"'Little pitchers have big ears,'" quoted Agnes.
At that Dot flared up. "I'm not a little pitcher! And I haven't got big ears!" The smallest Corner House girl knew now that her ill-timed remarks during her first call with Tess on Mrs. Eland had, somehow, made trouble. "How'd I know that Lem—Lemon Aden's brother was Mrs. Eland's father? He might have been her uncle."
They had to laugh at Dot's vehement defense; but Mr. Bob Buckham went on: "My fault, I tell ye—my fault. But I believe it's going to be all cleared up."
"How?" asked Agnes, quickly.
"And will my Mrs. Eland feel better in her mind?" Tess asked gravely.
"That's what she will," declared the farmer, vigorously. "She told me about the old papers and the book left by her Uncle Lemuel over there to the Quoharis poorfarm where he died. I got a letter from her to the townfarm keeper, and I drove over and got 'em the other day.
"Like ter not got 'em at all—old Lem being dead nigh fifteen years now. Wal! Marm and me's been looking over that little book. Lem mebbe was a leetle crazy—'specially 'bout money matters, and toward the end of his life. You'd think, to read what he'd writ down, that he died possessed of a lot of property instead of being town's poor. That was his foolishness.
"But 'way back, when he was a much younger man, and his brother Abe got scart over a trick he'd played about a horse trade and went West (the man who was tricked threatened to do him bodily harm), what old Lem wrote in that old diary was easy enough understood.
"There's some letters from Abe, too. Put two and two together," concluded Mr. Buckham, "and it's easy to see where my pap's five hundred dollars went to. It was left by Abe all right in Lem's hands; but it stuck to them hands!"
"Oh!" cried Agnes, "what a wicked man that Lemuel Aden must have been."