The damage had indeed been slight. One peasant had the reeds and thatch of his low-hanging roof a little singed. In another house the side of bacon left from last winter's pig and still hanging from the beam under the roof had been made to sizzle a bit. At a third, the brushwood that children had gathered and piled up along the wall had crackled and snapped, until the wife, wakened by her infant's cries, thought some one out there was stealing her kindling. At a fourth, the frightened lowing of the cow revealed a smouldering in the hay-loft. At the fifth, the flame did not even get started; for a downpour of rain had beaten upon the attic and quenched whatever of fire was lurking in the timbers. In every case the protection of all the saints had been plain to see.
Nevertheless, a secret horror began to worry the minds of the villagers.
"I warrant," said a wiseacre, contracting the brown leather of his brow in suspicious wrinkles, "some scalawag is doing this!"
Yes, it could not be otherwise: there was somebody setting fires! The children could not be the guilty ones--they were led by hand or carried in the dosser out into the fields; or, if it happened that they were left behind, their mother did not fail to hide the matches on the topmost shelf beyond their reach. But had not Annie Marie, watching alone by the cradle of her sick child one evening when all the others were still working in the fields, seen a fellow in disguise peering in at her window? And had not Brewer's Hubert, coming home late at night, caught sight of a dark shadowy figure that slipped by him and escaped in the hedgerow between the gardens?
There could no longer be any doubt: there was an incendiary. But where? Who was the miscreant? Some man in the village? Impossible! In the village each man knows the other far too well, learns too well from his daily toil how hard it is to scrape together his little livelihood, for him out of sheer wantonness to afflict his neighbor. No, it must be somebody from a distance; somebody, perhaps, who had been a-roving in the world. To be sure, journeymen, beggars who--how can one tell?--already have one foot in the lock-up, did not pass through the village, which is situated apart from others on the Eifel plateau, with its two straight, compact rows of houses in the protecting shade of a dark grove of fir-trees, but with its remote fields, reclaimed from the waste land, exposed to all the winds of the Eifel and all the rays of the burning sun.
The little village quivered with excitement. And mingled with the anxiety there was curiosity, and along with the curiosity fury. If they could catch the culprit, they would hurl him from the roadside down into the brook with such violence that he should never stand on his feet again! Or they would climb the mountain that rears its scrubby head behind the village and there hang him on the wind-swayed hazel-tree--after having soundly thrashed him with its switches! Then the cows and swine which the village herdsman pastured on the close-cropped field would have a sight to see, and the herdsman, Will Stoker, too!
And as they thought of William they suddenly held their breath. Had he not for years been a fire-tender down in the Rhineland? He was the only man in the village who, after serving his time in the army, had not returned home to till the soil in the sweat of his brow, but had remained down there, where the world puts forth its temptation and the saints are only to be found in the cathedrals, not to be met upon the highways. It was said that people had to toil in the factories--very likely, but certainly not by far so hard as up here, where often in May the frost killed the budding grain and potatoes froze as early as September. Will Stoker had had nothing further to do down there than poke fires. He had been fireman, night fireman in the factory; but during the day he had nothing to do but sleep, earning sure money by a lazy life--merely by making fires!
"Hm!" The chairman of the parish council scratched his head when sundry villagers turned up their noses in the direction of Will Stoker. What? He should have set the fires? He was indeed a strange fellow; yes, they were right, a very curious chap, different from other people--that was the result of his life out in the world--but an incendiary? No! Was not his mother, Widow Driesch, a downright honest woman, a God-fearing woman besides, to whom every one must take off his hat?
The chairman put far away from him the tell-tales and busybodies; but when, shortly after, one Sunday night the hayrick burned which he had just stacked up Saturday evening, he too began to scent mischief. From the direction of Will Stoker's cottage he too began to smell smoke. Was it after all possible that Will Stoker could not give up the business of poking fires? He had been in the village since the previous winter. In the gray of winter nothing had happened; but now, when the sun was shining again, when it was aglow in the heavens, when day in and day out it spread its red heat over cottages and fir-trees, over grain field and hill top, when the underbrush flared and the pebbles in the dry river bed scintillated, and the powdery dust on the sun-baked roads was blinding, now--!