"Yes—the villain!" exclaimed the doctor. "My poor boy, come here, and let me see what he did to you. It was bad enough for you to throw a burning sponge into his pig-pen, but——"
"I didn't, father," said Jack. "The sponge fell from the balloon." And Jack told in detail the story of the ascension and untimely end of the balloon, though his recital was so fragmentary and delivered with so much shading of the eyes and rubbing of the head that the doctor grew seriously alarmed for the boy's reason. It took him but a second or two to dismount from his carriage and lay his hand on Jack's head, yet even in this short time his conscience pricked him sorely for his many sins of omission concerning his only son, and he formed enough of good resolutions to pave at least a mile of the infernal pathway.
"Let me see your eyes," said the doctor.
Jack lifted them, heavy and bloodshot.
"No concussion of the brain, thank the Lord," said the doctor. "Now show me your tongue."
Jack opened his mouth, and that very instant the doctor sniffed the air suspiciously; then with both hands he held the boy at arms' length and exclaimed:
"You've been drinking, young man."
Jack looked up guiltily for just a second, and then dropped his eyes.
"Go home this instant!" said the doctor; "take off your clothes and go to bed, and stay there until I come. I never gave you a bit of sympathy without finding that I'd wasted it. Go along—quick!"
As the doctor spoke, he reached for his carriage-whip, so Jack moved off much faster than a moment or two before he would have thought possible under the existing physical circumstances. When the doctor had turned his carriage and moved off to visit some patients whom he had been neglecting all the morning, Jack's fears were sufficiently allayed to justify his thinking about the weather, for it seemed to him that the sun had never shone so hotly even in midsummer. Then he wondered what his father would do to him. He had been punished with great severity many a time, though his faults had never before been so grievous as this present one; the mere thought of being punished at all was more than in his present physical and mental condition he could bear.