The boy seated on the fence did not move, however, and Dave himself did not press Ben closely. The latter decided that his adversary had learned his lesson in past encounters, and was simply bent on giving him a tongue lashing.
“Haven’t you made a mistake, Dave?” suggested Ben.
“Oh, yes, certainly!” shouted Dave in sarcastic tones, “I only dreamed that your father has been waiting for weeks to shove Pete Doty, his particular friend and crony, into my father’s job.”
“Mr. Doty is no more my father’s particular friend than is any honest deserving man,” declared Ben. “Certainly my father never suggested his name as the successor of your father.”
“Tell that to the greenies!” vociferated the furious Dave. “It was all a nice little plot—your jumping in where you had no business, and exposing dad.”
“If somebody hadn’t stepped in,” said Ben, “you mightn’t have any father now.”
“Oh, is that so,” sneered Dave. “I guess my father knows how to run his department without your help. He’s been at it long enough.”
“He wasn’t able to run it to-day, Dave,” declared Ben. “He was ‘asleep at the switch,’ as the saying goes, and I tried to rouse him and keep things quiet.”
“Yah! Looks like it, when you let on that he’d been drinking.”
“I? Never!” cried Ben indignantly. “On the contrary, I tried to shield him, and I don’t know that I had any right to do so, either. Why, I even tried to hide the tell-tale bottle in the ashes.”