, as the
two, running in the van of the "Hose Company," splattered through a
mud-puddle. "You'd think he was Carewe's only son and heir instead of
his worst enemy. Hark to the man!"

"I'd let it burn, if I were he," returned the other.

"It was all Crailey's fault," said Tappingham, swinging an arm free
to wipe the spattered mud from his face. "He swore he wouldn't budge
without his uniform, and the rest only backed him up; that was all.
Crailey said Carewe could better afford to lose his shanties than the
overworked Department its first chance to look beautiful and earnest.
Tom asked him why he didn't send for a fiddle," Marsh finished with a
chuckle.

"Carewe might afford to lose a little, even a warehouse or two, if only
out of what he's taken from Crailey and the rest of us, these three
years!"

"Taken from Vanrevel, you mean. Who doesn't know where Crailey's--Here's
Main Street; look out for the turn!"

They swung out of the thick shadows of Carewe Street into full view of
the fire, and their faces were illuminated as by sunrise.

The warehouses stood on the river-bank, at the foot of the street,
just south of the new "covered bridge." There were four of them, huge,
bare-sided buildings; the two nearer the bridge of brick, the others
of wood, and all of them rich with stores of every kind of
river-merchandise and costly freight: furniture that had voyaged from
New England down the long coast, across the Mexican Gulf, through
the flat Delta, and had made the winding journey up the great river a
thousand miles, and almost a thousand more, following the greater
and lesser tributaries; cloth from Connecticut that had been sold in
Philadelphia, then carried over mountains and through forests by steam,
by canal, by stage, and six-mule freight-wagons, to Pittsburg, down the
Ohio, and thence up to Rouen on the packet; Tennessee cotton, on its way
to Massachusetts and Rhode Island spindles, lay there beside huge mounds
of raw wool from Illinois, ready to be fed to the Rouen mill; dates and
nuts from the Caribbean Sea; lemons from groves of the faraway tropics;
cigars from the Antilles; tobacco from Virginia and Kentucky; most
precious of all, the great granary of the farmers' wheat from the level
fields at home; and all the rich stores and the houses that held them,
as well as the wharves upon which they had been landed, and the steamers
that brought them up the Rouen River, belonged to Robert Carewe.

That it was