“Look here, Asa Gardner, do you mean to tell me that it was you who took those things in the night—Dan’s watch, the aluminum frying-pan, and last of all the gold watch which your best friend Mr. Holwell thinks so much of?”
Asa groaned, and drooped pitifully in his grasp.
“I don’t know for sure, Dick, but I’m awfully afraid I did,” he said, huskily.
“That’s a queer way to put it,” Dick told him, sternly. “Anybody ought to know if he were guilty of doing such a mean thing as that. You’ll have to explain yourself, Asa. Do you remember taking those things?”
“No, no, that’s the strangest part of it, you see, Dick,” pleaded the boy. “But they disappeared, and I was in the camp both nights.”
Dick began to breathe a little easier.
“But that isn’t any proof at all, Asa, that I can see,” he hurriedly remarked. “How could you take them, and not know it, tell me?”
“I wish I could, Dick, but then nobody else here would be low enough to steal except me, and so I’ve figured it out that I must have done it in my sleep, just because the old habit was so strong. While I was awake I could fight it off, but you see once I lost my senses my grip was broken, and I must have done it. Oh, I must!”
“Well, that’s a funny thing to tell me, I must say,” Dick replied. “You haven’t the least remembrance of doing it, yet you’re ready to take all the blame on your shoulders because once on a time you had a weakness that way. Brace up, Asa; you never took Mr. Holwell’s watch, I tell you.”
It was wonderful to see how new hope seemed to come immediately into the heart of the erring boy. The look of misery began to die out of his face, and through the tears gathering in his eyes Dick could see a new sparkle—that of hope.