“You do see it, then,” said the sheriff, in a very pleasant, gentle tone; “that’s one good thing. For you have got to reform, Ned; I’m going to give your mother a decent boy. Well, what happened then? Girl throw you over?”
“Why, I ran straight for a while,” said Paisley, furtively wiping first one eye and then the other with a finger; “there wasn’t any scandal. Ruth stuck by me, and a married sister of hers (who didn’t know) got her husband to give me a place. I was doing all right, and—and sending home money to ma, and I would have been all right now, if—if—I hadn’t met Mame, and she made a crazy fool of me. Then Ruth shook me. Oh, I ain’t blaming her! It was hearing about Mame. But after that I just went a-flying to the devil. Now you know why I wanted to see Mame.”
“You wanted to kill her,” said the sheriff, “or you think you did. But you couldn’t; she’d have talked you over. Still, I thought I wouldn’t risk it. You know she’s gone now?”
“I supposed she’d be, now the trial’s over.” In a minute he added: “I’m glad I didn’t touch her; mother would have had to know that. Look here; how am I going to get over that invitation?”
“I’ll trust you for that lie,” said Wickliff, sauntering off.
Paisley wrote that he would not take his mother’s money. When he could come home on his own money he would gladly. He wrote a long affectionate letter, which the sheriff read, and handed back with the dry comment, “That will do, I guess.”
But he gave Paisley a brier-wood pipe and a pound of Yale Mixture that afternoon.
The correspondence threw some side-lights on Paisley’s past.
“You’ve got to write your ma every week,” announced Wickliff, when the day came round.