he rushes up to
Wingate--kind of him, wasn't it?--and claims the reward. 'Too late, young
man,' says old Wingate, 'the culprits has been discovered.' You see
Sly-boots hadn't any intention of paying that five dollars."

Jack Harris's statement lifted a weight from my bosom. The article in
the Rivermouth Barnacle had placed the affair before me in a new light.
I had thoughtlessly committed a grave offence. Though the property in
question was valueless, we were clearly wrong in destroying it. At the
same time Mr. Wingate had tacitly sanctioned the act by not preventing
it when he might easily have done so. He had allowed his property to be
destroyed in order that he might realize a large profit.

Without waiting to hear more, I went straight to Captain Nutter, and,
laying my remaining three dollars on his knee, confessed my share in the
previous night's transaction.

The Captain heard me through in profound silence, pocketed the
bank-notes, and walked off without speaking a word. He had punished me
in his own whimsical fashion at the breakfast table, for, at the very
moment he was harrowing up my soul by reading the extracts from the
Rivermouth Barnacle, he not only knew all about the bonfire, but had
paid Ezra Wingate his three dollars. Such was the duplicity of that aged
impostor.

I think Captain Nutter was justified in retaining my pocketmoney, as
additional punishment, though the possession of it later in the day
would have got me out of a difficult position, as the reader will see
further on. I returned with a light heart and a large piece of punk to
my friends in the stable-yard, where we celebrated the termination
of our trouble by setting off two packs of fire-crackers in an empty
wine-cask. They made a prodigious racket, but failed somehow to fully
express my feelings. The little brass pistol in my bedroom suddenly
occurred to me. It had been loaded I don't know how many months, long
before I left New Orleans, and now was the time, if ever, to fire it
off. Muskets, blunderbusses, and pistols were banging away lively all
over town, and the smell of gunpowder, floating on the air, set me wild
to add something respectable to the universal din.

When the pistol was produced, Jack Harris examined the rusty cap and
prophesied that it would not explode.

"Never mind," said I, "let's try it."

I had fired the pistol once, secretly, in New Orleans, and, remembering
the noise it gave birth to on that occasion, I s