“‘It’s Jim Dobson, the famous confidence man and forger. He’s served more than one term in the State prison. He isn’t a very good companion for that boy that’s traveling with him.’
“I was struck all of a heap when I heard that, Tom. I knew what you told me, that this man had hired you for a secretary, or somethin’ of that kind. Of course I knew that was all a sham. What should a jail-bird like him want of a secretary. It didn’t take me long to make up my mind what his game was. I knew you had some money, for you had told me so last night, and I concluded that that was what Dobson was after. I saw that you would be robbed unless some friend interfered. I determined to be that friend.”
Tom took the hard, toil-hardened hand of his new friend, and gratefully pressed it.
“You were a friend when I most needed a friend,” he said.
“Oh, don’t mention it,” said Brush, hurriedly, for it always made him feel awkward to be thanked. “I’m paid for all I’ve done by knowin’ that I’ve come up with that pesky rascal.”
“But I don’t see how you managed to overtake us,” said Tom. “That is what puzzles me.”
“Easy now, Tom, I’m comin’ to that. I asked the stable-boy if there was another stage goin’ this way. He told me ‘not till to-morrow.’ I knew that would never do. In twenty-four hours you’d get that start of me that I couldn’t come up with you at all. There was only one thing to do.”
“You don’t mean to say you walked?” said Tom.
“No; if I had tried that I should be fifteen miles back. It isn’t favorable walking in this mud.”
Tom was more than ever puzzled. Mr. Brush was on foot, and there was no apparent way in which he could have come otherwise, unless he had flown and suddenly dropped down where he stood.