“Jenny,” he said to the young girl who came in to clear away the breakfast things, “do you know anything about Old Bruden, my uncle’s double-barrelled shot-gun?”
Jenny came nearer to him, and said, in a low voice,—
“If you wait five or six minutes she’ll be gone down to Joel’s house, then I’ve got something to tell you.”
Philip walked out on the porch. He remembered that Jenny had given him to understand, the evening before, that she had some sort of a mysterious communication to make, and now he supposed it was coming. He did not fancy such things at all. His own disposition, as well as his uncle’s teaching and example, made him averse to having controversies or confidences with servants. He did not object so much to Jenny, for, although she occupied a menial position, she belonged to a very respectable family, and he knew that his uncle expected her to go to school the next winter at Boontown.
For these and other reasons he was much more willing to hear Jenny’s story than to scold Susan about the breakfast, or to ask her what she knew of the man who came the night before. It was not very long before Jenny came out on the porch.
“Master Phil,” she said, “do you know that Susan was listening to all you said to the man last night? And when he went away she slipped down the back stairs and headed him off at the corner of the house. I looked out of our window, and I heard her tell him that the young boy he’d been talking to had made a mistake when he said there was no grown person in the house, for she was there, and if he had any message to leave for Mr. Berkeley he might leave it with her. The man said he supposed she was grown, though she wasn’t very large; but he guessed he’d keep his messages and deliver them himself. And then Susan told him that there was no knowing when Mr. Berkeley would be back, and that she knew a great deal more about family affairs than that boy inside did. ‘Very well,’ said the man, ‘perhaps, when I come again, I’ll ask for you, if Mr. Berkeley isn’t here. What’s your name?’ And then she told him her name, and he went away.”
“You’d make a good reporter,” said Phil; “but I don’t think there is much in all that. It isn’t a nice thing, Jenny, to be listening out of windows to what people are saying.”
“That mayn’t be much,” said Jenny, not at all disconcerted; “but I can tell you something that is much. I can tell you where Old Bruden is.”
Phil suddenly became all animation. He had already ceased to care about the man with the black straw hat, but the whereabouts of Old Bruden was quite another affair.
“Where is it?” he asked, eagerly.