Of course he would have to lose Brandon’s work on the farm; but he had seen, by the boy’s open defiance of “Square” Holt, that he cared nothing for the law or its minion—and Uncle Arad dared not allow his nephew out of his sight for fear he would run away.
To his mind there was very little doubt that the attempt to shut Brandon up would be successful. Judge Holt was a most powerful man (politically) in the town, and he would leave no stone unturned to punish the youth who had so fearlessly defied him.
Judge Holt, although disliked by many of his townsmen who realized that some of his methods and actions were illegal, still swayed the town on election days, and carried things with a high hand the remainder of the year. Old Arad chuckled to think how easily Brandon’s case would be settled by the doughty “square.”
Then, remembering the suggestion the judge had made just before his departure, he rose hastily from his chair and quietly ascended to the floor above. Here Brandon and himself slept in two small bedrooms on opposite sides of the hall.
The doors were directly opposite each other, and, although such things as locks were unknown in the house on any except the outside doors, the old man quickly lit upon a scheme that he thought remarkably clever.
He obtained a piece of stout clothes line and fastened it back and forth from handle to handle of the two bedroom doors, which, opening into their respective rooms, were now arranged so that the occupants of neither apartment could open the portals.
Then, chuckling softly over his sharp trick, the old farmer crept down the stairs once more to the kitchen, feeling moderately sure of finding Brandon in his room in the morning.
But one narrow window, looking out upon the barnyard, was in his nephew’s apartment, and as the sash had long since been nailed in, and the shutters closed on the outside, Uncle Arad felt secure on this score.
“I’ll starve him inter submission, ef I can’t do it no other way,” he muttered angrily.
Seating himself once more in his old armchair, he drew forth the two letters obtained that day at the post office, adjusted his steel bowed spectacles which, in a moment of extravagance, he had purchased of a traveling peddler, and opened the epistle from his brokers which, heretofore, he had not read.