"Oh, I don't know," said Ad, impatiently. "Bad enough, I'll warrant you. If it is the fellow I think it is, he is an out-and-out 'tough' and a blackguard. One of those chaps that are hanging round Tibbett's rum shop out at the Corners. You may be sure that a man of that stamp isn't whispering around under windows, for any good."
"Why, you don't suppose they were planning to steal, or rob, do you?" I asked, much startled.
"Who knows," replied Addison, coolly. "Halse is a strange boy. He is just rattle-headed and foolish enough to get coaxed into some scrape that will disgrace him and all the rest of us. I never saw a fellow in my life so lacking in good sense.
"Oh yes, I'll talk with Doad," continued Ad, somewhat impatiently. "Doad is a good girl. She thinks moral suasion and generosity will do everything. But if I had Halse to manage, I would put him under lock and key, every night," said Addison, striking his hoe sharply into the ground.
"And if we only let him alone, I guess he will get there, of his own accord," he added with a fine irony.
I saw quite plainly that, as Theodora had once said to me, Addison had no patience with Halstead and his but too evident weakness of character.
"I don't like to run to the Old Squire with all that I see and hear," Addison went on, in a low tone, for Gramp was hoeing only a few steps behind us, and Halstead was now coming back from the pasture. "For they all think now that I don't like Halse and that I am too hard on him. But they will find out who is in the right about it."
After supper I saw Theodora in earnest conversation with Addison, out in the garden by the bee-house. Doad was a great friend of the bees; if she were wanted and not in the house, we generally looked first for her in the garden, in the vicinity of the bee-house.
Later in the evening, after we had finished milking and were going into the dairy with our pails, Addison said to me that it was best, he thought, to say nothing to the old folks just yet. "Doad wants me to watch to-night and, if Halse gets up to go off anywhere, to stop him and coax him back to his room.
"It isn't a job I like," continued Addison, "but perhaps we had better try it; Doad thinks so.