Jerry insisted that he could not have had the money. "I _know_, Aunt Lucy. Uncle Cale handed me the roll of bills, and I put it down in this pocket, and never touched it till I got to town. When I took it out there were the bills just as he had handed them to me, and not a thing more."
"Maybe there's a hole in your pocket," she suggested.
She turned it wrong side out, but found no place where a coin could have slipped through.
"Well, it's a mystery where it went," she said. "I can't understand it."
"Pooh! It's no mystery," answered Jerry, contemptuously. "Uncle simply didn't give it to me. He thought he had rolled it up in the bills, but was mistaken. That's all!"
"What do you mean by that?" cried Caleb, jumping up white with anger. "I tell you it _was_ wrapped up in the bills, and if you can't account for it, you've either lost it or spent it!"
Jerry bounded up-stairs to his room, stuffed his best suit of clothes into a little brown carpet-bag, and then poured out the contents of an old, long-necked blue vase. He had thirty dollars saved toward buying a horse of his own. Then he marched defiantly down-stairs to his uncle.
"I never saw or touched your gold-piece," he declared, "but I'll not go away leaving you to say that I took any of your money!"
He threw down a five-dollar bill and started to the door. As he turned the knob, he looked back at the woman by the fireplace, with her face in her apron.
"Good-bye, Aunt Lucy," he said, with a choke in his voice. "You've been awful good to me--I'll never forget that!"
Then he shut the door abruptly, and went out into the night. It lacked only five minutes of train-time when he reached the station, determined to go to a cousin of his father's who lived in Vermont, and write from there to Jack Spencer that he would work his way out West as soon as he could.
Tingling with the recollection of his uncle's reproaches, the boy sat up very straight and wide-awake in the train for a long time. Then his tension relaxed, and for lack of something else to do, he felt in his pocket for Jack Spencer's letter. As he pulled it from its envelope something else fell into his hand. It was a gold-piece.
He could scarcely believe his eyes as he sat dropping it from one hand into another. How had the coin got into the letter. For a time he could not guess; then the truth suddenly became clear to him.