The Bondboy   By: George W. Ogden (1871-1966)

By G. W. Ogden

Trail's End Claim Number One The Land of Last Chance The Rustler of Wind River The Duke of Chimney Butte The Flockmaster of Poison Creek

THE BONDBOY

by

GEORGE W. OGDEN

Chicago A. C. McClurg & Co. 1922

Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co. 1922

Published October, 1922

Copyrighted in Great Britain

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS I. Delivered Into Bondage 1 II. A Dry Salt Man 21 III. The Spark in the Clod 47 IV. A Stranger at the Gate 66 V. The Secret of the Clover 84 VI. Blood 99 VII. Deliverance 114 VIII. Will He Tell? 126 IX. The Sealed Envelope 152 X. Let Him Hang 166 XI. Peter's Son 171 XII. The Sunbeam on the Wall 188 XIII. Until the Day Break 210 XIV. Deserted 228 XV. The State vs. Newbolt 241 XVI. "She Cometh Not" He Said 249 XVII. The Blow of a Friend 259 XVIII. A Name and a Message 276 XIX. The Shadow of a Dream 304 XX. "The Penalty Is Death!" 311 XXI. Ollie Speaks 325 XXII. A Summons of the Night 341 XXIII. Lest I Forget 359

The Bondboy

CHAPTER I

DELIVERED INTO BONDAGE

Sarah Newbolt enjoyed in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which clustered coppicelike in her dooryard, were ready to unlock and flare forth leaves. On the porch with its southern exposure she sat in her low, splint bottomed rocker, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees.

The sun tickled her shoulders through her linsey dress, and pictured her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail drawn, warped, and beaten floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were large and toil distorted, great jointed like a man's, and all the feminine softness with which nature had endowed her seemed to have been overcome by the masculine cast of frame and face which the hardships of her life had developed.

She did not seem, crouched there like an old cat warming herself in the first keen fires of spring, conscious of anything about her; of the low house, with its battered eaves, the sprawling rail fence in front of it, out of which the gate was gone, like a tooth; of the wild bramble of roses, or the generations of honeysuckle which had grown, layer upon layer the under stratum all dead and brown over the decaying arbor which led up to the cracked front door. She did not seem conscious that time and poverty had wasted the beauties of that place; that shingles were gone from the outreaching eaves, torn away by March winds; that stones had fallen from the chimney, squatting broad shouldered at the weathered gable; that panes were missing from the windows, their places supplied by boards and tacked on cloth, or that pillows crowded into them, making it seem a house that stopped its ears against the unfriendly things which passengers upon the highway might speak of it.