“They will take me away from you, brother—they will separate us!” he exclaimed.
“They shall not!” cried the older lad fiercely. “I had decided already to leave Oakdale to-morrow; we’ll leave to-night—we’ll slip away at once. Keep still, Jerry, and I’ll make all the preparations.”
“But what if that man should come—what if he should come before we can start?”
“He’ll have to get here in a hurry to find us.”
Indeed, it did not take Ben Stone long to make a bundle of the few belongings he felt he must take. A great deal of his poor personal property he had resolved to abandon for the time being, confident that Mrs. Jones would take care of everything for him. Sometime when there was no longer danger he could recover it all.
“We’ll get out of the house without saying a word to anybody,” said Ben. “That’s the best way, although I hate to do it, for we seem to be running away like criminals.”
At the last moment, smitten by regret because fancied necessity seemed to compel him to leave without bidding the kind widow good-by, he seized a piece of brown paper and the stub of a pencil and sat down to write a few words of farewell—Jerry urging him to hasten even while he was scribbling. This was what he wrote:
“My Dear Mrs. Jones:—
“I’ll never be able to thank you enough for all
your kindness to me and to my little blind brother.