y had to answer, his distress
became really pitiable.

"Can't you tell me, Jim?" Mr. Farnsworth hazarded, after a little,
putting a kindly hand on the boy's arm, while Mrs. Calkins stood
quiet by her tub in friendly expectation.

But Jim remained dumb.

After waiting a little, Farnsworth, seeing the boy so miserable,
took pity on him.

"Well, never mind, Jim," he said. "You needn't tell if you don't
want to."

He would have to let Nancy coax it out of him. But he was puzzled,
impressed with a sense of mystery and with a growing conviction that
the boy was shielding some one else. He began to talk cheerfully of
other things, hoping that Jim might perhaps drop a useful hint, or,
at least, that the boy would gain confidence in him as a friend. By
chance he asked:--

"Where did you get the knife, Jim?"

"Mr. Peaslee gave it to me."

"Peaslee!" exclaimed Farnsworth. He well knew the "closeness" of his
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 Edwards 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.

"