“All right, old man,” the sheriff replied, as his puzzled glance swept the two disturbed faces before him. “I don't care just so you don't garnishee my salary for what I owe you.”
Outside, as he joined a group of idlers on the corner, he remarked, with a broad, knowing smile and a twinkle of the eye: “That old note-shaver in there thinks he can fool me. He sent Toby Lassiter out just now as white as a preacher's Sunday shirt to ask me to see him. I found him looking like a staring idiot, and was informed that it was a false alarm. False nothing! I'll give you boys a tip. I'll bet that gay and festive Fred is up to some fresh devilment. You watch out and you'll hear something drop, if I am any judge. I saw Fred last night headed for the railroad. He didn't see me. I was hiding behind a fence, watching him. I think he boarded a freight-train; I am not sure.”
CHAPTER IX
AS was only natural in a town of the size of Stafford, the sudden departure of Fred Walton, under circumstances no one seemed able to explain, caused wide and growing comment. A railroad man who had returned from Atlanta informed an eager cluster of idlers in the big office of the main hotel of the place that Fred had been seen lurking about the freight-yards in the city at early daylight, evidently trying to avoid being seen. The report went out, too—and no less authority accompanied it than the word of Fred's stepmother, who, admitting the fact that she hated the young man, could not be charged with originating a direct lie—that Fred had gone without “a thread to wear,” except what he had on when leaving. The town did not need to be told that in that detail alone lay ample evidence of the gravity of the case, even if it were not said—on good authority, too—that old Simon Walton, immediately on discovering the flight, had called in Bill Johnston to consult with him. Had he taken away money? That was the question designedly put by Walton's business rivals, and that was the question which one and all declared the old man and Toby Lassiter had promptly denied. No, it was something else; that was quite plain.
Mrs. Barry heard the news at the fence the next afternoon from the voluble tongue of a poor washerwoman, a Mrs. Chumley, who, since the downfall of her only daughter, and the handsome girl's adoption of a life of prostitution in Augusta, had lived on alone in a cottage adjoining Mrs. Barry's, and who, as she cleansed the linen of her neighbors for a living, besmirched their characters as her only available solace. She was fond of hinting darkly that if disgrace had come to her family by discovery, it hovered—ready to drop at any minute—over the heads of people not a bit better, and who were far too stuck-up for their own safety.
“You certainly ought to be glad the scamp's gone,” she remarked to Mrs. Barry, as she leaned her bare, crinkled arms on the fence when she unctuously told the news. “I never liked to see him hanging round Dora. A body would see him one day over there at that big fine house with Miss Margaret, whose high-priced ruffles I've got in the tub right now, and the next bending his head to enter your lowly door. Things as wide apart as them two naturally are won't hitch, neighbor, that's all—they won't hitch.”
“Yes, I'm glad he's gone,” Mrs. Barry admitted, with the indiscretion most persons had under the plausible eye and guiding tone of the gossip. “Dora says he had a kind heart, and that she's sorry for him in all his ups and downs; but, as you say, no good could come of their being together so much, at least, and it is better to have it end.”
“The postman left a letter for you-all this morning, didn't he?” was a question Mrs. Chumley had evidently been holding in reserve.