CHAPTER VIII
IN WHICH HARRY KILLS A BIG SNAKE, AND MAKES A NEW FRIEND
Harry was not entirely satisfied with what he had done. He regretted the necessity which had compelled him to take George Leman's horse. It looked too much like stealing; and his awakened moral sense repelled the idea of such a crime. But they could not accuse him of stealing the horse; for his last act would repudiate the idea.
His great resolution to become a good and true man was by no means forgotten. It is true, at the very outset of the new life he had marked out for himself, he had been obliged to behave like a young ruffian, or be restored to his exacting guardians. It was rather a bad beginning; but he had taken what had appeared to him the only course.
Was it right for him to run away? On the solution of this problem depended the moral character of the subsequent acts. If it was right for him to run away, why, of course it was right for him to resist those who attempted to restore him to Jacob Wire.
Harry made up his mind that it was right for him to run away, under the circumstances. His new master had been charged to break him down—even to starve him down. Jacob's reputation as a mean and hard man was well merited; and it was his duty to leave without stopping to say good by.
I do not think that Harry was wholly in the right, though I dare say all my young readers will sympathize with the stout-hearted little hero. So far, Jacob Wire had done him no harm. He had suffered no hardship at his hands. All his misery was in the future; and if he had stayed, perhaps his master might have done well by him, though it is not probable. Still, I think Harry was in some sense justifiable. To remain in such a place was to cramp his soul, as well as pinch his body—to be unhappy, if not positively miserable. He might have tried the place, and when he found it could not be endured, fled from it.
It must be remembered that Harry was a pauper and an orphan. He had not had the benefit of parental instruction. It was not from the home of those whom God had appointed to be his guardians and protectors that he had fled; it was from one who regarded him, not as a rational being, possessed of an immortal soul—one for whose moral, mental, and spiritual welfare he was accountable before God—that he had run away, but from one who considered him as a mere machine, from which it was his only interest to get as much work at as little cost as possible. He fled from a taskmaster, not from one who was in any just sense a guardian.
Harry did not reason out all this; he only felt it. What was Jacob Wire to him? What was even Squire Walker to him? What did they care about his true welfare? Nothing. Harry so understood it, and acted accordingly.
The future was full of trials and difficulties. But his heart was stout; and the events of the last chapter inspired him with confidence in his own abilities. He entered the dark woods, and paused to rest himself. What should he do next?