My fears lest the good man bear me a grudge for my share, small though it was, in that villainous night's work, vanished there and then. "You!" he cried, with both hands outstretched; "why, Joe! why, Joe! We thought you were long since lost at sea or killed by buccaneers—such a story as Sim Muzzy told us!"
"Sim Muzzy?" I cried. "Not Sim!"
"Yes, Sim!"
Then I heard far down the road someone calling, and turned and saw—it was so good that I rubbed my eyes like a child waking from a dream!—actually saw Sim Muzzy come puffing and sweating along, with a cloud of dust trailing for a hundred yards behind him.
"Joe, Joe," he cried, "welcome home! Welcome home, Joe Woods!"
And as I am an honest man, he fell to blubbering on the spot.
"Things are not what they used to be," he managed at last to say. "The new man in the store don't like the town and the townspeople don't like him, and I've been living in hopes Seth Upham would come home and take it off his hands. But who is this has come back with you, Joe, and what's come of Seth Upham?"
At that I presented him to my wife, who received him with a sweet dignity that won his deepest regard on the spot; and then I told him the whole sad story of our adventures, or as much of it, at least, as I could cram into the few minutes that we stood by the road.
"And so," I concluded, "I have come back to Topham with not a penny to my name, save such few as are left from Arnold's bounty."
Sim heard me out in silence, for evidently his own trials had done much to cure him of his garrulity, and with a very sad face indeed he stood looking back over the village where we had lived and worked so long together.