lent inspiration to his labor, and no boy that ever worked in Burnham
Breaker performed his task with more skill and diligence than he.

When the noon hour came the boys took their dinner-pails and ran down
out of the building and over on the hill-side, where they could lie on
the clean grass in the warm September sunshine, and eat and talk until
the bell should call them again to work.

Here, before the recess was over, Ralph joined them, feeling very
conscious, indeed, of his embarrassing position, but determined to
brave it out.

Joe Foster set the, ball rolling by asking Ralph how much he had to
pay his lawyer. Some one else followed it up with a question relating
to his expectations for the future, and in a very few minutes the boy
was the object of a perfect broadside of interrogations.

"Will you have a hoss of your own?" asked Patsey Welch.

"I don't know," was the reply; "that depen's on what my mother'll
think."

"Oh! she'll give you one if you want 'im, Mrs. Burnham will," said
another boy; "she'll give you everything you want; she's ter'ble good
that way, they say."

"Will you own the breaker, an' boss us boys?" came a query from
another quarter.

Before Ralph could reply to this startling and embarrassing question,
some one else asked:--

"How'd you find out who you was, anyway?"

"Why, my lawyer told me," was the reply.

"How'd he find out?"

"Well, a man told him."

"What man?"

"Now, look here, fellows!" said Ralph, "I ain't goin' to tell you
everything. It'd predujuice my case too much. I can't do it, I got no
right to."

Then a doubting Thomas arose.

"I ain't got nothin' agin him," he began, referring to Ralph, "he's a
good enough feller--for a slate-picker, for w'at I know; but that's
all he is; he ain't a Burnham, no more'n I be, if he was he wouldn't
be a-workin' here in the dirt; it ain't reason'ble."

Before Ralph could reply, some one took up the cudgel for him.

"Yes, he is too,--a Burnham. My father says he is, an' Lawyer Sharpman
says he is, an' you don't know nothin' 'bout it."

Whereupon a great confusion of voices arose, some of the boys denying
Ralph's claim of a right to participate in the privileges allotted to
the Burnham family, while most of them vigorously upheld it.

Finally, Ralph made his voice heard above the uproar:--

"Boys," he said, "they ain't no use o' quarrellin'; we'll all find out
the truth about it 'fore very long. I'm a-goin' to stay here