John Simpson hesitated. Finally he spoke.
Out of the back door they went unobserved, to the back of the lot, six hundred feet away, where was an old ruined barn, now no longer used, as Mr. Simpson had built a stable near the house.
“You will find some hay in the loft,” he said, “and can rest undisturbed till morning. I expect you to keep your promise then, and leave this village.”
About one o’clock there was an alarm of fire in the village. John Simpson’s old barn was discovered to be on fire, and was past saving when the village hook-and-ladder fire-engine arrived on the spot.
Fire! When Tom Thatcher heard the bells ringing, and the ominous cry of “Fire!” rang with startling distinctness through the streets of the village, he sprang from his bed and hurried on his clothes.
“Where are you going, Tom?” asked his mother, as she saw him pass her chamber door.
And Tom hurried out of the little cottage, and joined those who were hastening to the scene of the midnight fire.
For boys in their teens, and for some beyond that period, fires have an irresistible fascination. This is especially true in a village, where such occasions are uncommon, and where, as all are acquainted, the loss will come upon a friend or neighbor.
“Where is the fire?” asked Tom, of the first man he met.
“No, it’s the old barn at the back of his house.”
“I wonder how it could have caught fire?” thought Tom, but as no answer suggested itself, he hurried on to the fire.
It was enveloped in a blaze when he came up, and surrounded by a group of men and boys, some in their shirt-sleeves, though it was a December night. The fire-engine was on the ground, but the firemen were inactive, for it was clear that nothing could be done to arrest the flames.
Prominent among those present was the rather portly form of John Simpson, bareheaded, and clad in a showy dressing-gown, the same he had worn in his interview with Tom and Darius Darke only a few hours earlier.
Mr. Simpson seemed excited and nervous, but that certainly was not surprising, considering that the fire was on his own premises, and might as well have involved his dwelling-house.
“Well, squire,” said Newell Ingalls, a near neighbor, “the old barn will have to go.”