Purdick swallowed hard once or twice and looked as if he were going to choke. Finally he contrived to say: “You must be taking me for somebody else, I guess. I never made your brother give up anything.”
“But didn’t Larry Donovan call you ‘Purdick’ out there by the wreck when he was talking to Uncle Billy?”
“That’s my name,” said Purdick, still more or less in the condition of a person who had stumbled over a wheelbarrow that he didn’t know was in the way.
“Well, then; maybe you didn’t just make Ollie give up—of course you didn’t, if it comes to that. But he did give up, just the same, and that is what really counts. He says now that he’s going to give up his summer vacation so as to have money enough to do it again.”
Purdick’s stare had by this time become perfectly vacant.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said; “I don’t know any more than a crazy person what you’re talking about.”
“How funny!” she returned. “I mean the Red-Wagon scholarship, of course. It was the best thing that has ever happened to Ollie. He is such a terrible spendthrift—for just foolish things, you know. And when he wrote Daddy that he had taken the two thousand dollars that Daddy sent him to buy a new car with to make a scholarship for you—he called it the Red-Wagon scholarship because he was going to buy a red automobile—and was meaning to go to work this summer so that he could have his vacation money to make another scholarship for somebody else, we were all just simply petrified, and—Why, what’s the matter?”
We may suppose that Purdick’s usually pale face was trying to turn all the colors of the rainbow. So Ollie McKnight was the one who had given him the two thousand dollars which was to help him through the Sheddon course! If Larry had only told him in the beginning!
The rainbow flush was gone and his face was even paler than usual when he forced himself to say: “Did you ever live in Steelville, Pennsylvania?”
“Why, yes,” said the girl. “I was born there.”