Pam thrust out her hands with an impatient gesture. She had never felt so much like fainting in her life. She wanted something to cling to, to keep her from falling, but there was nothing except Amanda, who was clinging to her, and crying as if her heart would break.
“You do not know, and I have never dared to speak of it before,” she said, plunging into her story with a desperate haste to get it told, and realizing, now that it was too late, how very much better it would have been if she had never made Sophy keep silence on the subject. “Grandfather came back one night in January, and—and he took the money. Of course, he had a perfect right to what was in his own desk!”
Don stared at Pam in surprise. Why did she fling up her head as if she were defying the whole world in championing the cause of her grandfather?
“The poor old fellow came home, and you never let on to us about it!” exclaimed Nathan in amazed disapproval. “You don’t mean to say you really thought that any one of us would have betrayed him to the police? Why, he might have stayed hidden in our house all the winter, and no one outside the township would have been a bit the wiser. How long did he stay? Was he very much cut up? Dreadful hard on a man of his sort to be forced into wandering!”
“I don’t know; I did not see him,” faltered Pam, who could not repress a shudder as she thought of what Amanda had found in the ditch. Almost unconsciously she moved a step nearer to Don and farther from the hollow.
“If you did not see him, how was it that you knew he had come?” asked Don hurriedly. He had seen the black frown on the face of Nathan, and was dreadfully afraid of what he might say to Pam. Nathan was a Justice of the Peace for the district, but all the same he had his own ideas of how far it was wise to obey the law, which, according to him, had been made for the instruction of fools.
Pam gave a little gasp as if she were choking, and then she went on with the story of that night when she and Sophy had braved the dangers of the forest to find the person who had called for help. She told how they had seen the wolves in pursuit of the moose, and had made their way back to the house, to find that someone had been there who had taken the money from the desk. She explained how she had firmly believed this to be the work of her grandfather, who, pressed by his dire need, had lured them out in order to get in and help himself to his own money.
“But it was not all his own money,” objected Nathan. “You say that twenty dollars of it belonged to Mrs. Buckle, and that was taken too.”
Pam lifted her head, and there was a stormy light in her eyes.
“Why should he not take the money that was in his own desk? As it happened, he had a perfect right to it too, for Mrs. Buckle had given it to me for him, she was so afraid he would be found by the police and punished for what happened to her husband, and she said there had been quite enough suffering and misery already. Are you trying to insinuate that my grandfather was a thief?”