“I’ll hold him up, Dick, and you can explain the whole thing to him. Then, if you say the word, we’ll all go to your house and meet Tilly Nocker and Billy. Hello! Uncle Henry, we were just talking about you. Are you in a big hurry, or could you spare a little time to listen to something my chum Dick here wants to say?”
The gentleman spoken to was a middle-aged, pleasant-faced man, and Leslie had for years come to look upon him as his good fairy. He supplied the lad with funds, perhaps too generously, but Uncle Henry’s faith in boys was deep-rooted, so that he believed they would come through all right. He looked upon them as certain to exhibit a certain number of prank-loving propensities, even as they caught the measles.
“It happens that I’ve got plenty of time on my hands just now, boys,” he told them. “What is the trouble at present? Been getting in some farmer’s orchard, and he threatens to make trouble for you if you don’t pay for the damage done?”
Leslie laughed at hearing this.
“A bad guess that time, Uncle Henry,” he told the gentleman, much to his relief. “We’re going to cut out most of that sort of business, now that Mr. Holwell has started to organize a Boys’ Department of the Y. M. C. A. Dick here wants to enlist your co-operation in a little scheme that his mother is engineering; and Uncle, I’ve as good as said I knew you’d jump at the chance to help.”
“Thanks for your good opinion, Nephew,” laughed the other. “But suppose you tell me what it’s all about before I make any promises.”
“Of course you know all about Amos Nocker, sir,” began Dick; “and how when he died away out West, his widow wrote asking the old deacon for help, which he refused to give unless she handed over her little son to him, with a promise never to even try to see him?”
“Yes,” replied Uncle Henry, gruffly, “I’ve heard about that, and thought it just about as mean and cold-blooded a proposition as ever was made. To think of making the poor young widow give up her child unless she wanted to starve! But then what more could you expect from Old Jed Nocker, the Icicle of Cliffwood?”
“Well, both Tilly and her child, little Billy, are over at our house right now,” continued Dick, eagerly. “Of course, it’s a dead secret, and you two are the only ones who know it. She’s meaning to go under the name of Mrs. Smith, you see.”
Uncle Henry looked decidedly interested.