To this he was prompted by Esther's having suggested Silverton, as the place where her mistress had possibly been, and taking warning by his past experience with Genevra, he resolved to give Katy the benefit of every doubt, to investigate closely, before taking the decisive step, which even while Tom Tubbs was talking to him had flashed into his mind. Perhaps Katy had been to Silverton in her excited state, and if so the case was not so bad, though he blamed her much for concealing it from him. At first he thought of telegraphing to Morris, but pride kept him from that, and Uncle Ephraim was made the recipient of the telegram, which startled him greatly, being the first of the kind sent directly to him.
As it chanced the deacon was in town that day, and at the store just across the street from the telegraph office. This the agent knew by old Whitey, who was standing meekly at the hitching-post, covered with his blanket, a faded woolen bedspread, which years before Aunt Betsy had spun and woven herself.
"A letter for me!" Uncle Ephraim said, when the message was put into his hands. "Who writ it?" and he turned it to the light trying to recognize the handwriting.
"I think it wants an answer," the boy said, as Uncle Ephraim thrust it into his pocket, and taking up his molasses jug and codfish started for the door.
"May be it does. I'll look again," and depositing his fish and jug safely under the wagon box, the old man adjusted his spectacles, and with the aid of the boy deciphered the dispatch.
"What does it mean?" he asked, but the boy volunteered no ideas, and the simple-hearted deacon asked next: "What shall I tell him?"
"Why, tell him whether she has been here or not since last September. Write on the envelope what you want sent, so I can take it back; and come, hurry up your cakes, I can't wait all day," and young America, having thus asserted its superiority over old, began to kick the melting snow, while Uncle Ephraim, greatly bewildered and perplexed, bent himself to the tremendous task of writing the four words:
"Not to my knowledge." To this he appended: "Yours, with regret, Ephraim Barlow," and handing it to the waiting boy, unhitched old Whitey, and stepping into his wagon, drove home as rapidly as the half-frozen March mud would allow.
"I wonder what he sent me that word for?" he kept repeating to himself. "We had a letter from Katy yesterday, and there can't be nothing wrong. I won't tell the folks yet a while anyway till I see what comes of it, Lucy is so fidgety."
It was this resolution, whether wise or unwise, which kept from Morris and the deacon's family a knowledge of the telegram, the answer to which was read by Wilford within half an hour after the deacon's arrival home.