The worst of it all was, Mr. Davenport knew that something was about to happen to Bob. Almost a year before, when Mr. Davenport had refused to advance money for some of Henderson’s schemes, the latter had so far forgotten himself as to make threats against Bob. It alarmed his father, who at once took Bob out of school and placed him under the protection of a private teacher, a stalwart man, a born athlete, and ready to hold his own against all the men that Henderson could bring against him. He slept, too, in a room adjoining Bob’s, so that the boy was under his care night and day. And it was all done so quietly that Bob never suspected anything. Wherever he went his tutor was ready to go with him; he was a man whom he liked, and he supposed that everything was just as it should be.
“That was a bad thing for me,” soliloquized Henderson, knocking the ashes from his cigar. “If I had kept still about that I might have got rid of Bob, and no one would have been the wiser for it, but now he is lost to me.”
Of course his determination to push Bob overboard when he went fishing with him was knocked in the head by this arrangement, and so was his desire to steal him away and lock him up. This last, which was the idea of the man he had left but a few minutes ago, held out brighter promises than anything else; and he had even gone so far as to engage the doctor who was to take charge of it, promising him five thousand dollars when the boy was delivered into his hands, and as much more if his object was successful. But there he stopped. Henderson didn’t have the pluck to go ahead with it, and there the matter laid for over a year. Now it was brought back to him with redoubled force. Everything was going to Bob; he could see that plainly enough, and it was high time he was doing something. In fact, it had been that way ever since Mr. Davenport returned from the mines with this little nuisance, picked up none knew where.
“He must go, and that’s all about it,” said Henderson, rising from his chair and hurriedly pacing the room. “If he won’t go overboard he must be locked up; my luck and everything else depend upon it. I will go out now and see what Scanlan has to say about it, for I am determined that I will not put up with him any longer.”
Scanlan was the friend he had left an hour or so before, and when found he didn’t have the money to enable him to go on with that speculation. There were few Hendersons in the field for him to call upon, and they were as hard up as he was.
“I guess the land will have to go to somebody else,” said he, as he described his ill luck. “I want just five hundred dollars, and nobody seems to have it.”
“I could get it, if it were not for my brother,” said Henderson; and when he spoke the word “brother” he fairly hissed it through his teeth. Scanlan looked up in surprise. “Have I forgotten to tell you that old Bob invariably speaks of that little snipe as my brother?” he continued. “He has been with him now for four years, and he thinks that I can get used to calling him by a relationship that really never existed.”
“How old is the boy, anyhow?”
“Seven years old. Old Bob took him when he was only three. I only wish the Indians had come down on them and massacred the last one of the lot. Not old Bob, of course, for I am indebted to him for a pocketful of rocks, but that young one I wish I had never seen.”
“I don’t see what his pocketful of rocks has got to do with you,” said Scanlan.