“You were so kind as to make an opening for him, sir, by hiring away Major Toppleton’s engineer, and my father has taken his place, at the same wages—eighty dollars a month—as you pay your new engineer.”
The great man stamped his foot with rage, and uttered an expression with which I cannot soil my paper. As wicked, tyrannical, overbearing men often do, he had overreached himself in his anxiety to strike my father. If it was unchristian for me to rejoice in his discomfiture, I could not help it, and I did so most heartily.
“I have been to see him about your conduct,” continued the colonel, when his wrath would let him speak again. “I want to know what he is going to do about paying his share of the loss of the canal boat which you and Waddie blew up?”
“I can speak for him, sir, if that is all you want. He is not going to pay the first cent of it,” I replied.
“Here is the captain of the boat, and he wants to know what you are going to do about it,” added the colonel, trying to enjoy the confusion which he thought I ought to feel in view of such a demand.
“Yes, I want to know who is going to pay for the mischief,” said the honest skipper; but as he already knew, he did not put much heart into the words, and actually chuckled as he uttered them.
“Captain,” I continued, turning to the master of the canal boat, “I say to you, as I have said to others, that I had nothing whatever to do with blowing up your boat, and I did not know anything about it till the explosion took place. That is all I have to say.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” replied the skipper.
“I do,” interposed the colonel. “He has confessed that he had hold of the string when the boat blew up.”
I took the trouble to explain to the honest skipper that Waddie had asked me to pull in his kite line; that I had picked it up, but, fearing some trick, had done nothing with it; and that Waddie had pulled the string himself.