Terry started as if he had been struck, for his mother had uttered the very question that possessed his own mind. He did not hold towards his father a very warm affection. Black Mike's treatment of him from his babyhood had been too consistently unfatherly for that. But the thought of being arrested and sent to the grim granite penitentiary out by the North-West Arm filled him with horror.
"Surely not, mother," he responded with a warmth that was increased by his desire to convince himself as well as his mother. "It's not the likes of father to be stealing money; somebody must have given it to him."
The suggestion was a very unlikely one, yet they both sought to take comfort from it. Gold was very plentiful in Halifax in those days, and the successful blockade-runners lavished it with a free hand. Some one of them, whose wits had been stolen away by strong drink, might have filled Black Mike's pockets in a fit of reckless generosity.
But the more Terry thought over this the more improbable did it seem, and he felt himself, however reluctantly, thrown back upon the only other alternative to which almost unconsciously he gave expression.
"If father did steal the money," he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the drunken form, "where do you think he could have got it?"
He put the question because, although he had already answered it in his own mind, he shrank from expressing his thought, at least until he saw whether the same had come into his mother's mind.
Mrs. Ahearn was silent for some moments. Then, bending over towards him as if afraid the sleeper might catch her words, she replied,—
"The black bag, Terry!"
Terry gave a groan of misery. His own harrowing suspicion had found expression in his mother's words, and instantly he saw himself transfixed between the horns of a terrible dilemma.
Not only so, but just as his mother had hit upon, the same solution of the mystery of the gold, so must she realize the position in which he was placed by it. That she did this was made clear the next moment; for, as he remained silent, she drew him into her arms, and folding him to her breast, sobbed out in plaintive tones,—