“Oh, Mr. Jimson!” Ruth cried. “I do so want to be sure that Curly stays here until I can hear from his grandmother. I have written to her and begged her to take him back——”
“An’ git him grabbed by the police?” demanded Jimson.
“He ought to go back and fight it out,” Ruth declared firmly. “He ought not to knock about the world, and fall into bad associations as he may, and come to harm. I don’t believe he will be punished if he is not guilty.”
“It don’t a-tall matter whether a man’s innocent or guilty,” objected Mr. Jimson. “If the police is after him, he’s jest natcher’ly scared.”
“I suppose so,” Ruth admitted. “I would run away myself, I suppose. But I want Curly to go back to Mrs. Sadoc Smith.”
“Jest as you say, Miss Ruth. I’ll hold on to him,” the warehouse boss promised.
“I hope he doesn’t see us girls and get frightened, thinking that we’ll tell on him,” Ruth said.
“I’ll see to it that he doesn’t skedaddle,” Mr. Jimson assured her. “He’s sleepin’ at my shack nights. I’ll lock him in his room.”
Ruth laughed at that, and rather ruefully. “That’s what his grandmother did,” she observed. “But it didn’t do any good, you see. He got out of the window and went over the shed roof to the ground. And it was a twenty-foot drop, too.”
“Don’t yo’ fret,” said Mr. Jimson. “The windah of his room is barred. And he’d half t’ drop into the river. By the looks of things,” he added, cocking his eye at the treetops, “there’s goin’ to be plenty of water in this river pretty soon.”