“The cow? Poor thing!” returned his “third,” disdainfully. “Ain’t you ashamed, Dr. Dryer! Do you suppose she’d be out on such a night as this? Listen to the rain on the window. There it is again!”
“Dorothy Jane!” exclaimed the Doctor, as he sprang to his feet and began to dress himself, “this proceeding should arouse all Ogleport!”
“That bell!” mourned Mrs. Dryer.
“Yes, indeed!” replied the Doctor. “It’s a terrible affliction.”
George Brayton also heard the first sound made by the bell, and it somehow put him in mind of his two young friends, although he well knew they were at that very moment in their room.
He was sure of it, if from nothing else, by the unnecessary amount of racket Bar Vernon was making in getting on his boots.
Fiercer and higher rose the strength of that reckless wind from the west, and louder and more prolonged, though terribly irregular were the clamorous peals from the Academy belfry, till not a sleeper remained in all Ogleport, except the stone-deaf grandmother of Zeb Fuller’s friend, William Jones.
The worst puzzled pair of ears in all the village, however, were those of Zebedee himself.
Not only on account of the bell, but because Deacon Fuller had deemed that tolling a direct summons to the bedroom of his son, and it had required all his fatherly faith in Zeb’s truthfulness to convince him that the mischief, whatever it might be, would never be traced across his own threshold.
That was very bad—so bad that Zeb enjoyed the rare luxury of looking upon himself in the character of injured innocence, but the very worst of it was that here was something going on in his own Ogleport of which he knew no more than did “old Sol” himself.