“If Wrack Peveril did not hurt my husband, what made him go away?” demanded Mrs. Buckle.
“That is what we want to know,” put in Pam, brushing away her tears, and looking at George as if she expected him to explain that mystery also.
“Ah, that is more than I can tell you,” he replied. “But doubtless time, which has cleared this mystery, will clear that one also. Of course I was not here to know anything about it. I had no acquaintance with the old man, but from what Sophy has told me in her letters I should incline to the belief either that he went away because he felt he did not dare stay where he was any longer, or else that something happened to him.”
“But he has been seen,” put in Pam in a jerky tone. She always hated to speak of this, because the circumstance seemed to write the old man down as a wrongdoer straight away. “A man met him at a lumber camp in the back country last winter, but Grandfather did not like being recognized.”
“What man was it?” asked George Lester quickly. It was plain he doubted the evidence, and Pam made haste to state her authority.
“He was a man named O’Brien, who used to work for Mr. Luke Dobson at Hunt’s Crossing, years ago. He told Mose Paget of this meeting with Grandfather, and he spoke of it also to Dr. Grierson, but he said he had told no one else, because he was afraid of putting the police on the track of Grandfather’s whereabouts.”
“If it was that O’Brien—Cassidy O’Brien, his full name was—then we shall never know more about it than we do now, for he, too, is dead,” said George, referring again to the papers in his hand. “Do you remember the night when someone entered the house at Ripple, and took the money from the desk?”
“Why, yes. I thought it was—I mean, I had believed it might be Grandfather come back for his own money, to which, of course, he had a perfect right.” Pam’s tone always became defiant when she spoke of her grandfather’s supposed return. How much she hated having to defend that coming back, no one but herself could know. She realized perfectly that it had been a dastardly thing to lure two unprotected girls from the shelter of a warm house on a night in midwinter, when the wolves were hunting in packs, and that no man worthy the name would have done it. But for the sake of her mother she would not alter her attitude, although it was impossible not to feel a little resentful about it all.
“It was not your grandfather who entered the house that night and forced open the desk where the money was kept, then walked off with all he could find. It was Mose Paget,” said George. Pam started up with a little cry of sheer amazement, for if Mose were the thief, how was it that the money had been found with those poor remains which the melting snows had revealed at the time of sugaring?
“How do you know?” she demanded, her heart beating furiously. Had she been misjudging the poor old man all this time? How good it would be to feel that she could respect him in her own private heart, and not have to continually fight down her secret mistrust of him!