puttees, when he finally emerged from that small shack, "Old Tom's" tin
box under his arm, and, with lips working strangely, pinned the door
shut behind him.

Caleb left in the limp fingers of the head of the Jenkins' household a
yellow-tinted note of a denomination which they had not even known
existed; he left them half-doubting its genuineness, until later when
there came an opportunity to spend it. And Sarah was waiting at the
door of the white place on the hill when Caleb wheeled into the yard at
dusk, two days later.

"You've found him!" she exclaimed as she glimpsed his face when he
entered the hall.

Caleb shook his head, his heart aching at the hunger in her question.

"No, I haven't found _him_, Sarah," he said gently enough. "But
I--I've found out _who he is_!"

They forgot their supper that night. With heads close together they
hung for hours over the ink-smeared sheaf of papers which the tin box
yielded up. Most of them were covered with a cramped and misspelled
handwriting which they knew must be that of the one whom Steve had
called "Old Tom." Some of them were hard to decipher, but their import
was very, very clear.

There was one picture--a miniature of a girl, eager of face and wavy of
hair. Her relationship to the boy was unmistakable. Sarah found that
and wept over it silently, and while she wept Caleb sifted out the
remaining loose sheets and came upon a bundle of tax receipts. These
puzzled him for a moment, until, at the very bottom of the box he found
a folded and legal-looking document. He opened that and then he
understood--he understood just how every penny had been spent which Old
Tom had been able to earn. After the swiftest of examinations, Caleb
refolded the paper and slipped it into his own pocket, without showing
it to Sarah at all. Just at that instant he was not sure why he meant
to keep its existence to himself, but even then, back in his brain, the
reason was there. At length he turned to his sister.

"It's not hard to understand now, is it?" he said. "It's pretty plain
now why he had to go. And we, Sarah--we who were going to 'make
something of him'--why, we should have known absolutely, without this
evidence. They laughed at him; they made fun of him--and there isn't
any better blood than flows in that boy's veins! He was Stephen
O'Mara's son, and no more brilliant barrister than O'Mara ever
addressed a jury of a prisoner's peers and--and broke their very hea