Meanwhile, Jake Hibbard was studying Mr. Edwards's face with puzzled attention. He had supposed that the lumber dealer, whom he knew to be well-to-do, would have paid anything, signed any bond, to protect his boy from jail. He was disconcerted. He drew his one hand across his mouth nervously.

"Well, Mr. Barton," said Squire Tucker, "I don't see but what you'll have to take this young man over to Hotel Calkins."

"Hotel Calkins" was the name which local wit gave to the county jail. The words sent a cold shiver down Mr. Peaslee's back. They stung him into generosity. As Barton and his prisoner, followed by Mr. Edwards and Jake, brushed by him on their way to the door, he slipped the knife into Jim's hand. When the boy, trying to keep back the tears, looked up inquiringly, he murmured, in agitation:--

"Don't ye care, sonny! Now don't ye care!"

He was greatly stirred--or he would not have been so incautious as to make his present in person and in public.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cat lying on fence.]

IV

When Nancy Ware, Jim's pretty teacher, heard that Mr. Edwards had let Jim go to jail, she was hotly indignant. She liked Jim, and laughed a little over him, for she knew he adored her. In her view he was a clumsy, nice boy; awkward and shy, to be sure, but rewarding her friendliness now and then with a really entrancing grin. She liked his imagination, she liked his loyalty, and she liked his dogged resolution.

She heard the news at the noon hour on Monday, and after her dinner she hurried at once to the store of Fred Farnsworth. To him she roundly declared that Mr. Edwards was a brute, a view of the man which struck Fred as a bit highly colored.

Fred was thirty-one or thirty-two years old, a sensible, humorous fellow, with considerable personal force. He was very proud of the handsome shop over which hung the sign, "Frederick W. Farnsworth, Fine Crockery and Gla.s.sware," and still prouder of his engagement to Miss Ware. He was the second grand juryman from Ellmington.

"Oh," said he, "Edwards isn't a bad sort of man. He isn't very sociable. I guess he wouldn't take much impudence, even from that boy of his. They say Jim wouldn't own up, and the old man won't do anything for him till he does."

"If Jimmie Edwards says he didn't fire that gun, he didn't," said Nancy, positively. "Jimmie isn't the lying kind. I know Mr.

Edwards. I ought not to call him a brute, I suppose. But he's one of these obstinate men who will do anything they've made up their minds to do, even if you prove to them that they're wrong, even if it hurts them more than it does any one else. He's just got it into his head that Jimmie ought to confess, and he'd let him go to the gallows before he'd back down."

Nancy spoke with animation, her color rose and her eyes grew bright, and Fred looked and listened admiringly. He was skeptical about Jim, but he was struck with the accuracy of the portrait of Edwards.

"I guess that's about so," he said.

"And when I think of that poor boy shut up in that awful jail, locked into a cell, when he ought to be out-of-doors playing ball and having a good time, it makes my blood boil!" continued Miss Ware. "Now, Fred," she concluded, with pretty decision, "you must stop it."

Fred laughed.

"Isn't that a pretty large order?" he asked. "Squire Tucker put him there. I guess it's legal."

"You can do _something_," said his betrothed. "Go to see Jimmie. See if you can't find out what's the matter. Jimmie likes you, perhaps he'll tell."

"I didn't know Jim had any particular partiality for me," said Fred, but he felt kindlier toward the boy in spite of himself.

"If you can only find out what really happened, I know we can get him out," averred Miss Ware.

"Why don't you go yourself?" said Farnsworth.

"I can't,--not till five o'clock. Of course I'm going then!"

"That's about four hours off," said Farnsworth.

"But I want something done _now_!" exclaimed Nancy.

"Oh!" said Fred, humorously.

"Will you go?"

"Of course. I'll start at once." Fred dropped his banter. "I'll tell you what, Nancy. I may not be able to do much right off, but I'll promise you that he has a fair chance before the grand jury."

Farnsworth started at once for the jail. It was a poor place for a boy, he reflected, as he rang the jailer's private bell. Calkins himself was not there, and his wife came to the door. She knew Farnsworth; and when he asked if he might see Jim she laughed a little, and told him to "step right in."

"Hotel Calkins" was a brick building which looked pleasantly like a private dwelling, as, in fact, a good half of it was. In this front half dwelt the jailer; in the rear half, separated from the living quarters by a thick wall and heavy doors, was the jail proper. There Farnsworth expected to be led.

But not at all! Mrs. Calkins ushered him into her own kitchen, where a wash-tub showed what she was doing, where the afternoon sun and sweet September air poured in at the open windows, and where a canary in its cage was singing cheerily.

Here Farnsworth was much surprised to see Jim, curled up in Mrs.

Calkins's own rocking-chair, eating a large red-cheeked apple which he was dividing with a brand-new knife!

"Squire Tucker told Mark," said Mrs. Calkins, enjoying the joke, "that he guessed James would like our society full as well as that of the prisoners."

As for Jim, he grinned affably, and took another slice of his apple.

The awful picture which Miss Ware had drawn of Jim's dreadful isolation and misery and her own indignant sympathy rushed upon Farnsworth's mind, and were so comically out of relation with the facts that he sank weakly into the nearest chair and roared.

"This--is--the way--you go to jail--is it?" he gasped.

Mrs. Calkins smiled in sympathy, and Jim, half-suspecting that he ought to be offended at this frank mirth, looked sheepishly at the floor.

Farnsworth recovered himself. "A mighty good friend of yours," he said, "sent me over here."

"Miss Ware?" asked Jim, much pleased.

"Yes. She's coming herself right after school, loaded down with things to console your desolate prison life, I believe," and Farnsworth had to stop to laugh again. "But she wanted me to start right in and help you out of this, and that's what I'm here for."

"Thank you," said Jim, embarra.s.sed, but polite. But it struck Farnsworth, as he said afterward, that the boy "shied" a little.

"Miss Ware says," he went on, "that she doesn't believe you fired that shot, and she wants you to tell me exactly what did happen. Now if we can show that you didn't shoot, I can get you out of here quick."

"What they going to do to me?" said Jim.

"That depends. It makes a difference how much Lamoury's hurt. The penalty might be severe if he's got a bad wound. But even then, if we could show that you didn't know he was there, or that the gun went off by accident, or that you were firing at something else, it would make a big difference. And if you can show that you weren't there at all--why, out you go, scot-free. But, Jim, you can see yourself that if you don't tell what you know, everybody'll think that you shot and meant to hurt Lamoury, and then it might go pretty hard with you. Now come, tell me what happened."

"You'd better tell, Jimmie," said Mrs. Calkins, straightening up from her wash-tub. "You won't find any better friends than Mr.

Farnsworth and Miss Ware."

The young man, as he talked, watched the boy curiously. Jim flushed and squirmed, and looked now at the floor and now out at the window, with a marked uneasiness and embarra.s.sment that greatly puzzled his friend. And when he stopped, and the boy had to answer, his distress became really pitiable.

"Can't you tell me, Jim?" Mr. Farnsworth hazarded, after a little, putting a kindly hand on the boy's arm, while Mrs. Calkins stood quiet by her tub in friendly expectation.