“I can kick it open!” yelled Winthrop joyfully. “Get to your sister, quick!”
He threw his shoulder against the door, and the staples flying before him sent him sprawling in the coal-dust. When he reached the head of the stairs, Beatrice Forbes was descending from the club-room, and in front of the door the two cars, with their lamps unlit and numbers hidden, were panting to be free.
And in the north, reaching to the sky, rose a roaring column of flame, shameless in the pale moonlight, dragging into naked day the sleeping village, the shingled houses, the clock-face in the church steeple.
“What the devil have you done?” gasped Winthrop.
Before he answered, Sam waited until the cars were rattling to safety across the bridge.
“We have been protecting the face of nature,” he shouted. “The only way to get that gang out of the engine-house was to set fire to something. Tommy wanted to burn up the railroad station, because he doesn’t like the New York and New Haven, and Fred was for setting fire to Judge Allen’s house, because he was rude to Beatrice. But we finally formed the Village Improvement Society, organized to burn all advertising signs. You know those that stood in the marshes, and hid the view from the trains, so that you could not see the Sound. We chopped them down and put them in a pile, and poured gasolene on them, and that fire is all that is left of the pickles, flyscreens, and pills.”
It was midnight when the cars drew up at the door of the house of Forbes. Anxiously waiting in the library were Mrs. Forbes and Ernest Peabody.
“At last!” cried Mrs. Forbes, smiling her relief; “we thought maybe Sam and you had decided to spend the night in New Haven.”
“No,” said Miss Forbes, “there was some talk about spending the night at Fairport, but we pushed right on.”