"I know. You say it like 'twas eight hundred thousand. But neither sum seems to mean so much to me—not re'lly. I sure won't lose no sleep over it—nor ary meal o' victuals, if I can help it.
"'What can't be cured must be endured,'" repeated this longshore philosopher. "I never re'lly felt that I had much part nor lot in our savings. Once I was in New Bedford when some whalers was paid off after a four-year cruise. A drunken boat steerer stood on the corner of the street an' fed silver dollars into the mouth of a sewer till the police stopped him.
"Puttin' money in the bank always seemed to me something like that, 'Zekiel. You see it go in, but where it goes to, an' what happens to it, is like what the Scriptures says about the ways of the Almighty—they are 'past finding out.'"
"Huh!" said Zeke. "Looks like we know what's happened to this money. 'Twas stole by somebody."
"Oh, sugar!" murmured Tobias. "Is that any satisfaction?"
Tobias Bassett had refused to admit to Arad Thompson that he had any suspicion as to the identity of the owner of the gold penknife he had found under the bank window. Nor did he have such suspicion.
It was merely that the old lightkeeper felt that sometime, somewhere, he had seen such a toy worn on a watch chain by somebody he knew. Unlike Lorna Nicholet he did not remember that Ralph Endicott owned such an ornament.
The young woman rode home from her marketing expedition in a very anxious condition of mind. One moment she mentally castigated herself for considering at all the suggestion that the penknife might be Ralph's property. The next instant the suspicion would attack her from another angle and his possible connection with the bank burglary would expand until she was fairly terror-stricken.
If Ralph had been seen in the town the previous evening by other eyes than those of Conway Degger! If Ralph had seemed to leave Clinkerport in the afternoon, how explain his later presence there?
If Degger thought he could cast any reflection upon Ralph by reporting his observation of the latter in town the night of the burglary, of course he would do so. There was no doubt of that in Lorna's mind. She had no longer any illusions regarding the character of Degger, no matter how much she might disapprove of Ralph. Degger was Ralph's enemy, and a bitter enemy indeed.