He spent a week in the saddle before he located the cabin of the
"Jenkinses" in an isolated clearing upon the main branch of the river.
If the journey could have been made cross-country, straight through the
wilderness itself, it would have been no more than a ten-mile ride from
that cabin to the same huge valley at the headwaters of the east
branch, where he and Dexter and the boy had camped only a few days
before. But it was a two days' journey around the backbone of that
ridge alone, by trail. And even then, when he did locate the
"Jenkinses," it took hours of quiet argument before Caleb could
convince those shy and suspicious people that his errand was an honest
one. Eventually they did come to believe him; they led him, a-foot,
another half mile up the timber-fringed stream, to a log cabin set back
in the balsams upon a needle carpeted knoll. And they stood and stared
in stolid wonder at this portly man in riding breeches and leather
puttees, when he finally emerged from that small shack, "Old Tom's" tin
box under his arm, and, with lips working strangely, pinned the door
shut behind him.
Caleb left in the limp fingers of the head of the Jenkins' household a
yellow-tinted note of a denomination which they had not even known
existed; he left them half-doubting its genuineness, until later when
there came an opportunity to spend it. And Sarah was waiting at the
door of the white place on the hill when Caleb wheeled into the yard at
dusk, two days later.
"You've found him!" she exclaimed as she glimpsed his face when he
entered the hall.
Caleb shook his head, his heart aching at the hunger in her question.
"No, I haven't found _him_, Sarah," he said gently enough. "But
I--I've found out _who he is_!"
They forgot their supper that night. With heads close together they
hung for hours over the ink-smeared sheaf of papers which the tin box
yielded up. Most of them were covered with a cramped and misspelled
handwriting which they knew must be that of the one whom Steve had
called "Old Tom." Some of them were hard to decipher, but their import
was very, very clear.
There was one picture--a miniature of a girl, eager of face and wavy of
hair. Her relationship to the boy was unmistakable. Sarah found that
and wept over it silently, and while she wept Caleb sifted out the
remaining loose sheets and came upon a bundle of tax receipts. These
puzzled him for a moment, until, at the very bottom of the box he found
a folded and legal-looking document. He opened that and then he
understood--he understood just how every penny had been spent which Old
Tom had been able to earn. After the swiftest of examinations, Caleb
refolded the paper and slipped it into his own pocket, without showing
it to Sarah at all. Just at that instant he was not sure why he meant
to keep its existence to himself, but even then, back in his brain, the
reason was there. At length he turned to his sister.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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