"I don't know but what it's my duty. Do yours quick, Vosh."
He was every way disposed to obey that suggestion. The roar of the waters, the strange sensation of the presence of great peril, and even the idea that so many people were looking at him, made the situation one from which he was in a hurry to get away. Nearly in the middle of the pack he came to a deep crevice between the heaps of glimmering ice, and into it he lowered his little barrel of explosive meal. He had made it all ready, fixing the end of the fuze in its proper place, and now he led the line back over comparatively dry ice.
"Nothing to put it out," he muttered; "and they said it was water-proof, anyhow."
A stream of people, on foot and in sleighs, had followed that undertaking from the moment when the news of it began to buzz around the village, and a full hundred had now gathered on the slope opposite the mill. They saw Vosh Stebbins scratch a match on his coat-sleeve, and stoop down; and then they saw him turn, and walk swiftly away towards the mill.
"It's all right, deacon!" he shouted. "She's a-burning!"
"Come on, Vosh. Hurry up. I just couldn't go ashore till you got back."
Vosh replied with a ringing laugh that had a world of excitement in it. He followed the deacon back through the mill, and across the perilous bridge of floating logs; and there on the shore stood Susie Hudson, and her aunts, and his mother, but Penelope was the only one who said any thing.
"Vosh," she asked, "did you lose all your powder and your string?"
"Guess I have," replied he; and then it was Adonijah Bunce who remarked,—
"Didn't quite do it, did ye?"