“When do you go home?” he asked.
“Next Friday evening, when school is out,” said Jack.
“And what are you going to do?” he asked of Bob.
“Get some work this summer, and then try to get another winter of schooling next year,” was the answer.
“What kind of work?”
“Oh, I can farm better than I can do anything else,” said Bob. “And I like it, too.”
And then Judge Kane drew from Jack a full account of his affairs, and particularly of the debt due from Gray, and of his interview with Gray.
“If you could get a few hundred dollars, so as to make your mother feel easy for a while, living as she does in her own house, you could go to school next winter.”
“Yes, and then I could get on after that, somehow, by myself, I suppose,” said Jack. “But the few hundred dollars is as much out of my reach as a million would be, and my father used to say that it was a bad thing to get into the way of figuring on things that we could never reach.”
The Judge sat still, and looked at Jack out of his half-closed gray eyes for a minute in silence.