"What you need, Ed," observed the Overseer of the Poor, "is a bath, a couple of square meals, a little daylight, and a freight load of common horse sense. Come out of this place. We'll take you to your wife, and you'll find that she's very much alive, and heart-broken over your running away from her. She's fretting because she thinks her own conduct made you run away from her."
"I guess we don't belong here," murmured Dick to his chums. "Suppose we hurry down to the camp."
Five minutes later the two farmers also reached camp, holding
Hoskins between them.
"It all shows what a man's fool way of reasoning—-or, rather, not reasoning—-can bring him to," explained the Overseer of the Poor in a low voice to the boys. "Ed Hoskins isn't exactly one of life's heavyweights, but he was always a good enough fellow, and industrious. He married a good-hearted, simple-minded girl, and they were mighty devoted to each other. But, back the last of May, Ed and his wife had a little bit of a tiff. They were standing near the top of the stairs in their house. Ed, according to his own story, went to push her aside so he could go downstairs, when his wife lost her balance and fell half way down the stairs. She fainted, I reckon, and Ed, in a great fright, thought she had broken her neck. So he ran down the stairs past her, got out of the house with a pair of blankets, a little food and a hatchet, and started up this miserable road in the night time. He says he knew he'd have to go to the electric chair some day for his deed, but he wanted to come up here and prepare his soul before he gave up his life. He says he got along all right until you boys came up here on purpose to find him and run him down for the law. He tells me that the first time some of you crossed the lake in a canoe he rigged up some bushes to a wooden frame, and swam, with his head inside the frame, hoping to get close to you and hear what you had to say about him. Then, he tells me, you moved your camp across the lake, and he knew you were here on the law's business. He says he has known, for certain, all along, that you'd get him sooner or later, but he couldn't get up the strength of mind to leave here. What I told Ed about his wife was true. She got nothing worse out of her fall than a bruise on one elbow. Gosh! Ed's wife will be as tickled to see him alive as he'll be to see her strong and well."
"Hoskins is a little touched in the upper story, isn't he?" Dick asked.
"Maybe he has been lately," replied the Overseer of the Poor. "But when he finds I haven't lied to him he'll be O.K. right away. Ed was never too strong in his mental works, but he's a good fellow, just the same, and he's bright enough for his trade—-blacksmith's helper. Now, I guess I'd better be going back with him, for Ed will be all excitement and dread till he gets the first word from his wife. Miss. Hoskins wife be terribly obliged to you young men. I am, too, 'cause I'll be glad to see that couple together again. They're so fond of each other that they've no business apart. So I reckon, Master Prescott and the rest of you young men, we'll be a-going now."
The visitors had soon left the camp behind them. The last seen of Hoskins, he was walking with the dazed air of a man who knows he's dreaming and is mortally afraid to wake up.
But that same day Mr. and Mrs. Hoskins were reunited and began life anew together.
"It all goes to show," the Overseer of the Poor afterwards explained philosophically, "what a fool a fellow is to be afraid to go back and look at his work. It's the same spirit that makes automobile cowards afraid to stop the machine and go back to look at the child they've hit. Any fellow that's afraid to go back and look at his mistake is bound to be mainly unhappy in life."
A very few days afterwards Dick & Co., still propelling the push cart by turns, arrived in Gridley toward dark one late July evening.