Then Priscilla, like a miser, gripped her purse. Never before had money
held any power over her, but the hundreds she had saved were precious to
her now. Her father's doors were still, undoubtedly, closed to her. She
could not be a burden to the two men living in Master Farwell's small
home. There was, to be sure, Mary McAdam! By and by, perhaps, when the
hurt was less and she could trust herself more, she would go to the White
Fish Lodge and beg for employment; but until then----
The morning Priscilla departed, Ledyard, unequal to any further strain,
was called upon to bear several. By his plate, at the breakfast table,
lay a scrawled envelope that he recognized at once as a report from
Tough Pine.
"What's up now?" muttered he. "This thing isn't due for--three weeks
yet."
Then he read, laboriously, the crooked lines:
I give up job. Dirty work. Money--bad money. I take no more--or I be
damned! He better man--than you was; you bad and evil, for fun--he grow
big and white. No work for bad man--friend now to good mens.
Pine.
"The devil!" muttered Ledyard; but oddly enough the letter raised, rather
than lowered, his mental temperature.
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