“It is here, in the confession,” replied George, giving a shuffle to the papers he was holding; “but because they are mostly in shorthand, as I took the statement down, and I have not had time to transcribe them, I have told my story instead of writing it. Cassidy O’Brien came back to this part of the world to hunt out Mose Paget, who owed him money. He threatened that if Mose did not pay up he, O’Brien, would make known to the police a bit of the past of Mose that would not bear the light of day. The debt was not a big one, but it was more than Mose could pay. He had heard Mrs. Buckle pressing Miss Walsh to take the money to supply the wants of Wrack Peveril if the old man should come creeping back to his home in want. He had heard Miss Walsh say where she intended putting the money, so that her grandfather would be sure to find it if he came when she was not about. It is the opportunity that makes the thief, and because it was all made so plain for him, Mose determined to get that money from Ripple, and to clear his debt with it.
“He arranged to meet O’Brien at a certain place and to take the money to him. It was fifty dollars he owed the man, but there was not sufficient to pay all; so he kept some of the cash for himself, and gave the rest of the cash and the paper money to O’Brien, who vowed that he would go straight to the police and tell what he knew. Apparently he must have started, for the direction in which his remains were found would seem to point to his having tried to hit the trail to the police head-quarters. Either he sat down and was frozen to death, or else he was chased by wolves, and died that way; this we shall never know.
“Mose was amazed to find that his old enemy made no sign. But when the bones were found in the forest it seemed to him as if fate had been working for him, and henceforth he had nothing to fear. Then Jack Walsh came out from England, and suddenly the blow of which Mose had stood in dread fell from a most unexpected quarter. He was coming into the house to see Mrs. Buckle about some small matter connected with his work, when to his horror he saw Mrs. Buckle with Sam’s watch in her hand. He had taken away Sam’s watch and the money in the man’s pockets after their fight, just to make it look like a case of robbery and violence. Then when he had been so ill in St. John from the after-effect of the mauling he got from the lynx, he had sold the watch to pay the doctor.”
“My word!” cried Mrs. Buckle; “he was a bad lot to rob the man he had knocked about so badly!”
“He had got out of the straight, and when once a man gets on the slant, there is no saying what he will do,” replied George, who then went on to tell them how Mose had worked his way out west, tracking backwards and forwards in the going, in order to hide his trail. But the fugitive had known no rest and no peace, and had faced starvation and hardship, until at last he had come by his death-wound in a fray between two strangers, when the bullet meant for another man found its billet in his breast. It was, indeed, a sad and tragic story.
“There is one thing for which I shall be grateful to my dying day,” said Mrs. Buckle between her sobs, “and that is that I was never tempted to visit what I supposed Wrack Peveril had done to my poor man on his granddaughter. She has always been my dear friend, and though sometimes I’ll admit I felt a bit wicked about it all, I stuck to what my instincts told me, and I’m just more glad about it than I can say.”
“You have been truly good to me, and to Jack too!” murmured Pam. Then, the confession having come to an end, she declared that they must be going, for it was not fair to Sophy to keep Mr. Lester away any longer.
“I will come with you,” said Jack. “When I got to the Gittins’s place this morning, Nathan told me he could not get the machine until to-morrow, so, of course, we could not start haymaking; and as he did not need me, I came over to put in some time at Mrs. Buckle’s hoeing corn. Then the rain came and I bolted indoors for shelter, and that is how I happened to be loafing round, apparently doing nothing, in the middle of the day.”
Pam laughed. It was rich to hear Jack trying to explain that he was more industrious than he looked, for those who knew anything about it at all had no trouble in making up their minds as to his hard work, though he always seemed to think that he might do a bit more if only he were a little more energetic. But it was not Jack or his doings that interested her most just then. She was turning over and over in her mind the problem of her grandfather’s mysterious conduct. Now that the old man’s name was entirely cleared, his conduct in going away was more mysterious than ever. Why did he choose to leave home without any warning on the very day that she had arrived at Ripple? It was not even as if he had not known of her coming. To Pam, in her fit of depression, it looked as if he had gone away because of her. A bitter humiliation this! How she winced in her secret heart to think that perhaps it was her self-will in coming that had driven the old man from his home! It might be that his mind had become a little unhinged from his long years of living alone since her mother left him. Perhaps he had vowed that he would never live in a house again that had a woman in it. But how strange that he should drop everything and go like that!
George Lester was talking to Jack, as they went along the trail, of the solitudes of the far west, but Pam was silent, thinking and thinking of her grandfather, and making herself so acutely miserable over the mystery of his disappearance that she was perilously near the verge of tears.