While they waited, Larry and Purdick pulled broken timbers out of the wrecked bridge and built warning road barriers on each side of the creek. In a short time the kindly farmer drove up and the shipwrecked ones were given places in his car. He told Larry and Dick they were welcome to standing-room on the running boards, but they thanked him and said they’d walk—that they were walking, anyway.
“Did you hear what that girl was telling me?” Purdick asked, after Dick’s uncle had told them both to be sure and look him up at the hotel in town, and the auto had sped away up the hill.
Larry shook his head. “No; I was talking to Mr. Starbuck.”
“She’s Ollie McKnight’s sister. She didn’t say how she came to be with Mr. and Mrs. Starbuck, but I suppose the Starbucks and McKnights are friends. Is Mr. Starbuck a rich man? But of course he is, or he wouldn’t ride off and leave a six-thousand-dollar car lying in the ditch without giving it a second look.”
Larry laughed.
“He can afford to, I guess. He and Dick’s father own a gold mine together, and he is a director in one of the Brewster banks.”
“Huh!” said Purdick, and the tone in which he said it meant that Uncle Billy Starbuck wasn’t, or didn’t appear to be, at all the kind of rich man that he had been taught from his infancy to hate and despise.
“Mr. Starbuck is everybody’s ‘Uncle Billy’ in Brewster,” Larry went on. “He used to be a cowboy, they say, and after that he was a prospector and had all sorts of hard times.”
“Huh!” said little Purdick again, and this time he added: “He doesn’t look or act like a man that any amount of money would spoil.” Beyond this he was silent until after they had topped the hill and the university buildings were in sight. Then he said: “What d’you suppose Ollie’s sister meant by calling me ‘the Red-Wagon boy’?”
Larry choked for a minute. Here was all sorts of a chance that, right at the very last moment, the fat of the Red-Wagon scholarship was going to be spilled in the fire.