Chapter 6

IN WHICH HARRY CONCLUDES THAT A DEFEAT IS SOMETIMES BETTER THAN A VICTORY

The keeper of the poorhouse received Harry in sullen silence, and conducted him to the chamber in which he had been ordered to keep him a close prisoner. He apparently had lost all confidence in him, and regretted that he had connived at his escape.

Harry did not like the cold and repulsive deportment of his late friend. Mr. Nason had always been kind to him; now he seemed to have fallen in with Squire Walker's plans, and was willing to be the instrument of the overseer's narrow and cruel policy. Before, he had taken his part against the mighty, so far as it was prudent for him to do so; now, he was willing to go over to the enemy.

The reverse made him sadder than any other circumstance of his return--sadder than the fear of punishment, or even of being sent to live with Jacob Wire.

"I've got back again," said Harry, when they reached the chamber in which he was to be confined.

"I see you have," replied Mr. Nason, in freezing tones.

The keeper had never spoken to him in such tones, and Harry burst into tears. His only friend had deserted him, and he felt more desolate than ever before in his life.

"You needn't cry, now," said Mr. Nason, sternly.

"I can't help it," sobbed the little prisoner.

"Can't you?"

Mr. Nason sneered as he spoke, and his sneer pierced the heart of Harry.

"O, Mr. Nason!"

"There--that will do. You needn't blubber any more. You have made your bed, and now you can lie in it;" and the keeper turned on his heel to leave the room.

"Don't leave me yet," pleaded Harry.

"Leave you? What do you want of me? I suppose you want to tell me I advised you to burn the barn."

"I didn't set the barn afire!" exclaimed Harry, now for the first time realizing the cause of his friend's displeasure.

"Don't lie."

"I speak the truth. I did not set it afire, or even know that it was going to be set on fire."

Mr. Nason closed the door which he had opened to depart. The firm denial, as well as the tone and manner of the boy, arrested his judgment against him. He had learned to place implicit confidence in Harry's word; for, though he might have told lies to others, he never told them to him.

"Who did burn the barn?" asked the keeper, looking sternly into the eye of the culprit.

Harry hesitated. A sense of honor and magnanimity pervaded his soul. He had obtained some false notions; and he did not understand that he could hardly be false to one who had been false to himself--that to help a criminal conceal his crime was to conspire against the peace and happiness of his fellow-beings. Shabbily as Ben Smart had used him, he could not make up his mind to betray him.

"You don't answer," added Mr. Nason.

"I didn't do it."

"But who did?"

"I don't like to tell."

"Very well; you can do as you like. After what I had done for you, it was a little strange that you should do as you have."

"I will tell you all about it, Mr. Nason, if you will promise not to tell."

"I know all about it. You and Ben Smart put your heads together to be revenged on the squire; you set his barn afire, and then stole Leman's boat."

"No, sir; I didn't set the barn afire, nor steal the boat, nor help to do either."

"You and he were together."

"We were; and if it wasn't for being mean to Ben, I would tell you all about it."

"Mean to Ben! As soon as it was known that you and Ben were missing, everybody in the village knew who set the barn afire. All you have got to do is to clear yourself, if you can; Ben is condemned already."

"If you will hear my story I will tell you all about it."

Harry proceeded to narrate everything that had occurred since he left the house on the preceding night. It was a very clear and plausible statement. He answered all the questions which Mr. Nason proposed with promptness, and his replies were consistent.

"I believe you, Harry," said the keeper, when he had finished his examination. "Somehow I couldn't believe you would do such a thing as set the squire's barn afire."

"I wouldn't," replied Harry, warmly, and much pleased to find he had re-established the confidence of his friend.

"But it is a bad case. The fact of your being with Ben Smart is almost enough to convict you."

"I shouldn't have been with him, if I had known he set the barn afire."

"I don't know as I can do anything for you, Harry; but I will try."

"Thank you."

Mr. Nason left him, and Harry had an opportunity to consider the desperate circumstances of his position. It looked just as though he should be sent to the house of correction. But he was innocent. He felt his innocence; as he expressed it to the keeper afterwards, he "felt it in his bones." It did not, on further consideration, seem probable that he would be punished for doing what he had not done, either as principal or accessory. A vague idea of an all-pervading justice consoled him; and he soon reasoned himself into a firm assurance that he should escape unharmed.

He was in the mood for reasoning just then--perhaps because he had nothing better to do, or perhaps because the added experience of the last twenty-four hours enabled him to reason better than before. His fine scheme of getting to Boston, and there making a rich and great man of himself, had signally failed. He did not give it up, however.

"I have failed once, but I will try again," said he to himself, as the conclusion of the whole matter; and he picked up an old school book which lay on the table.

The book contained a story, which he had often read, about a man who had met with a long list of misfortunes, as he deemed them when they occurred, but which proved to be blessings in disguise.

"Oft from apparent ills our blessings rise, Act well your part; there all the honor lies."

This couplet from the school books came to his aid, also; and he proceeded to make an application of this wisdom to his own mishaps.

"Suppose I had gone on with Ben. He is a miserable fellow," thought Harry; "he would have led me into all manner of wickedness. I ought not to have gone with him, or had anything to do with him. He might have made a thief and a robber of me. I know I ain't any better than I should be; but I don't believe I'm as bad as he is. At any rate, I wouldn't set a barn afire. It is all for the best, just as the parson says when anybody dies. By this scrape I have got clear of Ben, and learned a lesson that I won't forget in a hurry."

Harry was satisfied with this logic, and really believed that something which an older and more devout person would have regarded as a special providence had interposed to save him from a life of infamy and wickedness. It was a blessed experience, and his thoughts were very serious and earnest.

In the afternoon Squire Walker came down to the poorhouse to subject Harry to a preliminary examination. Ben Smart had not been taken, and the pursuers had abandoned the chase.

"Boy," said the squire, when Harry was brought before him; "look at me."

Harry looked at the overseer with all his might. He had got far enough to despise the haughty little great man. A taste of freedom had enlarged his ideas and developed his native independence, so that he did not quail, as the squire intended he should; on the contrary, his eyes snapped with the earnestness of his gaze. With an honest and just man, his unflinching eye would have been good evidence in his favor; but the pompous overseer wished to awe him, rather than get at the simple truth.

"You set my barn on fire," continued the squire.

"I did not," replied Harry, firmly.

"Yes, you did. How dare you deny it?"

"I did not."

He had often read, and heard read, that passage of Scripture which says, "Let your communication be Yea, yea, Nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Just then he felt the truth of the inspired axiom. It seemed just as though any amount of violent protestations would not help him; and though the squire repeated the charge half a dozen times, he only replied with his firm and simple denial.

Then Squire Walker called his hired man, upon whose evidence he depended for the conviction of the little incendiary.

"Is that the boy, John?" asked the squire, pointing to Harry.

"No, sir; it was a bigger boy than that," replied John, without hesitation.

"Are you sure?"

"O, very sure."

"It must be that this is the boy," persisted the squire, evidently much disappointed by the testimony of the man.

"I am certain it was a bigger boy than this."

"I feel pretty clear about it, Mr. Nason," added the squire. "You see, this boy was mad, yesterday, because I wanted to send him to Jacob Wire's. My barn is burned, and it stands to reason he burned it."

"But I saw the boy round the barn night afore last," interposed John, who was certainly better qualified to be a justice of the peace than his employer.

"I know that; but the barn wasn't burned till last night."

"But Harry couldn't have had any grudge against you night before last," said Mr. Nason.

"I don't know about that," mused the squire, who was apparently trying to reconcile the facts to his theory, rather than the theory to the facts.

John, the hired man, lived about three miles from the squire's house. His father was very sick; and he had been home every evening for a week, returning between ten and eleven. On the night preceding the fire, he had seen a boy prowling round the barn, who ran away at his approach. The next day, he found a pile of withered grass, dry sticks, and other combustibles heaped against a loose board in the side of the barn. He had informed the squire of the facts, but the worthy justice did not consider them of much moment.

Probably Ben had intended to burn the barn then, but had been prevented from executing his purpose by the approach of the hired man.

"This must be the boy," added the squire.

"He had on a sack coat, and was bigger than this boy," replied John.

"Harry has no sack coat," put in Mr. Nason, eagerly catching at his evidence.

"It is easy to be mistaken in the night. Search him, and see if there are any matches about him."

Undoubtedly this was a very brilliant suggestion of the squire's muddy intellect--as though every man who carried matches was necessarily an incendiary. But no matches were found upon Harry; and, according to the intelligent justice's perception of the nature of evidence, the suspected party should have been acquitted.

No matches were found on Harry; but in his jacket pocket, carefully enclosed in a piece of brown paper, were found the four quarters of a dollar given to him by Mr. Nason.

"Where did you get those?" asked the squire, sternly.

"They were given to me," replied Harry.

Mr. Nason averted his eyes, and was very uneasy. The fact of having given this money to Harry went to show that he had been privy to his escape; and his kind act seemed to threaten him with ruin.

"Who gave them to you?"

Harry made no reply.

"Answer me," thundered the squire.

"I shall not tell," replied Harry.

"You shall not?"

"No, sir."

The squire was nonplussed. The boy was as firm as a hero; and no threats could induce him to betray his kind friend, whose position he fully comprehended.

"We will see," roared the squire.

Several persons who had been present during the examination, and who were satisfied that Harry was innocent of the crime charged upon him, interfered to save him from the consequences of the squire's wrath.

Mr. Nason, finding that his young friend was likely to suffer for his magnanimity, explained the matter--thus turning the squire's anger from the boy to himself.

"So you helped the boy run away--did you?" said the overseer.

"He did not; he told me that money would keep me from starving."

"Did he?"

Those present understood the allusion, and the squire did not press the matter any further. In the course of the examination, Ben Smart had often been alluded to, and the crime was fastened upon him. Harry told his story, which, confirmed by the evidence of the hired man, was fully credited by all except the squire, who had conceived a violent antipathy to the boy.

The examination was informal; the squire did not hold it as a justice of the peace, but only as a citizen, or, at most, as an overseer of the poor. However, it proved that, as the burning of the barn had been planned before any difficulty had occurred between the squire and Harry, he had no motive for doing the deed.

The squire was not satisfied; but the worst he could do was to commit Harry to the care of Jacob Wire, which was immediately done.

"I am sorry for you, Harry," whispered Mr. Nason.

"Never mind; I shall _try again_," he replied, as he jumped into the wagon with his persecutor.