She could not, and Ruth next tried her skill.
“The first letter is certainly ‘P,’ though a very queer one,” she said. “Can it be ‘Pleasure’?”
“‘Pleasure’? No. There’s a ‘g,’ or a ‘y’ in it. Try again,” Alex. said, and Ruth tried again with better success.
“It must be ‘Pledges,’” she suggested.
“‘Pledges,’” Alex. repeated, and taking the paper from Ruth, he made “Pledgers” distinctly from the irregular letters. “‘Pledgers,’ that’s funny,” he said, with a thought of Old Pledger and the girl.
Neither Amy nor Ruth saw anything funny in the names. They were too much absorbed in what the old man had written, and asked Mrs. Marsh what she knew of him. She knew very little, except that he once lived on a farm among the New Hampshire hills, and her husband, when a boy, had spent a week with him, but was glad to get away.
“Since your father died I have scarcely given the man a thought,” she added. “I did hear, in a roundabout way, that he had gone West; I fancied him dead long ago. He was said to be very eccentric,—half crazy, or something.”
She was not one to care much for people not in her sphere, and Amos Marsh evidently was not, or had not been while living. Now, however, he became an object of importance. He had left her children his money, and although they were not in need of it, as the Marsh fortune was a large one, she was glad for the addition, and, with Amy, began to wonder how much there was in the banks and how much the ranch and house in Denver were worth. She scarcely thought of the farm, which was uppermost in Alex.’s mind, as he sat looking at the papers in his hand.
“Heard I was honest, with fewer tricks than most city young men! I am much obliged to his informant. Who was it, I wonder?” he thought, then, as his eyes fell upon the last words his uncle had written, he said aloud: “It looks as if he had done some wrong which I am to right; but how can I, when I don’t know what it is?”
“Probably nothing but a whim,” Ruth said. “Evidently he was half crazy as people thought. Think of his fancying some one standing in the door as he wrote and seeing things at the farm! It makes one feel creepy. Maybe the old house is haunted.”