The Calico Cat
fellow juror.

   "It isn't much of a knife," said Jim, apologetic but pleased. Jim's views of the world were changing: his father, although a bandit chief, had let him go to jail, while this stingy old man, with no halo of adventure about him, gave him a knife; and here were Miss Ware and Mr.

   Farnsworth and Mrs. Calkins and the jailer, none of them smugglers, who were very kind.

   Farnsworth rose to go. Then Jim, summoning all his courage, asked a question which had long been trembling on his lips.

   "What do they do to smugglers, Mr. Farnsworth?"

   "Fine 'em, or put 'em in jail, or both. Why?"

   "Nothing much," said Jim, but obviously he was cast down.

   Farnsworth walked thoughtfully toward his store. "By George!" he thought suddenly. "I wonder—"

   The gossip about the senior Ed

   wards had occurred to him, and at the same time he remembered the quarrel with Lamoury.

   "But what nonsense!" he thought. "If Edwards wanted to shoot any one he wouldn't do it in his own back yard, and he wouldn't treat his own boy that way, either." Still, the idea clung to him.

   And then he thought of Nancy, and chuckled. "If she comes to the store before she goes to the jail I won't tell her what she'll find there," he promised himself.

   Meanwhile, Mr. Peaslee felt a growing discomfort. He ate his dinner and answered the brisk

   questions of his wife with increasing preoccupation. Like Miss Ware, he was picturing Jim solitary and suffering in his lonely cell. With the utmost sincerity and ingenuousness he condemned Mr. Edwards.

   "Hain't he got any feelin' for his own flesh and blood?" he asked himself. "'T ain't right; somebody'd ought to deal with him."

   As he pottered about his yard after dinner, he finally worked himself up to the point of speaking to Edwards himself.

   Even his righteous indignation would not have led him to this undertaking had he known Mr. Ed


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