“After I seen Jed and smelled the kerosene, I went down around behind the house and seen a fellow running. Seeing he was headed toward the village I cut around back and followed him while he walked up Kenosha street—and who do you think it was?”
The highly excitable minds of the women and the village gossips had been worked to concert pitch by the bully, and as he paused dramatically after his story, they cried:
“Who? Tell us, quick!”
Looking round from one to another of the score of people who had gathered about him, the bully exclaimed:
“It was Harry Watson, the boy that’s come to live here!”
CHAPTER X—HARRY IS EXONERATED
Unfortunately for Harry, he and his boy and girl friends who had been at the Martins’ house during the evening were all scattered between the two houses where the bucket brigades were working, and no one was there to speak a good word for him in contradiction of Snooks’ most despicable charge, for his manner as he spoke gave no room to doubt that he believed the new student had fired the building.
The others quickly put this interpretation upon his statement, and with the rapidity only to be found in villages, word spread about that Harry, for some fancied spite, had burned up the home of the crippled veteran.
And as the story was repeated, it lost nothing in the telling.
“Why doesn’t someone go swear out a warrant for the boy’s arrest?” demanded a particularly irascible old woman.