ly.

"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.

[Illustration: 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 Glassware," 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