"I have no doubt you are right, ma'am. I heard him say myself that fire would come down and burn them because they threw stones at him. It is an outrage that such a man should be loose in the community. We are none of us safe in our beds."
It was Hadley. Some exclamation made him turn at that moment and he saw Leslie Underwood, and suddenly fell silent. But the woman to whom he had been talking did not fall silent. Instead, she rushed up to Leslie and screamed at her, between angry sobs:
"Yes, you'd better come and look at your father's work. I wonder that you dare show your face! Burnt in our beds we might have been and that's what he meant, and all because the boys threw some bits of stones playful-like at his old buggy. Every one of us might have been burnt to death, and where are our things and our clothes and our home, and where are we going to live? Burnt up by that wicked old man, and I wonder you will show your face in the street!"
Miss Underwood shrank back, speechless and dismayed, before the furious woman, and Burton put himself before her.
"Mrs. Sprigg, your misfortune will make Miss Underwood overlook your words, but nothing will justify or excuse them. You have suffered a loss and we are all sorry for you, and Miss Underwood came here for the express purpose of offering to help you if there is anything she can do. But you must not slander an innocent man. And as for the rest of you," he added, turning with blazing anger to the crowd as a whole, "you must remember that such remarks as I heard when I came up will make you liable to an action for defamation of character. The law does not permit you to charge a man with arson without any ground for doing so."
"If Dr. Underwood didn't do it, who did? Tell me that," a man in the crowd called out.
"I don't have to tell you. That's nonsense. Probably it caught from the chimney."
"The chief says it's incendiary all right. Started in a bedroom on the second floor, in a pile of clothes near a window."
"Even if it were incendiary,--though I don't believe it was--that has nothing to do with Dr. Underwood. He's laid up with a sprained ankle and can't walk a step, let alone climb up to a second story window."
"Well, Henry Underwood hasn't sprained an ankle, has he?" This came from Selby, whom Burton had not noticed before. He thrust himself forward now, and there was something almost like triumph in his excited face.