[Begun in No. 46 of Harper's Young People, September 14.]
WHO WAS PAUL GRAYSON?
BY JOHN HABBERTON,
Author of "Helen's Babies."
Chapter X.
RECAPTURED.
On the morning after Benny Mallow's party hardly a boy started for the brook or the woods. This was not because the dissipation of the previous night had made them overweary, or too heavy and late a supper had induced headaches, or the party itself had to be talked over. Each of these reasons might have kept a boy or two at home, but the real cause that prevented the majority going about their usual diversions was fear of meeting the escaped counterfeiter. Where the information came from no one thought to inquire, but the report was circulated among the boys quite early in the morning that the criminal was armed with two heavy revolvers that some secret confederate had passed through the window to him, and that he would on no account allow himself to be captured alive.
This story justified the stoutest-hearted boy, even if he owned a rifle, in preferring to keep away from any and all places in which such a person might hide, but the story seemed afterward to have been only half told, for as it passed through Napoleon Nott's lips a bowie-knife, a sword-cane, a bottle of poison, and a long piece of a prison chain were neatly added to the bad man's armament, so no boy felt ashamed to confess to any other boy that he really was afraid to venture beyond the edge of the town.