“The rogue!” said the deacon. “He ought not to have taken such a desperate course as that!” Yet somehow he wasn’t sorry. Riding over to the Basin, he had been greatly disturbed in his mind at the thought of Jack’s going to jail, and had seriously questioned whether it was not his duty to offer bail for him. He was a kind-hearted man, as we know; but he had lost faith in the boy’s integrity; and it was a relief to him to learn that the question of bail was settled. “Why, Sellick!” he cried, “what have you been about?”
The lately imprisoned crowd came laughing down the stairway to the street, Sellick laughing with the rest, though rather foolishly. He carefully folded Judge Garty’s warrant, and stuck it into the lining of his hat, remarking, “‘It may come in play some time,’ as the stingy man said when he laid away the bad egg in his cupboard.” Then stooping to pick up a bruised tin cup which lay at the foot of the stairs, “That’s an honest boy, deacon! He paid for the milk, and he left the cup.—This belongs to you, I believe,” handing it to the little fat grocer. “It looks like a good cup, and the milk may have been good milk, but the boy, I’m free to say, didn’t seem to be satisfied with it.—Now what’s to be done, squire? There’s no use crying for the article arter it’s spilt, ye know.”
The bareheaded old man strode past him, frowning prodigiously, and, taking his hat from the post, all wet as it was, put it on.
“Get track of your prisoner and take him!” he said impatiently. “What do ye stand dawdling here for? Somebody must have seen him!”
That was true enough. Reports were even then coming in of a youth whom women washing at their back doors had observed leaping fences and running fast across gardens and fields, away from the village. And now came shouts from down the canal, which drew the whole crowd in that direction.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE OWNER OF THE POTATO PATCH, AND HIS DOG.
Passing the corner of the block, where he dropped Judge Garty’s key into the hogshead of water, Jack slipped into a short, narrow alley, and turned down a back street which brought him quickly to the shore of a broad mill-pond, where it stopped. He then took to the fields.
He got on very well until, as he was crossing a potato patch, he saw, only a few rods ahead of him, a man going up from the shore of the pond, followed by a savage-looking dog. It was our old acquaintance and Jack’s enemy, Duffer,[[1]] a thick-set, red-faced, black-whiskered teamster, almost the last man Jack would have wished at that moment to encounter.