Terry pleaded with the old man for she had a horror of being locked up. She frantically promised him money; more money than Bud Hyslop was giving him if he would let them go, but Jim Heron shook his head.
“Nothin’ doin’, young lady! You can’t raise as much money as Bud has promised; that I’m sure of. Anyhow I promised Bud Hyslop that I’d keep you under lock and key, and I’m goin’ to do it. I’m a man of my word. What I promise, I stick to!”
Jim threw out his chest as he boasted of his honesty, then he added sharply, “Look here, if you girls hadn’t wanted trouble, you shouldn’t have come all the way up here huntin’ for it. You should have stayed at home where girls belong.”
Then Terry threatened him with the law, when her friends found out what he had done to her, but Jim Heron only sneered and showed his yellow fangs. “Into the room you go!” he snarled. “I’m not afeared of the law. In Fish Cove, _I’m_ the law! All the law there is!”
A glimpse of Sally’s excited face was the last thing that Terry and Prim saw before the oaken door closed on them and the key grated in the lock. The next moment the sisters were facing each other with puzzled and angry looks, for Sally’s voice came to them through the closed door. She was saying to Jim Heron, “That’s fine! Now we’ve got them where we want them. You can have your night’s sleep now. Just leave it to me; I’ll see that they don’t escape.”
And Jim Heron growled in reply, “I’m going to keep the key under my pillow tonight. You keep watch, for if they do get loose, I’ll skin you alive.”
“So that’s that!” stormed Terry. “Sally’s our jailer. And we thought we could trust that girl!”
Prim was on the verge of tears, and Terry continued wrathfully, “Aren’t we a couple of saps to be taken in by that lying little cat! We listened to her sad story and swallowed it all. How she must have laughed at us! Probably there wasn’t a word of truth in it. If you ask me, I think she’s Jim Heron’s daughter.”
“I’ll say we’re dumb!” replied Prim. “What makes me feel sore is that we told her a lot of our plans, thinking she was our friend. This ought to be a lesson to us, never to trust anybody again.”
But while Prim was raging, her sister suddenly burst out laughing. It was real laughter this time. There was nothing forced about it. She pointed to the roughly plastered wall opposite the windows where hung a framed motto worked in brightly colored wool yarn. It read, “Home, Sweet Home.”