Meanwhile, Jake Hibbard was studying Mr. Edwards's face with puzzled attention. He had supposed that the lumber dealer, whom he knew to be well-to-do, would have paid anything, signed any bond, to protect his boy from jail. He was disconcerted. He drew his one hand across his mouth nervously.
"Well, Mr. Barton," said Squire Tucker, "I don't see but what you'll have to take this young man over to Hotel Calkins."
"Hotel Calkins" was the name which local wit gave to the county jail. The words sent a cold shiver down Mr. Peaslee's back. They stung him into generosity. As Barton and his prisoner, followed by Mr. Edwards and Jake, brushed by him on their way to the door, he slipped the knife into Jim's hand. When the boy, trying to keep back the tears, looked up inquiringly, he murmured, in agitation:—
"Don't ye care, sonny! Now don't ye care!"
He was greatly stirred—or he would not have been so incautious as to make his present in person and in public.
IV
When Nancy Ware, Jim's pretty teacher, heard that Mr. Edwards had let Jim go to jail, she was hotly indignant. She liked Jim, and laughed a little over him, for she knew he adored her. In her view he was a clumsy, nice boy; awkward and shy, to be sure, but rewarding her friendliness now and then with a really entrancing grin. She liked his imagination, she liked his loyalty, and she liked his dogged resolution.