"I did," answered Ed, "and now that you're back, Tom, I'm going to eat a lot of it too."
"Well cut three or four times as much more of it," Tom said, slipping still another slice of the dainty between his teeth, and following it with a mouthful of corn pone, "and I'll help you toast it. But don't let's talk till we eat something to talk on."
Ed quickly cut a great plateful of the bacon slices, and every boy in the party except the one on guard duty, sharpened a stick and helped in the broiling.
Tom had brought their appetites back with him.
CHAPTER XIV
Tom Gives an Account of Himself
"Now first of all," said Tom, when breakfast was over and the boys again began questioning him as to his night's adventure,—"first of all if I ever disappear again you're not any of you to worry about me. You all say that 'little Tom knows how to take care of himself,' and I believe I do, particularly when I have a double-barrelled shotgun with me and forty cartridges loaded with buckshot in my belt.
"Now to explain. I was curious to find out how far the moonshiner who 'negotiated' with me at the muzzle of your magazine rifle, Doctor, was telling the truth, and how far he was lying. So I made up my mind to climb down the mountain, following the line of our chute, and find out whether or not that big timber had made a wreck of an illicit still down there. Of course it hadn't. That was only an 'explanation' invented by the fellow for immediate use, when he was caught sneaking up here to shoot some of us. His sole purpose was to drive us 'out'n the mountings' as these people put it. His plan was to sneak up here behind the house and shoot some one or other of us, and thus compel us to 'git down out'n the mountings.' He thought we'd all be out there chopping and that after dropping one of us he could slip away unseen and of course unrecognized. He thought that then we'd quit. He didn't know that that cat had scratched me so badly that the Doctor had condemned me to stay here at the house, and so he was taken completely by surprise when I levelled that repeating rifle at him, at less than six paces distance. So he resorted to humanity's last resource, lying. I remember reading in a book somewhere that Queen Elizabeth said that 'a lie is an intellectual way of meeting a difficulty.' Well that fellow was very intellectual. He lied 'to the queen's taste'—even Queen Elizabeth's taste. He told me that he had come up here to ask us fellows to change the direction of our chute, lest it demolish his still down there—though of course he didn't admit that it was a still. I wanted to find out about that and so I slipped away and climbed down the mountain. I found the still all right—indeed I found three of them—on my mother's land, but there isn't one of them in the line of our chute or within a quarter of a mile of it. All that was a fable made up to cover the moonshiner's murderous mission.
"Well when I found the stills in full blast I made up my mind to watch their operations for a time. I was securely ensconced upon a ledge which I thought inaccessible from below, but it wasn't. For presently those fellows threw out their pickets, and one of them climbed up to my particular ledge, to keep 'watch and ward' there. There were only two things for me to do. Either I must shoot the fellow and take my chances of running away over a difficult track with which the moonshiners were familiar while I was not, or I must crouch away somewhere where the moonshining picket was not likely to see me.