"I used to hate rats," said Tom, "but I don't now. I'll never have a trap set in any house of mine as long as I live."
"If you'd only known how safe it would have been to walk downstairs that day!" mourned Frank.
"Wouldn't it have been bully?" agreed Tom. "Think of the satisfaction it would have been to have had the bulge on that lieutenant who was going to hang me. I wouldn't have done a thing to him!"
"Well, we got him anyway and that's one comfort," remarked Bart.
"To think that you were legging it away from the house just as we were coming toward it," said Billy.
"It was the toughest kind of luck," admitted Tom. "Yet perhaps it was all for the best, for then I might not have had the chance to get the best of Rabig."
"Rabig?" exclaimed Frank, for the traitor had not yet been mentioned in Tom's narrative.
"What about him?" questioned Billy eagerly.
"Hold your horses," grinned Tom. "I'll get to him in good time. If it hadn't been for Rabig I wouldn't be here. I owe that much to the skunk, anyway."
It was hard for them to wait, but they were fully rewarded when Tom described the way in which he had trapped and stripped the renegade, and left him lying in the woods.