Freckles drew back.

“You needn’t be afraid of speaking up,” he said.  “There isn’t a soul in the Limberlost save the birds and the beasts, unless some of your sort’s come along and’s crowding the privileges of the legal tinints.”

“None of my friends along,” said Wessner.  “Nobody knew I came but Black, I—­I mean a friend of mine.  If you want to hear sense and act with reason, he can see you later, but it ain’t necessary.  We can make all the plans needed.  The trick’s so dead small and easy.”

“Must be if you have the engineering of it,” said Freckles.  But he heard, with a sigh of relief, that they were alone.

Wessner was impervious.  “You just bet it is!  Why, only think, Freckles, slavin’ away at a measly little thirty dollars a month, and here is a chance to clear five hundred in a day!  You surely won’t be the fool to miss it!”

“And how was you proposing for me to stale it?” inquired Freckles.  “Or am I just to find it laying in me path beside the line?”

“That’s it, Freckles,” blustered the Dutchman, “you’re just to find it.  You needn’t do a thing.  You needn’t know a thing.  You name a morning when you will walk up the west side of the swamp and then turn round and walk back down the same side again and the money is yours.  Couldn’t anything be easier than that, could it?”

“Depinds entirely on the man,” said Freckles.  The lilt of a lark hanging above the swale beside them was not sweeter than the sweetness of his voice.  “To some it would seem to come aisy as breathing; and to some, wringin’ the last drop of their heart’s blood couldn’t force thim!  I’m not the man that goes into a scheme like that with the blindfold over me eyes, for, you see, it manes to break trust with the Boss; and I’ve served him faithful as I knew.  You’ll have to be making the thing very clear to me understanding.”

“It’s so dead easy,” repeated Wessner, “it makes me tired of the simpleness of it.  You see there’s a few trees in the swamp that’s real gold mines.  There’s three especial.  Two are back in, but one’s square on the line.  Why, your pottering old Scotch fool of a Boss nailed the wire to it with his own hands!  He never noticed where the bark had been peeled, or saw what it was.  If you will stay on this side of the trail just one day we can have it cut, loaded, and ready to drive out at night.  Next morning you can find it, report, and be the busiest man in the search for us.  We know where to fix it all safe and easy.  Then McLean has a bet up with a couple of the gang that there can’t be a raw stump found in the Limberlost.  There’s plenty of witnesses to swear to it, and I know three that will.  There’s a cool thousand, and this tree is worth all of that, raw.  Say, it’s a gold mine, I tell you, and just five hundred of it is yours.  There’s no danger on earth to you, for you’ve got McLean that bamboozled you could sell out the whole swamp and he’d never mistrust you.  What do you say?”