“Do you remember sending a letter with thirty dollars and a picture in it to young Dick Brunsen, back in last summer?” he asked.
A hot colour surged over Nell’s face, and a dizzy sensation seized her, but gripping the hard wood of the seat until it hurt her hand, she kept herself steady enough to answer calmly—
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, it’s that thirty dollars what kept me from starving, but there ain’t much of it left now,” he answered.
“But I don’t understand. You said I had made a mistake; what did you mean?” she demanded.
“You thought young Dick Brunsen was the man what I took to Button End that time when I didn’t come back?” he asked.
But she replied with another question, “Was he not?”
“Bless you, no; and the two were no more alike than chalk is like cheese. Young Dick was always seeing if he couldn’t do somebody out of something, and live by scheming instead of work. But the other one, the man that I took to Button End on Blossom, he was as straight-laced as a parson, and he read me a reg’lar moral lecture, all the way to Joe Lipton’s, on how I wasn’t treating you fair by keeping you on Blue Bird Ridge, with no advantages except fresh air. But he paid me well, so I ain’t going to complain about him, nor yet to say that I didn’t deserve the lecture,” Doss Umpey remarked, with another groan, as he gave himself a twist round on the wooden shelf, in the vain hope of finding a more comfortable spot for his aching bones.
“Did the other one, this man Dick Brunsen, I mean, give you the money that I sent to him?” asked Nell. And now there was such a flood of gladness in her heart, that her weariness was momentarily forgotten, and her eyes were shining like two stars.
The man whom she had succoured at the Lone House had been, according to Doss Umpey, straight-laced as a parson, and so her instincts had been right; she had felt that he was a good man as well as a kind one, and it had been absolute torture to her when circumstances seemed to point to his being a rogue.