“Rot!” snapped the Shark.
Sam motioned to his friend to hold his peace. “Then you took a lot of needless trouble, Jack. What was your idea, anyway?”
Again Hagle failed to respond.
“Look here,” Sam argued. “You are making a big mistake. If you had any good reason for being in the woods at this time of night, you’d better give it. If you don’t, everybody’ll believe there was a bad reason. And with this big fire—I say, Hagle, I shouldn’t like to be blamed for starting it, even by accident.”
“But it was going, when——” Hagle began impulsively, but stopped abruptly.
“When you came across the pond in a boat?”
“I didn’t say I——” Again Jack broke off in the middle of a sentence.
“But didn’t you?”
The Shark had been chafing on the bit, as it were; and now he spoke forcefully:
“What’s the matter with you, Hagle? Haven’t you got the backbone of a rabbit? Haven’t you any gratitude? Say, did you ever hear that word ‘gratitude’ before? Don’t you know Sam saved you just now just as surely as if he’d carried you out of a burning house and down a ladder? Don’t you know that if it hadn’t been for him, you’d be up to your armpits in that bog by this time, with the fire all around you? If you don’t know it, I know it, and you can take my word it’s true. And to see you acting the way you’re acting—huh! but it’s sickening! Get that, and get it straight, will you?”