I'd
rather lose a large sum of money than those drawings."
At about this time Jacob Farnum was prowling carefully about the spot
that Mr. Emerson had named. He waited there, in hiding, for a long time,
ere Messrs. Melville and Emerson came along. He let them pass, then
followed slyly, in accordance with Broughton Emerson's directions of
that afternoon.
"Now, what on earth does this all mean?" wondered Jacob Farnum, unable,
despite his curiosity, to regard this expedition without a feeling of
considerable disgust with himself. "Confound it, it's unmanly, this
spying on someone else! It makes me feel like a rubber-soled detective,
a thug or a labor picket trying to 'warn' a workman with a lead-stuffed
club! Yet Emerson is a gentleman, or I've been fooled. It must be all
right, I suppose."
The night was dark, and the moon not yet quite due to rise. When it
did come up above the horizon it was certain to be more or less obscured
by the clouds hanging there.
While Messrs. Melville and Emerson stepped off along the road, Jacob
Farnum was forced to keep behind bushes and other natural objects of
cover, which increased the boatbuilder's uneasy feeling that he was,
doing something well nigh dishonorable.
At last, however, the two capitalists stepped off the road, concealing
themselves in a clump of bushes as though by previous understanding.
"It looks like a prearranged meeting of some sort," reflected the
boatbuilder, after having crept close enough to be able to see and to
overhear.
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