"Best boy, barring none, I ever had, Fred," he declared. "Never late in the morning, neat in his work, obliging in his manners to my customers, and willing to stay after hours if there is a rush. In fact I'm so well satisfied with Toby that I expect to add a couple of dollars to his wages this very next Saturday. And I'm told he's the idol of his mother's eye. She's a widow, you know, with three small children, Toby being the eldest. He shows signs of being like his father; and Matthew Farrell was one of our leading citizens up to the time of his death. I hope she gets his pension through; it'll mean several thousand dollars for her. He died really of wounds received long ago in the war. Never would apply for the pension he was entitled to. Toby's all right, you tell your friend; and he's promised to stick right here. Some day he might be a partner in this business, who knows?"
Well, after that, Fred was ready to throw up his hands in so far as Toby was concerned. He felt that he could never strike pay dirt in that quarter. There never was, and never would be again, quite such a paragon as Toby Farrell. It would be wasting time to try and bark up this tree. The scent had evidently led him in the wrong quarter.
Accordingly, he turned toward the butcher's, and here he fully anticipated getting on the track of something. Gabe lived in an outlying quarter, and when he went home in the evening, or at noon, he took a short-cut through Ramsey's woods, where there was a convenient path.
Now it happened that Fred knew this fact, for he had many a time seen the butcher's boy going and coming. Gabe had a big whistle, and used to amuse himself as he walked to and from home in trying to get the airs from the popular ragtime songs of the day.
Fred had heard it said that the boy who whistles is generally an honest fellow, and that guilt and this disposition seldom, if ever, go hand in hand. How much truth there was in this saying he did not know; but it was on his mind now to try and find out.
Perhaps the fact that it was about ten minutes of twelve influenced Fred in what he set out to do.
First he passed all the way through the strip of woods. It was not very thickly grown, and there was really only a stretch of about one hundred feet where he did not find himself in sight of some house or other.