“I could not hear much that passed between them, but I believed I recognized the voice of Driggs, and I was sure I heard him say something about ‘friendship’ and ’hiding it somewhere.’ When the man had gone I heard father climb the stairs to the attic. I wondered over it a long time before I fell asleep again.
“The following day my father was arrested and the house was searched. Concealed in the attic they discovered a bundle, or package, and this contained dies for the making of counterfeit money. In vain father protested his innocence. Appearances were against him, and every one seemed to believe him guilty. On learning what the bundle contained, he immediately told how it came into his possession, stating it had been brought to him in the night by Nathan Driggs.
“Driggs was likewise arrested, but he contradicted my father’s statement and positively denied all knowledge of the bundle or its contents. Several members of an organized body of counterfeiters had been captured, but these men did not manufacture their dies, and the Secret Service agents had traced the latter to Fairfield.
“Both father and Driggs were held for trial in heavy bonds. Neither of them was able to find bondsmen, and so they went to jail. There were those in Hilton who fancied Driggs might be innocent, but everybody seemed to believe my father guilty. It was the talk of the town how he had shut himself in his garret day after day in a most suspicious manner and had often boasted that some day he would ’make a lot of money.’
“At the regular trial I was a witness. I told how Driggs had come to our house in the night, and I repeated the few words I had heard him say. The prosecutor did his best to confuse me, and when he failed he sarcastically complimented me on having learned my lesson well. You can’t understand how I felt when I saw no one believed me.
“Again Driggs denied everything, and he had covered his tracks so well that it was impossible to find him guilty; but my father was convicted and sentenced to a long term in prison. It was a heavy blow to my poor mother, and she never recovered from it.
“I now found myself an outcast in every sense of the word, despised and shunned by all the boys who knew me. Under such conditions I could not attend school, and I tried to do what I could to help my mother support the family; but no one seemed willing to give me work, and we had a pretty hard time of it.
“The worst was to come. Two months after being sent to prison my father attempted to escape and was shot and killed. Mother was prostrated, and I thought she would surely die then; but she finally rallied, although she carried a constant pain in her heart, as if the bullet that slew my father had lodged in her breast.”
Once more the narrator paused, swallowing down a lump that had risen into his throat. He was a strong lad and one not given to betraying emotion, but the remembrance of what his unfortunate mother had suffered choked him temporarily. When he again took up his story he spoke more hurriedly, as if anxious to finish and have it over.
“It isn’t necessary to tell all the unpleasant things that happened after that, but we had a hard time of it, Eliot, and you can understand why it was that I just almost hated nearly everybody. But most I came to hate Bern Hayden, who was a leader among the village boys, and who never lost a chance to taunt and deride me and call me the son of a jail-bird. I don’t know how I kept my hands off him as long as I did. I often thought I could kill him with a will.