and he's bin to Squire Kerby tellin' him."

The two companions, albeit burning with curiosity, affected indifference
and pre-knowledge.

"Dad sez your father druv 'Lige outer the store lass night! Dad sez your
father's 'sponsible. Dad sez your father ez good ez killed him. Dad sez
the squire'll set the constable on your father. Yah!" But here the small
insulter incontinently fled, pursued by both the boys. Nevertheless,
when he had made good his escape, John Milton showed neither a
disposition to take up his former nautical role, nor to follow his
companion to visit the sanguinary scene of Elijah's disappearance. He
walked slowly back to the store and continued his work of sweeping and
putting in order with an abstracted regularity, and no trace of his
former exuberant spirits.

The first one of those instinctive fears which are common to imaginative
children, and often assume the functions of premonition, had taken
possession of him. The oddity of his father's manner the evening before,
which had only half consciously made its indelible impression on his
sensitive fancy, had recurred to him with Johnny Peters's speech. He had
no idea of literally accepting the boy's charges; he scarcely understood
their gravity; but he had a miserable feeling that his father's anger
and excitement last night was because he had been discovered hunting in
the dark for that paper of 'Lige Curtis's. It WAS 'Lige Curtis's paper,
for he had seen it lying there. A sudden dreadful conviction came over
him that he must never, never let any one know that he had seen his
father take up that paper; that he must never admit it, even to HIM. It
was not the boy's first knowledge of that attitude of hypocrisy which
the grownup world assumes towards childhood, and in which the innocent
victims eventually acquiesce with a Machiavellian subtlety that at last
avenges them,--but it was his first knowledge that that hypocrisy might
not be so innocent. His father had concealed something from him, because
it was not right.

But if childhood does not forget, it seldom broods and is not above
being diverted. And the two surveyors--of wh