He got up and paced the floor wrathfully.
“Jes’ as soon as I git this matter o’ Brandon’s settled, an’ git th’ farm work started with Jim Hemin’way fur foreman, I’ll go. I ain’t er-goin’ ter be cheated bare faced like this ’ere.”
Then he thought a moment, and pulling Caleb Wetherbee’s letter from its envelope again, read it once more carefully.
“I—I might look inter this w’ile I was there too,” he muttered slowly. “I reckon I kin fin’ thet feller I saw terday—Leroyd, his name was, an’ his address was New England Hotel, Water Street. I shan’t furgit thet right off.”
He shook his head slowly, thrust both letters into his pocket, and then shambled off to bed in the room off the kitchen as, having locked his nephew in, he had also locked himself out of his usual bed chamber.
CHAPTER X
BRANDON’S ARRIVAL AT THE METROPOLIS
Long habit had made Uncle Arad Tarr an extremely early riser, and it had been his custom to arouse Brandon as early as half past three or four during the summer months, and never later than five-thirty in winter. On the morning after he had fastened the door of his nephew’s room, however, the old man did not seek to disturb the boy, but rising himself before five he went about the customary duties of the house and barn.
In this work he missed Brandon sadly; but having made up his mind that the boy was bound to leave him any way, old Arad was determined that he should go to the reform school, and therefore he would have to learn to do without his valuable services.
To his unsophisticated mind, it seemed a very simple matter indeed for a powerful local politician like “Square” Holt to send his nephew to the State reformatory institution, “and no questions asked.”
But under our present system of humane laws, and with our enlightened legal executives, an undeserved incarceration in prison or reform school is seldom known—outside of story books. Judge Holt was a large man in his own community (and in his own estimation) but he had never been beyond that community far enough to learn how very small a man he really was.