“There, there, my boy. It’s all right. You made a mistake, as we all do sometimes, but you’ve been punished more than enough. I am sure no one could wish you to receive further punishment.”
Then Hooker spoke again:
“Why, he wasn’t to blame any more than I was—not as much. I started it. I lost my head and called him nasty names and tried to hit him. I’m the one who is really to blame for everything.”
Somehow this made Charley’s tears flow the faster. He did not sob, he did not speak, but he sat there with a great feeling of gratitude in his heart and a yearning to say something to Roy Hooker which he knew he never could say.
“We were all to blame,” asserted Ned. “No one fellow should try to take it on himself; I’m dead certain other chaps in the bunch will agree to that.”
“It will be a lesson to you all,” said the old professor. “Mrs. Hooker, I congratulate you that your son is again in his normal mind and apparently not much the worse for his experience. It has been a trying time for us all, and we should be thankful indeed that it has turned out so well.”
Through his tear-wet eyelashes Shultz was looking at Roy.
“I—I don’t understand,” he whispered. “I saw him fall into the old quarry.”
“But you didn’t wait to see how far he fell,” said Ned. “I looked. Perhaps twenty feet below the brink over which he ran, I saw him lying on a wide projecting shelf of rock. He was stunned, and he lay perfectly still, without answering when I called to him. I knew I must get him out somehow, and in a minute or two I thought that I might find a rope in one of the tool houses of the new quarry. I ran around there as fast as I could, broke into one of those little shanties, found a rope and hurried back. Making one end of the rope fast, I lowered myself to the shelf on which Roy still lay. He was just coming to his senses, and when he saw me he spoke. Of course, he had no idea where he was or how he came to be there, for he could remember nothing that happened after his head struck the mantelpiece in my room.”
“And I can’t remember now,” put in Hooker. “It’s all a blank.”