month--with no near neighbors," admitted Mother Atterson. "But I've
been so busy that I ain't never minded it----

"What's that light, Hiram?"

Her cry was echoed by Sister. Behind the bam a sudden glow was spreading
against the low-hung clouds. It was too far away for one of their
out-buildings to be afire; but Hiram set off immediately, although he
only had slippers on, for the corner of the barnyard fence.

When he reached this point he saw that one of the fodder stacks in the
cornfield was afire. The whole top of the stack was ablaze.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" cried Sister, who had followed him. "What can we
do?"

"Nothing,", said Hiram. "There's no wind, and it won't spread to another
stack. But that one is past redemption, for sure!"

Hiram hastened back to the house and put on his boots. But he did not
wade through the snow to the fodder stack that was burning so briskly.
He merely made a detour around it, at some yards distant. Nowhere did he
see the mark of a footprint.

How the stack had been set afire was a mystery. Hiram had stacked the
fodder himself, with the help of Sister, who had pitched the bundles up
to him. The young farmer did not smoke, and he seldom carried matches
loose in his pockets.

Therefore, the idea that he had dropped a match in the fodder and a
field mouse, burrowing for some nubbin of corn, had come across the
match, nibbled the head, and so set the blaze, was scarcely feasible.

Yet, how else had the fire started?

When daylight came Hiram could find no footprint near the stack--only
his own where he had circled it while it was blazing.

It was the stack nearest to the Dickerson line. Hiram, naturally,
thought of Pete.

Since Mrs. Dickerson's sickness, Mother Atterson had been back and forth
to help her neighbor, and whenever Sam Dickerson saw Hiram he was as
friendly as it was in the nature of the man to be.

Hiram could not believe that Pete's father would now countenance any
of his son's meannesses; yet when the young farmer went along the line
fence, he saw fresh tracks across the Dickerson fields, and discovered
where the person had stood, on the Dickerson side of the fence opposite
the burned fodder stack.

But these footprints were all of three hundred feet from the stack, and
there was not a mark in the snow upon Hiram's side of the fence, saving
his own footprints.

"Maybe somebody merely ran across to look at the blaze. But it's strange
I did not see him," tho