So I guess that was the reason Slim Finnegan hadn't come around to stab us—he wasn't in Riverbank. I guess it was a month more before they found him down in Oklahoma and fetched him back to Riverbank because me and Swatty and Bony had oathed that he had stolen the keg of powder. Petty larceny was what it was called. That was what they arrested him for.
Well, come to find out, Slim Finnegan hadn't blown up anything, and it wasn't even his keg of powder that done it. He had stole the powder to load a shotgun with, to go hunting, and he showed Mr. Murphy the dry powder keg, with most of the powder in it yet. So he wasn't the dynamiter, after all.
But his father was. Mr. Murphy gave Slim Finnegan three degrees and said to him, “I guess you know who blew up the houses and if you don't tell I'll send you to the penitentiary for twenty years,” and Slim Finnegan—the mean sneak—told that his father and two other men had done it, and they were arrested and went to prison.
So me and Swatty and Bony talked about which of us ought to have the one-thousand-five-hundred-dollars reward, and we made up our minds that Swatty ought to have it because he was the one that went back and saw that Slim Finnegan was really stealing a keg of powder, and that if Swatty didn't get it I ought to have it, because I was the one that told Mamie Little, and that if I didn't get it Mamie Little ought to have it, because if it hadn't been for her I never would have told.
But none of us got it. Mr. Murphy got it. The only thing Swatty and Bony got was that they didn't get stabbed. And I got Mamie Little back for my secret girl again.
XI. “THIEF! THIEF!”
While Mamie Little's father's house was getting fixed up, after being dynamited, they went someplace else to live, and the only people that lived across the street from us were the Burtons. There weren't any Burtons to play with, because the only children they had was Tom Burton, who was older than my sister Fan, and that summer he began taking Fan to ride with the dandy horses and carriage the Burtons' hired man took care of.
The Burtons' hired man's name was Jimmy, and everybody called him that except Mrs. Burton—she called him James. I guess Jimmy was forty years old. Or maybe he was fifty, or thirty-five, or something. He was thin and balder than hired men generally are, and his only bad habit was putting angle worms in a pickle bottle and setting the bottle in the sun to dissolve the worms into angle-worm oil for his rheumatism in the winter; but summer was when the worms were, so he had to get a lot of worms in the summer to last through the winter.