"Oh, I beg your pardon," observed their friend, dryly. "I didn't know you'd paid for the nuts, or I'd not have mentioned the matter."
"Paid for them!" exclaimed both boys at once. "Of course we'd not paid for them; but then that's not stealing, you know, for we only each took one or two, and we were right there in open sight. It's a totally different thing."
"I beg leave to differ entirely from you," answered the captain, in his slow way. "But suppose there'd been a water-melon lying there on the step, would either of you have carried it off without paying for it, or eaten it there, either?"
"Of course not," said Dick, indignantly; but Theodore broke in, abruptly, as he sprang up, his cheeks glowing with shame:
"I never thought of it so before! Why, it's just dreadful, Dick; for Captain Dan is right—we were stealing, though we never meant it. Oh, what would my mother say?" he added, with a choke in his voice.
"I don't see it in that light at all," persisted Dick, sturdily; "it was only a pea-nut or so, and we didn't do it 'on the sly,' as we would if we'd been 'stealing,' as you say. Why, the very word makes me mad all over"—doubling up his fists as he paced up and down before them, now and then giving himself a shake like a great dog.
"Hold on a minute, my son," said the old man, gently, "and I think I can make it clearer. Suppose a basket of apples was standing in Smith's grocery store. On my way home I stop in to buy a pound of tea, and while it is being weighed out I pick up an apple to eat. You drop in next to get some crackers, and you take one while waiting. Then Theo's mother sends him for a pound of cheese, and he also helps himself. Others follow our example, and though no person takes more than a single one, yet by night the basket is emptied, without a cent of profit to the grocer, though he has paid the farmer for them. Yet you say we have not been stealing. How is it?"
The color had been slowly mounting in Dick's frank face as he stood before his friend with folded arms, and looking far out to sea. But the instant he heard the question with which the speaker concluded, he turned and said, impulsively: "You're right, Captain Dan, and I'm all wrong. It is stealing, and nothing else, just as you said; but I never thought of it so before, and it's just dreadful. I can't bear to think of it, even though I've hardly ever done it; still, the part I hate just the worst kind is that I've done it at all, and never saw the harm of it till now."
"Tell you what, Dick," exclaimed Theodore, hurriedly, "I mean to go in and tell Mr. Baker about it on my way home to-night; will you go with me?"
"Of course I will; and we'll pay him for everything we can possibly remember. But I say, old fellow, what if Jack Stretch saw us, or any of those other street chaps? They could turn the tables on us splendidly, you know, after our asking them to go to Sunday-school with us. They'd be likely to tell us we'd borrowed their trade, and would say we needn't preach to them again."