The thing he had been guarding with his toes was this kit. Someone had long since taken away the satchel. It is an old trick, this “lifting” of a bag from the floor of a crowded vehicle. But to youth no misfortunes are old. All of them have the horrible charm of novelty.
The satchel was gone. And it had not been taken by mistake. For the sawdusty man’s kit was the sole bit of luggage on the platform.
The satchel was gone. And with it was gone the ninety-eight dollars collected, the night before, at the church bazaar—the charity money that had been entrusted to Arnon Flint to take to bank—the money which, just then, represented Arnon Flint’s honour.
Now, as any sane reader will know, the one simple and natural thing for the boy to do was to notify the police and thence to go home and tell his parents what had happened. His father was moderately well-to-do, and readily could have made up the deficit.
Yes, that would have been the one normal thing for Arnon to do:—to go home and confess. And—his first name being neither Rollo nor Percival—it is the very thing he did not do.
From across the eternal chasm which divides boyhood from middle age, the lad’s right course seems absurdly simple. But to no boy, and to no one who recalls the mental agony of boyhood disgraces, will it appear so. As wisely ask an unsuspected sinner to write out a list of his misdeeds and to mail them to his wife and to the police.
Arnon had a lively imagination. He had no trouble at all in picturing the scene of his home-coming with such tidings as were his. He, who had begged to go to work,—whose father had fifty times told him he had not enough level-headedness or sense of responsibility to hold a job for one week,—he must go home and admit his father was right.
He—whose weekly spending money was just seventy-five cents—must confess he had lost ninety-eight dollars. The magnitude of the sum gripped him with panic force. A few minutes ago he had regarded the bag’s contents as merely a heavy mass of small change. Now he knew it for Wealth.
The knowledge that he had committed no sin did not buoy him up in the very least. A consciousness of innocence is an excellent anchor, no doubt. But what good is an anchor after the ship has sunk?