"I don't see how you can say sich a thing, Aunt Nancy"; and Bill assumed an injured expression.
"Didn't you mix up the harness when the circle met here, and didn't you try to drown the baby?"
"Me drown a baby?" Bill cried in a horrified tone.
"Yes, it was you and your friends who carried him to the duck pond and set him adrift on a raft."
"Now, Aunt Nancy, it ain't right to talk agin me in this way"; and a stranger would have said that Bill was on the point of crying.
"Why, William Dean, I saw you running away!"
"I ain't sayin' you didn't; but that's nothin' to do with the baby. When I came across the field he was at the pond, an' I didn't know what he might do to my raft. Before I got up to him he was sailin' like all possessed, an' when you came I run away for fear you'd want me to wade in after him."
Aunt Nancy's eyes opened wide in astonishment at this marvellous story, and while she felt convinced it was false, she would not accuse him of telling a lie without having something in the way of evidence against him.
"At least I know you fought with Jack because he wouldn't promise to go away," she said after quite a long pause.
Louis's guardian tried to prevent this last remark by a look, but was unsuccessful, and Bill replied boldly,—