“Have you spoken to Wayring about proposing you for the yacht club?” asked Scott.
Tom, with unblushing mendacity, replied that he had.
“I don’t believe the regatta will amount to much this year,” remarked one of the boys who had not spoken before. “If Matt Coyle carries out the threats he made yesterday, there won’t be any yachts to contend for the prizes. You heard about that, I suppose?” he added, turning to Tom and his cousins.
“We were present when a legal process of some kind was served on him yesterday, and we heard Matt say that he wouldn’t go away,” answered Loren. “But when we came around the foot of the lake a little while ago, we found that he had cleared out, taking his shanty with him.”
“You saw the constable serve him with a notice to quit, did you!” exclaimed Noble. “Well, you missed the best part of it. You ought to have been there about three hours later, and witnessed the fight that took place between Matt and his family, and the officer and his posse. The old woman proved herself to be the best man in the lot. Matt evidently knew that an effort would be made to eject him by force, and his wife prepared for it by boiling a big kettle of water. When the constable, with a crowd of guides at his back, presented himself at the door, she opened on him with that hot water; and if you could have seen the stampede that followed, you would have laughed until your sides ached, as I did.”
“You didn’t laugh much when it happened,” Prime remarked. “I was there, and I know there wasn’t a man or boy in the party who showed a neater pair of heels than one Frank Noble.”
When the burst of merriment that followed these words, and in which Frank joined as heartily as any of his companions, had somewhat subsided, the narrator continued:
“I am free to confess that I didn’t see any thing funny in the way the old woman jammed that long-handled dipper into the kettle and sent its boiling contents flying toward us, but it was very amusing after it was all over, and I woke up in the night and laughed about it. Of course the defiant squatters were over-powered after a while, but not until Matt and both his boys had been knocked flat, and one of the guides had disarmed the old woman by running in and kicking over her kettle of water. The officer was determined to arrest the last one of them for resisting his authority; but Mr. Hastings, who happened along just then, and who thought that neighbors so undesirable could not be got rid of any too quick, told the constable to chuck the squatter and all his belongings into the punt and shove them out into the lake, after giving them fair warning that they would be sent up as vagrants if they stopped this side of Sherwin’s pond.”
“Did he do it?” asked Ralph.
“Of course he did. But before Matt put his oars into the water he made us a speech containing threats which I, for one, hope he will have the courage to carry out.”