At about midnight Cap'n Sproul, snoring peaceably with wide-open mouth, snapped upright in bed with a jerk that set his teeth into his tongue and nearly dislocated his neck. He didn't know exactly what had happened. He had a dizzy, dreaming feeling that he had been lifted up a few hundred feet in the air and dropped back.
"Land o' Goshen, Aaron, what was it?" gasped his wife. "It sounded like something blowing up!"
The hint steadied the Cap'n's wits. 'Twas an explosion—that was it! And with grim suspicion as to its cause, he pulled on his trousers and set forth to investigate. An old barn on his premises, a storehouse for an overplus of hay and discarded farming tools, had been blown to smithereens and lay scattered about under the stars. And as he picked his way around the ruins with a lantern, cursing the name of Luce, a far voice hailed him from the gloom of a belt of woodland: "I ain't an outlaw, hey? I don't dast to be one, hey? You wait and see."
About an hour later, just as the selectman was sinking into a doze, he heard another explosion, this time far in the distance—less a sound than a jar, as of something striking a mighty blow on the earth.
"More dynamite!" he muttered, recognizing that explosive's down-whacking characteristic. And in the morning Hiram Look hurried across to inform him that some miscreant had blown up an empty corn-house on his premises, and that the explosion had shattered all the windows in the main barn and nearly scared Imogene, the elephant, into conniptions. "And he came and hollered into my bedroom window that he'd show me whuther he could be an outlaw or not," concluded the old showman. "I tell you that critter is dangerous, and you've got to get him. Instead of quietin' down he'll be growin' worse."
There were eleven men in Smyrna, besides Zeburee Nute, who held commissions as constables, and those valiant officers Cap'n Sproul called into the first selectman's office that forenoon. He could not tell them any news. The whole of Smyrna was ringing with the intelligence that Aholiah Luce had turned outlaw and was on the rampage.
The constables, however, could give Selectman Sproul some news. They gave it to him after he had ordered them to surround Mr. Luce and take him, dynamite and all. This news was to the effect that they had resigned.
"We've talked it over," averred Lycurgus Snell, acting as spokesman, "and we can't figger any good and reeliable way of gittin' him without him gittin' us, if he's so minded, all in one tableau, same to be observed with smoked glasses like an eclipse. No, s'r, we ain't in any way disposed to taller the heavens nor furnish mince-meat funerals. And if we don't git him, and he knows we're takin' action agin' him, he'll come round and blow our barns up—and we ain't so well able to stand the loss as you and Mr. Look be."
"Well, if you ain't about the nearest to knot-holes with the rims gone off'm 'em of anything I ever see," declared the Cap'n, with fury, "may I be used for oakum to calk a guano gunlow!"
"If you think it's a job to set any man to, you'd better go and do it yourself," retorted Snell, bridling. "You know as well as I do, s'leckman, that so long as 'Liah has been let alone he's only been a plain thief, and we've got along with him here in town all right—onpleasant and somewhat expensive, like potater-bugs. But you seem to have gone to pushin' him and have turned him from potater-bug into a royal Peeruvian tiger, or words to that effect, and I don't see any way but what you'll have to tame him yourself. There's feelin' in town that way, and people are scart, and citizens ain't at all pleased with your pokin' him up, when all was quiet."