This speech enlightened me as to what would be the general theory regarding the outrage. It would be set down as an act of revenge on the part of some enemy of Yetmore’s; and so Tom and Joe thought, too, when I went back to the house and told them about it.
“That’ll be the theory, all right,”said Tom. “And as far as I see, we may as well let it go at that. We have no evidence to present, and it would look rather like malice on our part if we were to charge Long John with blowing his best friend’s house to pieces just because we happen to suspect him of it. And so, I guess, boys, we may as well lay low for the present: we shan’t do any good by putting forward our own theories.
“I dare say,”he went on, after a moment’s reflection, “I dare say, if we were to go around telling what we thought and why we thought it, we might influence public opinion; but, when you come to think of it, we have no real proof; so we’ll just hold our tongues. Are you in a hurry to get home?”
“No,”I replied. “We shan’t be able to plow for two days at the very least, so there is nothing to hurry home for.”
“Well, then,”said Tom, “I’ll tell you what I wish you’d do. I must go back to work in a few minutes, but I wish you two would go down town and hear what folks have to say about this business, and then come back here and have dinner with me at twelve. Will you?”
“All right,”said I. “We’ll do that.”
We found the town in a great state of excitement. Everybody was talking about the explosion, which, as the newspaper said, “would cast a blight upon the fair fame of Sulphide.”Yetmore’s store was crowded with people, shaking hands with him and expressing their indignation at the outrage; the universal opinion being, as we had anticipated, that some miscreant had done it out of revenge.
Joe and I, squeezing in with the rest, presently found ourselves near the counter, when Yetmore, catching my eye, nodded to me and said:
“How are you, Phil? I didn’t know you were in town.”