think it out, it seemed that he had a better right to
be afraid of me than me of _him_. It couldn't be to do me no harm, I
reckoned, but probably to assure himself that I was asleep.

He was plainly up to something, and it was equally plain he didn't want
me to know it. So I got out of bed--if you can call a stack of mats and
a schooner's topsail a bed--and lit out to see what was doing. It was no
good trying to get into the house, for Old Dibs had nailed the keys and
handed them out every morning through the winder when I went to take him
his shaving water. But the curtains of the bedroom weren't extra close,
and if I could get up on the veranda without too much of a creaking I
knew I could see in all right. There's a lot of cat in a sailor, even to
the nine lives and the dislike of getting wet, and I was soon on my
knees at the sill, taking in the performance.

The room was lit up as usual, and all the big five trunks were open,
with Old Dibs diving into them like he was packing for the morning
train. Leastways, that was my first thought; the second was, that
something stranger than that was up, and that people didn't usually go
traveling with an outfit of pinkish paper cut into shavings. You've seen
them, haven't you?--the kind of packing they put into music boxes, fine
toys, and the like, flummoxy twisted paper ravelings that protect the
varnish and have no weight to speak of. Well, that was what was in them
trunks, and Old Dibs was pawing it out till it stuck up in the room,
yards high, like a mountain. Occasionally he seemed to strike something
harder than paper--something that would take both his hands to lift--and
it was only a little clinking canvas bag that big.

Money? Of course it was money! And he was stacking it in a leather
dress-suit case laid on the floor next his bed.

You could see he was nervous by the way he kept looking behind him; and
once, when a rat ran across the attic, he jumped awful and the whole
floor shook. It was a queer sensation to look right into a man's eyes
and him not see you, which I did with Old Dibs again and again as he'd
stop and listen. I ought to have said that one of the trunks was clothes
all right, but even here there was three or four bags of coin, which he
got out and added to the others.

Then he counted the bags and tried to turn the top of the suit case on
them, but couldn't manage it. He arranged them first this way and then
that way, but there was always about a