Tim was the first to speak. Assuming an air of indifference and bravado, and looking boldly about the room he said "Well, we might as well have it out at the beginning as at any time, I suppose. We've come over to see what you intend to do about it."
"Do about what, Tim?" said Ward. "Of what are you talking?"
Tim laughed noisily, as he replied. "That'll do to tell the doctor, but it won't go here. You know as well as I do what we've come over here for."
"You'll have to explain yourself," said Ward coldly.
"All right then, if you must have it; it's the accident. We came over to see about it. You might as well speak it right out now as any time, and it may save a heap of trouble."
"I suppose by 'the accident' you mean the ashes you had sprinkled on the road on West Hill, and your trying to crowd 'The Arrow' upon them," said Ward.
"Now look here, fellows," said Tim with an air of assumed indifference, "it's all very well for you to talk about my steering into you. No one can ever say that I did that purposely. You can't hold two bobs going as swiftly as ours were right to a chalk line. It's simply impossible. You happened to have the lower side, that's all there was about it, anyway, and when 'The Swallow' veered a little from her course, why you thought we were coming straight for you. But even then you didn't have to leave the track, and you wouldn't have done it, only Speck lost his head. He looked behind him and, like Lot's wife, he had to suffer the consequences of his own mistake, and that's all there was to it."
As none of the boys made any reply, Tim hastily continued. "And it's all true what I was saying about it's not being necessary for you to leave the track, even if we had gone out of our course a bit. We know it's so, because some of us have been up and examined the place again."
"Is that what Ripley was running down the hill so for?" inquired Brown quietly.
Ripley's face flushed as he said quickly: "I wasn't running away. If any of you fellows think you can go down West Hill across lots at a walk when the crust is as hard and slippery as it is now, why just try it, that's all I've got to say, and you'll sing a different tune. I couldn't stop and I couldn't turn around. I wasn't running away. What was there to run from, I'd like to know?"