“It is too bad,” admitted Bob. “But you did the best you could, and if they’re not there, you can’t help it.”
“I can see the look on Uncle Aaron’s face,” said Teddy. “That sort of I-told-you-so look that makes you wish you were big enough to lick him.”
“You sure do stand well with that uncle of yours,” laughed Jim.
“Yes,” assented Teddy gloomily, “I stand like a man with a broken leg.”
“Oh, brace up,” chirped Jack. “We had the peaches anyway.”
“Bother the peaches!” exclaimed Fred. “I’d give all the peaches in the world just to lay my eyes on those papers.”
“Sam Perkins at one end of the road and Uncle Aaron at the other,” brooded Teddy. “I sure am up against it!”
But the confession of failure had to be made. The boys had cherished a faint hope that somebody in town might have found the papers, and that when they got back at noon, Uncle Aaron might have recovered them. But although he had been downtown most of the morning and had inquired everywhere, there had been not the slightest trace of them, and he had returned tired and angry.
“Rampagin’ roun’ like de bery Ole Nick,” was the way Martha described him, when she had a moment alone with Teddy. “It sho duz beat all, how de good Lo’d lets people like him cumber de earf.”
His greeting was about as genial as Teddy had expected. But he had steeled himself for that and could stand it. What disturbed him much more was the distress his mother felt and the chilly disapproval of his father.