“Sure,” I said; “I think it was near the station.”
He said, “You didn’t get up and go to it, eh?” He said that because I always go to fires. I stayed up all night when the High School burned down.
I said, “Have a heart. I was dead to the world all night. We had some job getting our car moved.”
My mother said, “Why, of course.”
Then my father said, kind of funny like, he said, “You got it moved all right, eh?”
“You bet we did,” I said.
“And what’s the next move?” he asked me, very nice and pleasant.
“To get it across Willow Place to the Sneezenbunker land,” I told him. “I guess maybe we can do that next Saturday.”
I don’t know, but something in the way he looked made me feel awful funny. Then he pushed back his chair and looked straight at me and said, “Roy, Mr. Slausen’s repair shop was burned to the ground last night. Did you boys have any altercation with Mr. Slausen yesterday?”
Gee, you could have knocked me down with a feather. “Burned to the ground?” I just stammered out.