“Oh!” I exclaimed; “and I made sure that it was all right again.”
“How came you to set the trap there?”
“I had seen marks on the wall,” I said, “where someone came over, but I never thought it could be Gentles.”
“No, my lad, one don’t know whom to trust here; but how came you to think of that?”
“It was the rat-trap set me thinking of it, and when I made up my mind to do it I never thought it would be so serious as it was. Are you very angry with me?”
Uncle Jack looked at me with his forehead all in wrinkles, and sat down on a high stool and tapped the desk.
I felt a curious flinching as he looked so hard at me, for Uncle Jack was always the most stern and uncompromising of my uncles. Faults that Uncle Dick would shake his head at, and Uncle Bob say, “I say, come, this won’t do, you know,” Uncle Jack would think over, and talk about perhaps for two or three days.
“I ought to be very angry with you, Cob,” he said. “This was a very rash thing to do. These men are leading us a horrible life, and they deserve any punishment; but there is the law of the land to punish evildoers, and we are not allowed to take that law in our own hands. You might have broken that fellow’s leg with the trap.”
“Yes, I see now,” I said.
“As it is I expect you have done his leg serious injury, and made him a worse enemy than he was before. But that is not the worst part of it. What we want here is co-operation—that’s a long word, Cob, but you know what it means.”