Birt stared.  One might have inferred, from the tone, that the gentleman had expected to meet him here, whereas Birt had just had the best evidence of his senses that the encounter was a great surprise.

The boy observed his interlocutor more carefully than he had yet been able to do.  He remembered all at once Rufe’s queer story of meeting, down the ravine, an eccentric old man whom he was disposed to identify as Satan.  As the stranger stood there in the deer-path, he looked precisely as Rufe had described him, even to the baffling glitter of his spectacles, his gray whiskers, and the curiously shaped hammer in his hand.

Birt, although bewildered and still tremulous from the shock to his nerves, was not so superstitious as Rufe, and he shouldered his gun, and, pushing out from the tangled underbrush, joined the old man in the path.

“I want,” said the gentleman, “to hire a boy for a few days—­weeks, perhaps.”

He smiled with two whole rows of teeth that never grew where they stood.  Birt wished he could see the expression of the stranger’s eyes, indistinguishable behind the spectacles that glimmered in the light.

“What do you say to fifty cents a day?” he continued briskly.

Birt’s heart sank suddenly.  He had heard that Satan traded in souls by working on the avarice of the victim.  The price suggested seemed a great deal to Birt, for in this region there is little cash in circulation, barter serving all the ordinary purposes of commerce.

As he hesitated, the old man eyed him quizzically.  “Afraid of work, eh?”

“Naw, sir!” said Birt, sturdily.

Ah, if the bark-mill, and the old mule, and the tan-pit, and the wood-pile, and the cornfield might testify!

“Fifty cents a day—­eh?” said the stranger.

At the repetition of the sum, it occurred to Birt, growing more familiar with the eccentricity of his companion, that he ought not in sheer silliness to throw away a chance for employment.

“Kin I ask my mother?” he said dubiously.

“By all means ask your mother,” replied the stranger heartily.

Birt’s last fantastic doubt vanished.  Oh no! this was not Satan in disguise.  When did the enemy ever counsel a boy to ask his mother!

Birt still stared gravely at him.  All the details of his garb, manner, speech, even the hammer in his hand, were foreign to the boy’s experience.

Presently he ventured a question.  “Do you-uns hail from hyar-abouts?”

The stranger was frank and communicative.  He told Birt that he was a professor of Natural Science in a college in one of the “valley towns,” and that he was sojourning, for his health’s sake, at a little watering-place some twelve miles distant on the bench of the mountain.  Occasionally he made an excursion into the range, which was peculiarly interesting geologically.

“But what I wish you to do is to dig for—­bones.”