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Even Iosefo, sitting on the trunk in the bedroom, became one of them things that ran into habit; and in some ways it was a good idea, too, for it brought custom to the store, what with the deacons coming over to talk about church affairs, and the Committee on Ways and Means meeting there regular. Even the gold twenty every week settled down in the same channel of routine, and I didn’t bite it any more, as I used to do, nor hold it in my hand wondering where it come from. I just put it away with the rest and thought no more about it. The only concern of me and Sarah was to feed up the old fellow to the best of our ability and try and make him pleased.

We had been running along like this for I don’t know how long, when one night, toward the small hours, a singular thing happened. I was sleeping very light, and I woke up all of a sudden and saw Old Dibs standing in the doorway! He had a candle in his hand and bulked up enormous in his red silk dressing gown, and there was a wild look on his unshaved face.

I held my breath and watched him through my half-shut eyes–watched him for quite a spell, till he softly tiptoed away again in his naked feet, and I heard the door close behind him in the house. I waited a long while wondering what to do, and what there could be in the boatshed to bring him out at such an unlikely hour. At first I was for getting my rifle and sitting up the balance of the night; but then, as I waked up more and tried to 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.