“They say it must have been set. It started in a dozen places at once. Somebody hated him pretty bad.”
“I guess there was more’n one!” another woman spoke bitterly. “He never done no good to this place. Just feathered his own nest, he did.”
Were they talking about Anne’s father? Someone jostled her and she lost Beverly in the crowd.
“How do you think the fire caught?” a summer cottager was asking the question of a fisherman in tarpaulin and slickers who had fought the fire till he was exhausted and now rested on the handle of his axe.
“Fire was sot,” said the man. “Cap’n Sackett’s got an old Indian woman in charge. They caught her hangin’ around the place just after the fire was discovered. Couldn’t say what she was up to. Cap’n thinks she may have done it.”
“Sal Seguin!” thought Anne. “I don’t believe she did it.”
“Poole had enemies enough in this town. But I don’t know a feller mean enough to do this trick,” said another man. “Look how they’re all tryin’ to help now—some of the very ones he let in for a fraud! There’s Doc. Right, and Lonny Maguire.”
“What does he mean?” thought Anne. “Fraud? Has someone been doing something dishonest?”
“He was a mean cur,” said another fisherman, lounging up to this group, and never noticing Anne crouching behind them. “I allers thought so. Anybody who would drive his neighbors off land that had allers been free—that ain’t American, I say. Well, we can walk on it all we want after to-night, I guess. Poole will be walkin’ elsewhere!”
“Yes, they say he’ll have to go to prison for what he done,” said the first man. “He took all my wife’s sister’s savings of twenty years. And she’s a widder with five children!”