Then Terry threatened him with the law, when her friends found out what he had done to her, but Jim Heron only sneered and showed his yellow fangs. “Into the room you go!” he snarled. “I’m not afeared of the law. In Fish Cove, I’m the law! All the law there is!”
A glimpse of Sally’s excited face was the last thing that Terry and Prim saw before the oaken door closed on them and the key grated in the lock. The next moment the sisters were facing each other with puzzled and angry looks, for Sally’s voice came to them through the closed door. She was saying to Jim Heron, “That’s fine! Now we’ve got them where we want them. You can have your night’s sleep now. Just leave it to me; I’ll see that they don’t escape.”
And Jim Heron growled in reply, “I’m going to keep the key under my pillow tonight. You keep watch, for if they do get loose, I’ll skin you alive.”
“So that’s that!” stormed Terry. “Sally’s our jailer. And we thought we could trust that girl!”
Prim was on the verge of tears, and Terry continued wrathfully, “Aren’t we a couple of saps to be taken in by that lying little cat! We listened to her sad story and swallowed it all. How she must have laughed at us! Probably there wasn’t a word of truth in it. If you ask me, I think she’s Jim Heron’s daughter.”
“I’ll say we’re dumb!” replied Prim. “What makes me feel sore is that we told her a lot of our plans, thinking she was our friend. This ought to be a lesson to us, never to trust anybody again.”
But while Prim was raging, her sister suddenly burst out laughing. It was real laughter this time. There was nothing forced about it. She pointed to the roughly plastered wall opposite the windows where hung a framed motto worked in brightly colored wool yarn. It read, “Home, Sweet Home.”
Even in her anger, Prim had to smile at that innocent text. “So this is Home, Sweet Home!” she chuckled. “Can you tie that! Let’s see what it is like.”
The room was extremely plain, bare and ugly. Against the wall under the motto stood a broad, old-fashioned four-poster bed. There was a small table with a lamp on it and in one corner stood a shabby wash stand with a cracked mirror above it.
“We can thank our stars they gave us a lamp,” said Prim. “I’d be scared here in the dark. It’s a wonder they trusted us with a light. You’d think they would be afraid we would set fire to the house.”