“What have you done with Charles Channing?” thundered the master. “Where have you put him? Where is he gone? I command you to speak! Let the senior of those who were in it speak! or the consequences be upon your own heads.”
The threat sounded ominous in the ears of Bill Simms: he saw himself, in prospective, exposed to all the horrors of a dungeon, and to something worse. With a curious noise, something between a bark and a groan, he flung himself with his face on the floor, and lay there howling.
“Mr. Simms,” said the master, “what has taken you? Were you the chief actor in this matter?”
All considerations had disappeared from Mr. Simms’s mind except the moment’s terror. He forgot what would be his own position in the school, if he told, or—as they would have expressed it—turned sneak. Impelled by fear, he was hardly conscious of his words; hardly responsible for them.
“It wasn’t me,” he howled. “They all know I didn’t want the trick played upon him. I told them that it had killed a boy down by our farm, and it might kill Channing. They know I told them.”
The master paused. “Walk here, Simms.”
Simms picked himself up from the ground and walked there. A miserable object he looked; his eyes red, his teeth chattering, his face white, and his straw-coloured hair standing on end.
The master leaned his arms upon his desk, and brought his face almost into contact with the frightened one. “What trick did you play upon Charles Channing?”
“‘Twasn’t me, sir,” sobbed Simms. “I didn’t want it done, I say, O-o-o-o-o-o-h! I didn’t!”
“What trick was played upon him?”