“Could the boy have got beyond the breaker?”
“He must ’a’, sir, he must ’a’; the grass was na growin’ under his feet goin’ doon the hill.”
“Do you think Tom Taylor fired that breaker?”
Sandy stared for a moment in blank amazement.
“Why, the guid Lord bless ye, mon! be ye daft? There ain’t a better boy i’ the roun’ warl’n Tom Taylor!” and Sandy broke into a hearty laugh at the very idea of Tom doing any thing wrong.
But Tom, who sat back in his seat and heard it all, was suddenly startled with the sense of a new danger. Suppose he should be charged with setting fire to the breaker? And suppose Rennie and Carolan should go upon the witness-stand and swear that they saw him running away from the newly kindled blaze, as, indeed, they might and not lie, either,—how could he prove his innocence? Yet he was about to swear Jack Rennie into freedom, knowing him to be guilty of the crime with which he was charged, and, what was still more despicable, he was about to do it for money.
Looked upon in this light, the thing that Tom had promised to do rose very black and ugly in his sight; and the poor delusion that he should tell no lie was swept, like a clinging cobweb, from his mind.
It was while his heart was still throbbing violently under the excitement of this last thought and fear, that he heard some one call,—