Beadle's Dime Novels No. 96: Little Moccasin — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 LITTLR MOCCASIN. “Qh, botheration, Dave Perry! what on airth are you lookin’ at now—you and Charley Frost? Ain’t afeard the ruff ’ll be blown down upon us, hey? Look at him ! jes’ look at him, Cap’n Bob—’nough to set a feller’s teeth chetterin’.. I say, though, Dave, better cheer up, an’ let the mulligrubs go! Storm’s over now; wind’s all died away; and my notion is —between you ‘an’ me an’ the post—if you don’t wake up and stir your stumps, you wun’t continer long. Them’s my sentiments.” The captain shook his head at the speaker, a strange, way- ward-looking fellow, with red, bushyiair, a hanging lip, and & most enormous mouth, always open, by the name of Hannaford, and then made-a sign for the others to take no notice of Perry, who sat a little behind the rest, with his head thrown back, now with both hands clasped over his lifted knee, and looking as if he saw something through the roof. with his large, dark, dreamy eyes, and now playing nervously with the moss which was crowded into all the spaces between the logs, to “ chink” them against the weather. “The blackest sky—the deadliest—I ever saw in all my life,’ said Perry, at last, in a low, trembling, mournful voice. “ A black-velvet sky, such as they cover hearses with—and set thick with stars ;” and then he tried to smile, as he met the eye of Hannaford, who sat watching him with a look of deep interest; but the smile was a failure, @ decided failure—sad, sorrowful and ghastly. . ‘“Ouaptain Gage,” he added, after another long pause—*“ cap- tain, do you believe in ghosts ?” “Can not say I do,” said the captain, “ though I—” Before he could finish what he had to say, somebody called out from the furthest corner and asked what day of the month it was; and another declared he had “lost his reckoning somehow, pretty much as Robinson Crusoe had lost his’n,” and wished he had thought of “notchin’ a stick when the storm fust set in.” } “ To-day,” said the captain, stooping over a heap of red coals, and opening a sort of diary——“ to-day is the—let me see—yes, the twenty-eighth—no, the twenty-ninth of Decem- ber.” | “The twenty-ninth of December! Almighty God! Are connicloooks. com