CHAPTER IX
ANOTHER LETTER FROM NEW YORK
“MR. TARR,” declared the judge, when Brandon had, for the moment, so successfully routed them and retired, “you are doing a very wrong thing in shielding that young reprobate from the reform school. That’s where he belongs. Send him there, sir, send him there!”
“I never thought he’d ha’ shown disrespect fur the law,” gasped Uncle Arad weakly.
“Disrespect!” cried the judge, “I never was so insulted in all my life. That boy will be hung yet, you mark my words!”
“I never thought it of Brandon,” said the farmer, shaking his head.
He seemed quite overcome to think that his nephew had dared defy the law, or its representative. To Uncle Arad the law was a very sacred thing; he always aimed to keep within its pale in his transactions.
“You’ll never be able to do anything with that boy here,” declared “Square” Holt. “A strait jacket is the only thing for him.”
“But if he goes there what’ll be the use o’ my bein’ his guardeen?” queried Arad.
Then he hesitated an instant as a new phase of the situation came to him.
“If Brandon was under lock an’ key—jes’ where I c’d put my han’ on him when I wanted him—I c’d go right erbout this ’ere treasure business, an’ git it fur—fur him,” he thought, yet shivering in his soul at the thought of the wrong he was planning to do his nephew.
“I—I dunno but ye’re right, square,” he said quaveringly. “I—I don’ wanter see th’ boy go right ter perdition, ’fore my very eyes, as ye might say, an’ if ye think the reformin’ influences o’ the institution is what he needs——”
“The best thing in the world for him,” declared the judge, drawing on his driving gloves. “The only thing, I might say, that will keep him out of jail—where he belongs, the young villain!”
“But—but haow kin it be fixed up?” asked Arad, in some doubt.
“You leave that to me,” said the judge pompously. “I’ll show that young reprobate that he has defied the wrong man when he defies me. I’ll give him all the law he wants—more, perhaps, than he bargained for.”
“But s’pose he tries to run away in th’ mornin’, as he threatened?”
“All you’ve got to do, Mr. Tarr,” said the judge, shaking one long finger at the farmer, “is to keep a close watch on that young man. Don’t give him a chance to run away. Lock him into his room tonight and keep him there till we can—er, hem!—straighten this out. I think it will be a very easy matter to place the case before the court in such manner that the necessity for immediate action will be at once admitted.
“Why,” declared the judge, warming up to his subject, “I wonder, sir, how you—an old man” (Uncle Arad winced at that), “and in feeble health—have been able to remain here alone with that young scoundrel all this winter. I wonder that he has not laid violent hands on you.”
“Wal, he has been some abusive, square, but I wouldn’t say nothin’ erbout that,” said Uncle Arad hesitatingly.
“Don’t compound villainy by shielding it,” responded the judge, with righteous indignation. “This matter has already gone too far. When our quiet town is to be aroused and made a scene of riot, such as has been enacted—er—here tonight, sir, it is time something was done. Such young hoodlums as this Brandon Tarr should be shut up where they will do no harm to either their friends or neighbors.
“If I had my way,” added the judge viciously, “I’d shut up every boy in town in the reform school!”
Then he marched out to his carriage, and Uncle Arad, after locking the door, sat down to think the matter over.
If he was successful in his nefarious plan of shutting Brandon up in the reformatory institution of the State, the getting of the diamonds, which Captain Tarr had hidden aboard the Silver Swan, would be all plain sailing.
Of course he would have to lose Brandon’s work on the farm; but he had seen, by the boy’s open defiance of “Square” Holt, that he cared nothing for the law or its minion—and Uncle Arad dared not allow his nephew out of his sight for fear he would run away.
To his mind there was very little doubt that the attempt to shut Brandon up would be successful. Judge Holt was a most powerful man (politically) in the town, and he would leave no stone unturned to punish the youth who had so fearlessly defied him.
Judge Holt, although disliked by many of his townsmen who realized that some of his methods and actions were illegal, still swayed the town on election days, and carried things with a high hand the remainder of the year. Old Arad chuckled to think how easily Brandon’s case would be settled by the doughty “square.”
Then, remembering the suggestion the judge had made just before his departure, he rose hastily from his chair and quietly ascended to the floor above. Here Brandon and himself slept in two small bedrooms on opposite sides of the hall.
The doors were directly opposite each other, and, although such things as locks were unknown in the house on any except the outside doors, the old man quickly lit upon a scheme that he thought remarkably clever.
He obtained a piece of stout clothes line and fastened it back and forth from handle to handle of the two bedroom doors, which, opening into their respective rooms, were now arranged so that the occupants of neither apartment could open the portals.
Then, chuckling softly over his sharp trick, the old farmer crept down the stairs once more to the kitchen, feeling moderately sure of finding Brandon in his room in the morning.
But one narrow window, looking out upon the barnyard, was in his nephew’s apartment, and as the sash had long since been nailed in, and the shutters closed on the outside, Uncle Arad felt secure on this score.
“I’ll starve him inter submission, ef I can’t do it no other way,” he muttered angrily.
Seating himself once more in his old armchair, he drew forth the two letters obtained that day at the post office, adjusted his steel bowed spectacles which, in a moment of extravagance, he had purchased of a traveling peddler, and opened the epistle from his brokers which, heretofore, he had not read.
He slit the envelope carefully with the blade of his jack knife. More than one man had torn or otherwise mutilated a check by opening an envelope too carelessly.
But instead of the printed form and generous draft which was the usual monthly inclosure of the firm, all the envelope contained was a typewritten letter, which the old farmer read with something like horror:
Office of
BENSELL, BENSELL & MARSDEN,
513 Wall St., New York,
April 2, 1892.
MR. ARAB TARR,
CHOPMIST, RHODE ISLAND.
Dear Sir:
We beg to announce that owing to several accidents, causing a large loss of rolling stock of the road, the B. P. & Q. has dropped several points on the market and has passed its monthly dividend.
We would suggest that you hold on to your stock, however, as this is a matter which will quickly adjust itself.
YOURS SINCERELY,
BENSELL, BENSELL & MARSDEN.
The letter fluttered to the floor from Uncle Arad’s nerveless fingers. To lose money was like losing his very life, and this was no inconsiderable sum that had gone. He had invested a large amount in B. P. & Q. stock, and up to the present time it had paid large interest.
“Them brokers air thieves! I know they be,” cried the old man, breaking forth into vituperations against the innocent firm of Bensell, Bensell & Marsden. “Ye can’t trust ’em—not an inch! I don’t b’lieve none o’ their lyin’ stories erbout the railroad’s passin’ its div’dend. I—I’ll go ter New York m’self, I declare I will!”
He got up and paced the floor wrathfully.
“Jes’ as soon as I git this matter o’ Brandon’s settled, an’ git th’ farm work started with Jim Hemin’way fur foreman, I’ll go. I ain’t er-goin’ ter be cheated bare faced like this ’ere.”
Then he thought a moment, and pulling Caleb Wetherbee’s letter from its envelope again, read it once more carefully.
“I—I might look inter this w’ile I was there too,” he muttered slowly. “I reckon I kin fin’ thet feller I saw terday—Leroyd, his name was, an’ his address was New England Hotel, Water Street. I shan’t furgit thet right off.”
He shook his head slowly, thrust both letters into his pocket, and then shambled off to bed in the room off the kitchen as, having locked his nephew in, he had also locked himself out of his usual bed chamber.