"So you know all my little indiscretions, eh?" he gritted. "Then don't you see I can't give you--your liberty?"
Liberty! What did he mean by taking her liberty away? She asked him with beating heart.
"Just this, my dear child," he advanced mockingly. "There are places where people're taken care of and--the world thinks them dead. In fact, your father had a taste of what I can do. Only he happened to----"
"Did you put him somewhere?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Same kind of a place I'm going to put you----" He hesitated a moment and ended, "A mad house!"
"Did you let him come home to me?"
"Not I. Damn the careless keepers! He skipped out one day, and I didn't know until he'd a good start of me. I followed as soon as possible, but you were gone. Now--now--then, to find such a place for you!"
Jinnie's imagination called up the loathsome thing he mentioned and terrified her to numbness. At that moment she understood what her father had written in that sealed letter to Lafe Grandoken.
But she couldn't allow her mind to dwell upon his threat against herself.
"What'd you mean when you said I could save my friends?"
"You're fond of Mrs. Grandoken, aren't you?"
Jinnie nodded, trying to swallow a lump in her throat.
"And--and there's a--a--blind child too--who could be hurt easily."
Jinnie's living world reeled before her eyes. During this speech she had lost every vestige of color. She sprang toward him and her fingers went blue-white from the force of her grip on his arm.
"Oh, you couldn't, you wouldn't hurt poor little Bobbie?" she cried hysterically. "He can't see and he's sick, terribly ill all the time. I'll do anything you say--anything to help 'em."
Then she fell to the floor, groveling at his feet.
"Get up! You needn't cry; things'll be easy enough for you if you do exactly as I tell you. The first order I give you is to stay here quietly until I come again."
As he spoke, he lifted her up, and she stood swaying pitiably.
"Can't I let Peg know where I am?" she entreated when she could speak. "Please! Please!"
"I should think not," scoffed Morse. Then, after a moment's consideration, he went on, "You might write her a note, if you say what I dictate. I'll have it mailed from another town. I don't want any one to know you're still in Bellaire."
"Could I send her a little money, too?" she asked.
"Yes," replied Morse.
"Then tell me what to write, and I will."
After he had gone and Jinnie was once more alone, she sat at the window, her eyes roving over the landscape. Her gaze wandered in melancholy sadness to the shadowy summit of the distant hills, in which the wild things of nature lived in freedom, as she herself had lived with Lafe Grandoken in Paradise Road, long before her uncle's menacing shadow had crossed her life. Then her eyes lowered to the rock-rimmed gorge, majestic in its eternal solitude. She was on the brink of some terrible disaster. She knew enough of her uncle's character to realize that. She spent the entire day without even looking at her beloved fiddle, and after the night closed in, she lay down, thoroughly exhausted.