“I said it before—ride him on a rail around town so people can see how scouts stand up for their own rights!” came a voice from the group of excited boys.
“Oh! that would be letting him off too easy,” Tom Betts affirmed. “’Twould serve him just about right if we ducked him a few times in the river.”
“All we need is an axe to cut a hole through the ice,” another lad went on to say, showing that the suggestion rather caught his fancy as the appropriate thing to do—making the punishment fit the crime, as it were.
“Keep it goin’,” sneered the defiant Jud, not showing any signs of quailing under this bombardment. “Try and think up a few more pleasant things to do to me. If you reckon you c’n make me show the white feather you’ve got another guess comin’, I want you to know. I’m true grit, I am!”
“You may be singing out of the other side of your mouth, Jud Mabley, before we’re through with you,” threatened Curly Baxter.
“Mebbe now you might think to get a hemp rope and try hangin’ me,” laughed the prisoner in an offensive manner. “That’s what they do to spies, you know, in the army. Yes, and I know of a beauty of a limb that stands straight out from 43 the body of the tree ’bout ten feet from the ground. Shall I tell you where it lies?”
This sort of defiant talk was causing more of the scouts to become angry. It seemed to them like adding insult to injury. Here this fellow had spied upon their meeting, possibly learned all about the plans they were forming for the midwinter holidays, and then finally had the misfortune to fall and smash one of the window panes, which would, of course, have to be made good by the scouts, as they were under heavy obligations to the trustees of the church for favors received.
“A mean fellow like you, Jud Mabley,” asserted Joe Clausin, “deserves the worst sort of punishment that could be managed. Why, it would about serve you right if you got a lovely coat of tar and feathers to-night.”
Jud seemed to shrink a little at hearing that.
“You wouldn’t dare try such a game as that,” he told them, with a faint note of fear in his voice. “Every one of you’d have to pay for it before the law. Some things might pass, but that’s goin’ it too strong. My dad’d have you locked up in the town cooler if I came home lookin’ like a bird, sure he would.”