"I can easy tell you my side of it," said the farmer. "Jud and me was something like chums when we was boys. When he come back here a spell ago he heard I was storing something in the cellar under the east wing of the house. He told me he wanted to get into that cellar for something.
"So I met him up there that night. I opened the cellar door and we went down. I kept a lantern there. Then I found out he wanted to go farther. There's a hatch there in the floor of the old doctor's workshop----"
"Naw, I didn't. He wouldn't tell me what he wanted in the old doctor's offices. I stayed there a while with him--us argyfyin' all the time. Then we come away."
"On Saturday night? I caught him trying to break in at the cellar door. I warned him not to try no more tricks, and I told him if he did I'd make it public. We ain't been right good friends since," declared Mr. Pritchett, chewing reflectively on a stalk of grass.
"And you don't know what it's all about?" demanded Lyddy, disappointedly.
"No more'n you do," declared Mr. Pritchett; "or as much."
"Oh, dear me!" cried Lyddy. "Then I'm just where I was when I started!"
"You wanter watch Jud Spink," grumbled Mr. Pritchett, rising from the fence-rail on which he had been squatting. "Does he want to buy the farm?"
"Why--I guess not. He only made Aunt Jane a small offer for it."
"He'll make a bigger," said Pritchett, clamping his jaws down tight on that word, and turned on his heel.
She knew there was no use in trying to get more out of him then. Cyrus Pritchett had "said his say."
When Lyddy got back to the house again she found that Grandma Castle's folks had come to see her in their big automobile, and she and 'Phemie had to hustle about with Mother Harrison to re-set the enlarged dining table and make other extra preparations for the unexpected visitors.
So busy were they that the girls did not miss Harris Colesworth and his father. They appeared just before the late dinner, rather warm and hungry-looking for the Sabbath, Harris bearing something in his arms carefully wrapped about in newspapers.
"Oh, what have you got?" 'Phemie gasped, having just a minute to speak to the young man.
"Samples of the water Spink has bottled up there," returned Harris.