“Don’t laugh! it seems so cruel. Hungry!” breathed Helen.
“The boy is learning something,” her chum said, with decision. “Now that he is really away from his grandmother, I hope this will teach him a lesson. I don’t want any harm to come to Curly Smith; but if he learns that his home is better than a loose life among strangers, it will be a good thing.”
“Why, Ruth!” gasped Helen. “You talk just as though the police were not looking for him.”
“Hush! we won’t tell everybody that,” advised Ruth. “Probably they will never discover him here, in any case. His crime is not so great in the eyes of the law.”
“I don’t believe he ever did it!” cried Helen.
“Neither do I. It seems to me,” Ruth said gravely, “that if he had helped those men commit the robbery, he would have gone away from Lumberton with them.”
“That is so!”
“And he shows that he has no criminal friends, or he would not come so far—and all alone. Nor would he have been so forlorn and hungry, if he was willing to steal.”
Ruth wrote her letter, as she promised; and she thought a good deal about the boy they had seen at the cotton warehouse. Suppose Curly Smith should take up his wanderings from this place? Suppose the warehouseman, Mr. Jimson, should discharge him? The man had spoken in rather an unfeeling way of the “little, hungry Yank,” and Ruth did not know how good at heart the lanky, chin-whiskered man was.
She determined to do something to make it reasonably sure that Curly would remain on the Merredith plantation until she could hear from his grandmother. Possibly the trouble in Lumberton might be settled. If the railroad had not lost much money—provided it was really proved that Curly had recklessly helped the thieves—the matter might be straightened out if Mrs. Sadoc Smith would refund a portion of the money lost.