Don laughed outright now.
“My guardian!” he responded. “I’d like to know why I should have any guardian. I’ve no property, goodness knows. And as you said about the board receipts, where are your papers giving you any legal control over me?”
The old man was utterly taken aback at this and sat down again, glowering at his nephew angrily, while the latter put on his hat and coat and departed on his errand to Mrs. Hemingway’s.
But Arad Tarr was not the man to see either money or its equivalent slipping his grasp without strenuous efforts to retain it. His nephew represented to him just so much hard cash saved, for if Brandon went away Uncle Arad realized that the hiring of an extra hand would be an absolute necessity.
Therefore, the boy had not been gone long before the old man decided on a line of action. He struggled into his own coat, locked up the house, and harnessed a horse to a dilapidated light wagon. He was too careful of his good vehicles to take anything but this out on such a nasty day.
“That boy is a-gettin’ too upstartish!” he declared, climbing into the wagon and chirruping to the horse. “He’s jest like Anson an’ Horace. There was no livin’ with them, an’ now he’s got this fool notion inter his head erbout goin’ away!
“But I’ll git that aout o’ him,” he added, with emphasis. “If I hain’t got no legal right ter his services, I will have, now I tell ye! Arter all I’ve done fur him an’ fur his shif’less, no ’count pa, I ain’t goin’ ter let go o’ him till he comes of age—mos’ five years yet.”
He shook his head slowly at that thought. Five years of Brandon’s services on the farm would be worth all of twenty-five hundred dollars!
He clucked to the horse and drove on the faster at that. Suppose the boy should take it into his head to go before he obtained the papers which he was sure he could have made out? The idea was quite agonizing.
“I reckon Squire Holt kin fix it up for me in short order,” he muttered, as he urged his horse into a faster trot. “I’ll show that boy ’t he ain’t his own master, by no means!”