So Toady didn't know what to do. He picked up the dime lib'ry and stood looking. So Swatty didn't pay any attention to him. He said to me:
“Seckertary, write in the Book of Doom that the first house the Red Avengers will burn down will be Toady Williams's house, because he's a stingy-cat and took his tom, old, no-good dime lib'ry away from us!”
Toady looked awhile. Then he said:
“Oh, I didn't know you were going to make me a librarian. I didn't know you were going to do that. What do I have to do if I'm Librarian?”
“Why, you keep charge of the library,” I said. “You take an oath to keep and preserve it, in that starch box over there.”
“And then you can be one of the band and take the oath, and if anybody is mean to you we'll burn their houses down,” said Swatty. So Toady said all right, he would be Librarian, and we gave him the oath, and he put “The Red Avengers” in the starch box, and we held a council. We talked about whose houses the Red Avengers ought to burn down first.
I guess we all thought about Miss Carter first, because she had kept us in school after hours that very afternoon; but she lived in a boarding house and we couldn't burn down her room without burning down the rest of the house, so we thought we would just record her in the book and wait until she got married sometime, and had a house of her own, and then burn that down. We thought of everybody, but the one we thought was the meanest was old Dad Veek. So we wrote his name at the top of the list in my memorandum book, and we said we'd burn his barn, and that we would do it at nine of night on the eighteenth of December. I wrote the letter of warning that was to be stabbed onto his door with a dagger, because I was Secretary, and I wrote the date of revenge in the memorandum book, and we all went out and over to Veek's barn.
We hid in the dead weeds at the side of the road and drew straws to see which of the Red Avengers had to go up and dagger the warning onto old Dad Veek's barn, and Bony drew the fatal straw; but of course he was afraid to do it, so Swatty did it. He sneaked through the fence into Veek's yard and up to the barn door. He didn't have a dagger, so he took a sort of splinter and ran it through the warning and stuck the point in a crack in the door, and scooted back to us. It was a daring deed, worthy of our fearless Chief, and we received him with silent cheers, because we had scarce hoped he would return from his perilous mission alive. (That's from the dime lib'ry book.)
Well, that was pretty good, and we felt bully. I guess we would have gone ahead and put up some more warnings another day, but it turned cold that night and the skating got good and we forgot to be Red Avengers. You can't be everything all the time. We didn't think any more about it until the day after the fire. That was the Sunday we were up in my room and Swatty said:
“Well, men, the Red Avengers have been true to their oath! The enemy's property lies in ruins!”