CHAPTER V

ABOUT ten days after the happenings recorded in the foregoing chapter old Simon Walton sat alone in his office. A typewriter was clicking in the counting-room adjoining, its sound deadened by the closed door and thin partition through which it passed. With noiseless tread Toby Lassiter, now older, more careworn, more machine-like than ever, entered and laid a bulky express envelope before his employer.

“What is this?” the banker asked, as he examined the heavy wax seals and reached for his paper-knife.

“I don’t know, sir; it came just now,” and Toby silently withdrew.

Walton clipped the twine, pried under the seals, and tore open the thick paper. It contained money. Six five-hundred-dollar bills were drawn out and laid on the desk. Wondering what it meant, the old man looked into the envelope. There was a letter, and it covered several pages of paper. A glance at the writing caused him a dull thrill of surprise. There was no address from which it was written, and it bore no date. It ran as follows:

My dear Father,—I am sure you will be surprised to hear from me. I would have written before this if it could have done either of us any good. As I wrote you when I left, I had determined to turn over a new leaf, if such a thing were possible. It was an awful fight against big odds.

Finally, however, I happened to meet—and it was when I had almost given up—a rich man with a good heart who befriended me, and offered me a position in his big wholesale store. I had a struggle with myself as to what I ought to do in regard to revealing my past life, but I finally decided to tell him the truth, and I am glad to say he overlooked it all and became my friend and benefactor. I never knew it, when I was a wild, headstrong boy, bent on ruining myself and you, but I now realize that every growing soul needs some sort of incentive to endeavor, and I have found two which have helped me a lot. The first was to refund by honest earnings what I took from you, the next to prove my worthiness of the trust my employer placed in me when all hope was lost. I see now that I never could have overcome my bad habits if I had stayed on in Stafford. It was getting out into the world and learning what it means to fight adversity, with no one to lean on, that helped me. When I think over what you, yourself, had to go through with to get your start in life, and remember that I was deliberately throwing away the hard-won rewards of your efforts, the blood of shame fairly boils in my veins.

I am sending herewith three thousand dollars, which are my savings up to date. I had got together only twenty-five hundred, but when my employer, at my suggestion, succeeded in putting a certain deal through the other day which he considered advantageous to his interests, he insisted on adding five hundred dollars to the amount which I had told him was going to you. I am sending the money by express instead of by draft on any bank, for I would still prefer for you not to know where I am at present. When I have made the last payment on my debt (if you will let me call it that), I may feel differently, but until I am able to clear it all up I shall still hide from you and everybody who knew me in the past. I do hope you will read these lines kindly. I have wronged you (terribly wronged you), dear father, but I am trying now to live right, and surely you will be glad to know that, even at this late day. Concealing my whereabouts may anger you, I am well aware of that; but the good man for whom I am working thinks it is best—for a while, at any rate. Of course, if I could have a talk with you, I’d know better how you look at the matter, but being so far away leaves me no alternative than to let things remain as they are. Good-bye, dear father. It has taken six years to get together the money I am sending, but if I live and keep my health I feel reasonably sure that I can send the balance, including the interest, within the next two years, for I am doing much better than I was.

When he had finished reading the letter, Simon Walton laid it on the desk before him and sat in deep thought for several minutes. Then, with no visible trace of emotion on his wrinkled face, he took the money in his hands, laid it on the letter, and rose and went to the door opening into the counting-room. He stood looking at the workers for several minutes, and then, happening to catch the glance of Toby, who was dictating to a stenographer, he signalled him to approach. Handing him the letter and the bills, he said, curtly:

“Credit the money on my private account, then read that letter carefully and bring it back to me. Don’t let anybody see it. It’s private.”

“Very well, sir,” said the clerk. “I was just dictating a note to Morton & Co., telling them that we can’t possibly extend—”

“Never mind about that now,” Walton ordered, sharply. “Do as I tell you!” And he turned back into his office, where he sat slowly nodding his great, shaggy head, as was his habit when making up his mind over any matter of importance.

“Huh!” he said, suddenly and with a sneer, “that’s it! I can see through a millstone if it has a big enough hole in it. Huh, yes, that’s it! I’d bet a yearling calf to a pound of butter that I am onto the game, and it is one, too, that would take in nine men out of ten.” He tapped his brow with his pencil and smiled craftily. “Deep scheme; good scheme; bang-up idea! Might have pulled the wool over my eyes once. But a burnt child dreads the fire, and I’ve certainly been burnt.”

The door creaked. Toby Lassiter, with the letter quivering in his excited hand, approached. His lethargic face was filled with emotion; his mild eyes were glowing ecstatically.

“I always thought—I mean I always hoped, Mr. Walton—that it would turn out this way.” He started to say more, but checked himself as his glance fell on the parchment-like face craftily upturned to his.

“Yes, I know, Toby!” Simon snarled, as he took the letter and put it into his desk drawer. “You always thought the scamp had sprouting wings, and now you are sure they are full size. That is why you have never risen higher in life, Toby. Your eyes are too easily closed. Leave it to you, and we’d never foreclose a mortgage on a widow with a full stocking hid away under her hearth. Believing in heaven on earth has held many a man back from prosperity.”

“Then you don’t think—you don’t actually believe that Fred—”

“Set down in that chair, Toby. Me and you are the only folks in Stafford that know how that boy buncoed me, and I reckon it’s only natural for me to be willing to talk about it when there is anything to say. I endured several years of that fellow’s devilment, and I’m not calculated to be fooled as easily as others might who never had him on their hands. You see,” the banker went on, as his clerk lowered his thin person timidly into a chair and leaned forward—“you will note that he writes that he’s got a good, substantial job with a rich man, who, while he knows all about the boy’s devilment here at Stafford, has completely overlooked it. Huh! we all know the world is full of men of capital who are ready to take in a runaway thief and hand over three thousand cool plunks to him just to show good-will and the like! To begin with, Toby, that is an underhanded slap at me; it is saying, in a roundabout way, that a plumb stranger is giving a son of mine a chance that he never had at home. But the tale, from start to finish, is a lie out of whole cloth, as I have good and private reason to know.”

“Do you think so, Mr. Walton?” Lassiter’s fallen countenance sank even lower.

“Of course I think so, or I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you about it. I haven’t been idle on this thing, Toby, though I never let anybody know what I was up to. You see, I am an old man now, and in law I never had but one heir to my effects, outside of my present wife, and it struck me as pretty queer for that heir, disinherited on paper or not, to keep absolutely out of sight and sound all these years when as big a plum as I am supposed to be is still aboveground. You see, the scamp has got what some folks would call a ‘natural expectancy,’ even on the chance of breaking any will I might make, and you can bet there are plenty of men slick enough to speculate on such chances, slim as they might look to me or you. So you see, Toby, knowing all that, I kept a sharp lookout for developments. I decided first of all to keep a watch on the young woman he left high and dry and in such a miserable plight. I used to sort o’ saunter by her mammy’s house once in a while. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of the girl by accident, but she kept as well hid as any mole that ever burrowed in the ground. Sometimes I’d see her—when she was to be seen at all—daubing away at some picture or other on a peaked frame, and I must say that every time I’d see her looking so neat and pretty, with her fine head of hair flowing over her brow in that easy, fluffy sort of way, and them big, deep, babyish eyes of hers—well, to come to the point, I began to think that it wasn’t quite natural for any fellow to go clean off and leave such a creature behind for good and all. You see, she’s too good-looking, too attractive, for any man to drop once he was favored, and—well, it made me suspicious, to say the least. Then I begun to notice the child, who was always hemmed up in that little pen of a yard, and never allowed to stick his head out or have any playmates. I saw that he was always rigged up as fine as a fiddle, looking as if he’d just come out of a bandbox; and as I knew, from personal knowledge, that the old lady had no income to speak of, except the rent on her barren little farm, I used to wonder where the cash was coming from. Now and then I’d see Watts & Co.‘s delivery wagon leaving groceries at the back door, and I found out through them, on the sly, that the grub bills was always paid. Then what do you think I did? I did some bang-up, fine detective work, if I do say it. I nosed around until I found out, through a clerk in the express office here, that packages of money were coming pretty regularly to the sly little lassie from somebody in Atlanta who called himself ‘F. B. Jenkins.’ Whoever it was, was using the express to hide his tracks, instead of sending bank-checks, which might come to my attention, as Fred well knew.”

“So you think, Mr. Walton—you think—”

“I think Fred’s letter is a lie out of whole cloth,” old Simon blurted out. “I don’t think he is at work; I don’t think it was ever in him to work in any capacity; but I do believe he has set out to make good that shortage for a deep-laid reason. Some sharper or money-shark may be backing him, or he may have had a temporary streak of luck at poker or cotton futures, and has decided to invest something in me, as too big a fish to remain unhooked. I don’t swallow one word of his mealymouthed tale. I’d bet my last dollar he’s this F. B. Jenkins, and that he has been hanging around Atlanta all these years, keeping himself out of sight, and, like as not, coming here now and then under cover of night to see that woman. That’s why she has kept so close at home. They have guarded the child, too, so that he wouldn’t let the cat out of the bag. Toby, if I wanted to—if I just wanted to—I could put a watch on that cottage and nab our man in less than a month. I say, if I just wanted to.”

“Then you wouldn’t arrest him, Mr. Walton?” Lassiter breathed, in relief.

“Well, not now, at any rate,” Walton said, grimly. “We are too solid in every way now for such a thing to do us any great financial damage, but I don’t fancy the idea of stirring up the stench again. He has put in a pretty big amount to start with, and he won’t lie idle after that. Mark my words, we’ll hear from Atlanta, and it will be apt to come through the fellow that calls himself F. B. Jenkins.”