Then he went out of the room and descended the stairs, leaving the stricken lad standing there, his hands clenched, his teeth set, his whole body trembling.
“He knows!” panted the miserable boy—“he has found out about the forged excuse! The jig is up, and my father knows just what kind of a wretched liar and two-faced hypocrite I am! Oh, I wish I were dead! I wish I’d never been born.”
He walked the floor, his soul torn by the poignant anguish that he had brought upon himself by his own false steps. Fancying he could never again look his father in the face, he thought of running away, of drowning himself, of doing anything to escape the mortification of the ordeal.
Then came a sudden, fierce surge of anger. “Renwood is to blame for it all!” he panted. “But for him I’d never done any of these things, for I’d stayed on the eleven, and it would not have been necessary! Oh, how I hate him! How I hate him!”
He made no attempt to reason calmly, therefore it was not possible for him to see the unjustness of his position. His eyes were not yet fully opened to his own moral weakness, nor had this exposure unveiled to him all the pitfalls of the crooked road into which he had been led by his ungoverned anger and by the craft of a bad companion.
As he was fuming about Renwood, he heard somebody leave the house. Hurrying through the hall to the front of the house, he looked out from a window in time to see his father pass through the front gate and join a bearded man who had paused on the sidewalk to wait for him. The bearded man was Simeon Drew, the deputy sheriff of the village of Rockspur. The two men walked away toward the village, Dr. Scott talking earnestly and Drew listening.
“Now, what does that mean?” wondered Don, beset by a sudden, vague sense of peril. “I don’t understand why Sim Drew waited for father at the gate, and I’d give a dollar to know what father is telling him.”
Having watched them till they disappeared from view, he hurried downstairs, where dinner was waiting, and Aunt Ella was in a state of flustered worriment.
“I can’t understand it,” declared the flushed woman. “Something has happened that worries Lyman, and he hasn’t told me what it is. He didn’t even wait to eat dinner, yet I’m sure he ain’t going to see a patient.”
Don did not eat much himself, but, after swallowing a few mouthfuls, he got away from the house, fearing his father might return and find him there.