“You see, they didn’t mean me to hear,” said Jamie, talking very fast, “but it wasn’t my fault. I was up the apple tree cutting my name, and two of them were under it, and one of them said, ‘The old gentleman will open his eyes, for once in his life,’ and then the other said, kind of uneasy, ‘I don’t think we need take cannon crackers; wouldn’t the small ones do just as well?’ and then I began to sing, and they never let on they heard me, but the first fellow said: ‘My dear boy, my grandfather expressly requested that the salute in his honor should be fired with cannon-crackers!’ and then they both burst out laughing, and walked away, and I never thought, till ever so long afterward, that that one who spoke last hadn’t a grandfather to his name, and I’m sure they’re going to do something to—to Mr. Foster.”
“What makes you think that, Jamie?” asked Johnny, kindly, “It may be all a joke; perhaps they saw you up there, and are just putting up a game on you.”
Jamie shook his head.
“No, they’re not!” he said, very positively, “they both jumped like everything when I began to sing, and the one who said little crackers would do turned as red as a beet. Now, Johnny, I came to you because I knew you wouldn’t give me away, and because I thought you could think of some way to checkmate them, and you’d just better believe it’s what I think! You know Mr. Foster always leaves his window wide open at night, and the ceilings are so low in that house where he boards that anybody could throw a pack of crackers into a second-story window easy enough. I was in his room once, and his bed’s right opposite the window, and suppose those fellows should throw so hard that the crackers would hit him in the face, or light in the bed and set the clothes afire? I can’t tell you all I know, or you’d believe me, and spot the fellows in a minute, and then they’d spot me, and I wouldn’t give much for my skin if they did!”
Jamie would have been a good deal more nervous than he was if he had known that Johnny had already, and without the least difficulty, “spotted the fellows.” Jamie was a timid little boy, and his affection for Mr. Foster, who was the teacher of mathematics at the school, had grown out of that gentleman’s patient kindness to him. Mr. Foster never mistook timidity for stupidity, but he was a very clear-headed man, with little patience for boys who tried to make shifts and tricks do duty for honestly-learned lessons. So the school was divided into two pretty equal camps concerning him. The boys who really studied hard were his enthusiastic admirers, and those who studied only enough to “pull through,” as they expressed it, were very much the reverse. But when it came to a question of “fun,” things were sometimes a little mixed, and it seemed, in this particular case, as if some of the boys had thoughtlessly gone over to the enemy, and then been somewhat dismayed when they saw where they were being led.
Johnny was very much troubled by what he had heard, and the more he thought of it the less he liked it. A pack of cannon-crackers, flung at random through a window, and flung all the harder by reason of the flinger’s haste to put himself out of sight, might do untold mischief. Beside the possibility that they would start a fire in the room, there was another even worse one—they might explode dangerously near the face of the sleeping victim.
No, the thing must be stopped; but how to stop it? He thought of asking the boys, point-blank, what they were whispering about, but, even should any of them give him a truthful answer, they would probably suspect that somebody had suggested the question to him, and then, of course, remember Jamie’s presence in the tree. He thought of giving Mr. Foster a confidential warning, but, if it took effect, it would be open to the same objection, and he did not like to think of the life Jamie would lead for the next few months were he even suspected of being the informer.
Johnny’s face wore so puzzled and hopeless an expression, that evening after he had learned his lessons, that his father said, kindly,—
“There’s nothing so desperate that it can’t be helped somehow, my boy; what’s the special desperation this evening? Grief at the prospect of a temporary separation from your beloved studies?”