"I think I would."
"This other person that looked like you didn't say a word."
Timothy puffed and protested and denied, growing redder and redder.
"See here, Waters," said Captain Sinclair: "I have been looking at the lighthouse records last year, and I have hunted up places where you have written, and the style is like this in the letter I received--that anonymous one--about the charges against the keepers in the lighthouse. You come up into the room above with me."
Stuttering in his confusion, still asserting his innocence, blushing, he stumbled up the stairway, and then alone with Captain Sinclair he was urged to make a clean breast of it.
"Yes," said the captain, "tell the whole story; for there is enough against you to shut you up in quarters of stone, and it won't be a lighthouse."
Timothy was startled by this. He broke down, and made a full confession to the inspector.
XIX.
A PLACE TO STOP.
Here is a place to bring into a harbour our story drifting on like a boat. Dave Fletcher was appointed keeper of the light at Black Rocks, and Thomas Trafton became his assistant. Bart, though, said he considered himself to be second assistant, and should fit himself as rapidly as possible for a keeper. He wanted, he added, to be as useful as he could be--an idea that never forsook him since the old days of his career as Little Mew. Dick Pray went on in the old style, full of plans and projects, stirred by an intense ambition to do some big thing, but impatient of the little things necessary to the execution of the whole. Always ready to dare, he was as uniformly averse to the doing of the hard work that might be demanded.