disagreeable ways had lost to him the few friends he had picked up when first coming on board. The fact that Si and Walter were growing more popular every day caused him fairly to grate his teeth with rage.
"I'll fix him, see if I don't," he told himself that night. "They shan't tell everybody that I took that gold piece—when I didn't touch his bag."
Jim Haskett was one of those mean, unscrupulous men, who do a wrong and then try to argue themselves into thinking that it is all right. It was not true that he had taken the ten-dollar gold piece from Si's bag, but it was true that he had found the Yankee boy's satchel overturned and partly open, and had closed it up and locked it, and afterward found the money on the floor of the car within a few feet of where the bag had stood. Any fair-minded man would have told himself that the gold piece must be the one lost by Si; but Haskett was not fair-minded, and it was doubtful if the man could ever become so, any more than a dwarfed and crippled tree can be forced to be come straight and upright.
On Monday morning, the day after leaving
