“Dear Sir:  Anybody who can do so good a thing as you did for our Shocky, can not be bad.  I hope you will forgive me.  All the appearances in the world, and all that anybody says, can not make me think you anything else but a good man.  I hope God will reward you.  You must not answer this, and you hadn’t better see me again, or think any more of what you spoke about the other night.  I shall be a slave for three years more, and then I must work for my mother and Shocky; but I felt so bad to think that I had spoken so hard to you, that I could not help writing this.  Respectfully,

     “HANNAH THOMSON.

     “To MR. R. HARTSOOK, ESQ.”

Ralph read it over and over.  What else he did with it I shall not tell.  You want to know whether he kissed it, and put it into his bosom.  Many a man as intelligent and manly as Hartsook has done quite as foolish a thing as that.  You have been a little silly perhaps—­if it is silly—­and you have acted in a sentimental sort of a way over such things.  But it would never do for me to tell you what Ralph did?  Whether he put the letter into his bosom or not, he put the words into his heart, and, metaphorically speaking, he shook that little blue billet, written or coarse foolscap paper—­he shook that little letter full of confidence, in the face and eyes of all the calamities that haunted him.  If Hannah believed in him, the whole world might distrust him.  When Hannah was in one scale and the whole world in the other, of what account was the world?  Justice may be blind, but all the pictures of blind cupids in the world can not make Love blind.  And it was well that Ralph weighed things in this way.  For the time was come in which he needed all the courage the blue billet could give him.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE FLIGHT.

About ten days after Ralph’s return to Flat Creek things came to a crisis.

The master was rather relieved at first to have the crisis come.  He had been holding juvenile Flat Creek under his feet by sheer force of will.  And such an exercise of “psychic power” is very exhausting.  In racing on the Ohio the engineer sometimes sends the largest of the firemen to hold the safety valve down, and this he does by hanging himself to the lever by his hands.  Ralph felt that he had been holding the safety-valve down, and that he was so weary of the operation that an explosion would be a real relief.  He was a little tired of having everybody look on him as a thief.  It was a little irksome to know that new bolts were put on the doors of the houses in which he had staid.  And now that Shocky was gone, and Bud had turned against him, and Aunt Matilda suspected him, and even poor, weak, exquisite Walter Johnson would not associate with him, he felt himself an outlaw indeed.  He would have gone away to Texas or the new gold fields in California had It not been for one thing.  That letter on blue foolscap paper kept a little warmth in his heart.