“What makes you think it wasn’t he, Harry?” asked Mr. Martin.
“Because he was going on a sleigh ride with Socker Gales and some of the other boys and girls,” returned Harry.
“But evidently he didn’t go, for he was at the fire after it was burning fiercely,” asserted the venerable man. Nobody knew the cause for the bully’s remaining at home.
Stung deeply by the words Nettie had uttered when he had come up behind them when the two girls were walking home, Snooks had asked his father for some money that he might join his friends in driving to the Lake House at Cardell for the dance, only to be gruffly refused.
Angry at his father, his friends and himself, the bully had eaten his supper in sullen hastiness, and then left the house by the back way for the purpose of watching his friends depart on the sleigh ride. The route he took, however, led him past the house of the crippled veteran whom he hated so deeply, and the sight of it suggested to him that he might work off his ill-humor by playing some trick on old Jed.
Entering the shed, he lighted a match and was looking about the shop, when he had heard the crippled veteran opening the door of the kitchen, and, thinking only that he must escape, the boy had thrown the match on the floor and rushed to leave the shed. Instead of going out, the match had fallen into a pile of shavings, quickly igniting them, and the flames found ready food in the pieces of wood, oil-soaked leather and other odds and ends with which the shop was littered, and in a few moments had gained such headway that they were irresistible.
Such was the story which Mr. Martin and the bully’s father extorted from the boy after they had questioned him closely in the presence of the crippled veteran for a half hour.
Though the fire was purely an accident, it was so evident that Pud had gone to his arch-enemy’s house bent on mischief, that the butcher and Mr. Martin were at a loss how to proceed in the matter of meting out punishment; and as they sat in silence, pondering over the confession, it was Jed himself who solved the problem.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t come to the house with the intention of burning it, Pud,” he exclaimed. “You and I know I hadn’t occasion for being fond of you, but I’d hate to think there was any boy, or man either for that matter, in Rivertown who was so down on me that he would want to burn the roof over my head.
“Now, I’ve carried a bit of insurance on the place and I’m not going to live very much longer, so if——”