It was now Pearson’s turn to stare. His jaw dropped, and his face turned ashy.
“Your children? What do you mean? Didn’t they find Miss Marian and the kids all right?”
“Find them! Where? Where did you leave them? They’ve never been seen from that day to this. Speak up! What did you do with them?”
Pearson crumpled down into a chair. There was no more resistance in him.
“Good Heavens! Hadley, I never dreamed of any harm coming to them. I’ll tell you all I know about it.”
And tell it he did, holding nothing back. He told it all,—how Cunningham had discharged him for no fault of his, so he declared, and how he had vowed that he would get even with the dude; he wouldn’t take dirty treatment from no man. He had nothing against the girl and the kids; he wouldn’t have hurt them, but he didn’t suppose it would. People were going out to those picnics every day, and they often camped overnight, and when he saw what a daisy the launch was,—she ran like oil,—it just came to him that he could leave them there on the Island and run the launch over to Santa Anita, where he knew a couple of fellows who would take it off his hands.
So he did it; he was owing the fellow at Santa Anita about seventy-five dollars that he would have paid long before if Cunningham had not fired him; and he got there before the storm got really bad and hunted up his friend that night and found he would be glad to take the launch on the debt and pay him the difference.
The storm was sure a bad one, but he had thought that Miss Marian and the kids would be all right, for the boy had been telling about a house on the Island around on the sheltered side and a cave, too, and he left them all the food and blankets, and he thought Cunningham would be after them the first thing in the morning. He’d left Santa Anita as soon as the storm was over so anybody could leave, and, of course, he had not heard anything about the tragedy at the Port, but he’d swear by everything holy that he never dreamed of any harm coming to them.
Mr. Hadley explained then; he told the man huddled up before him of the search that had been made, and how he himself had just in the last week learned what and where Smugglers’ Island was, and how he was even then on his way to see if after all these years there was some trace still to be found in San Moros.
When he had finished, Pearson straightened up a little.