“They’ll think it was awful wrong for me to get away,” he thought. “It’s just as if it was as bad as stealing to have ever been sent there. How shall I get rid of it?”
He had all the while, month after month, been suffering under a sense of terrible injustice, and now it stung him again, for it was following him, and so, he knew, were men who deemed it their duty to catch him and take him back.
Rodney, too, was thinking of that.
“Jim,” he said, “Kirby’s printing office is better than working in our garden. They might see you, from the sidewalk, and ask where you came from.”
“I guess I could tell ’em, with these clothes on,” laughed Jim, for his spirits were improving and it seemed to him as if Randall’s Island were drifting away.
At that very moment, in the Bronson farmhouse, away up the Hudson, they were talking about Jim.
A man had come in, just at breakfast time, and had said something which made everybody jump.
“What’s that, Squire? Did you say it was a telegraphic despatch from Randall’s Island that Jim’s got out?”
“Thank God if he had!” exclaimed Aunt Betty, and it looked as if she would have clapped her hands, or danced, if she had not been so anxious to hear.
“Jim and four more of ’em,” said the Squire. “It doesn’t tell how they did it, but they might come right here, or he might, and you’d ought to know.”