The Young Mountaineers Part 14

"Well, I wouldn't think about it any more just now," said good-natured Stebbins. "You look like you had been dragged through a keyhole instead of a window-pane. This town we're coming to is the biggest town you ever saw."

Barney could not respond to this attempt to divert his attention. He could only brood upon the fact that he was innocent, and would be punished as if he were guilty, and that it was Nick Gregory, his chosen friend, who had brought him to this pa.s.s.

He would not be unmanly, and injure Nick with a possibly unfounded suspicion, but his heart burned with indignation and contempt when he thought of him. He felt that he would go through fire and water to be justly revenged upon him.

He determined that, if ever he should see Nick again, even though years might intervene, he would tax him with the injury he had wrought, and make him answer for it.

Barney clenched his fists as he looked back at the ethereal blue shadows that they said were the solid old hills.

Perhaps, however, if he had known where, in the misty uncertainty that enveloped Goliath Mountain, Nick Gregory was at this moment,--far away in the lonely woods, helpless with his broken arm, perched high up on the "Old Man's Chimney,"--Barney might have thought himself the more fortunately placed of the two.

Before he was well aware of it, the wagon was jolting into the town. He took no notice of how much larger the little village was than any he had ever seen before. His attention was riveted by the faces of the people who ran to the doors and windows, upon recognizing the officers, to stare at him as one of the burglars.

When the wagon reached the public square, a number of men came up and stopped it.

Barney was surprised that they took so little notice of him. They were talking loudly and excitedly to the officers, who grew at once loud and excited, too.

The boy roused himself, and began to listen to the conversation. The burglars had been captured!--yes, that was what they were saying. The deputy-sheriff had nabbed the whole gang in a western district of the county this morning early, and they were lodged at this moment in jail.

Barney's heart sank. Would he be put among the guilty creatures? He flinched from the very idea.

Suddenly, here was the deputy-sheriff himself, a young man, dusty and tired with his long, hard ride, but with an air of great satisfaction in his success. He talked with many quick gestures that were very expressive. Sometimes he would leave a sentence unfinished except by a brisk nod, but all the crowd caught its meaning instantly. This peculiarity gave him a very animated manner, and he seemed to Barney to enjoy being in a position of authority.

He pressed his foaming horse close to the wagon, and leaning over, looked searchingly into Barney's face.

The poor boy looked up deprecatingly from under his limp and drooping hat-brim.

All the crowd stood in silence, watching them. After a moment of this keen scrutiny, the deputy turned to the constable with an interrogative wave of the hand.

"This hyar's the boy what war put through the winder-pane ter thieve from Blenkins," said Jim Dow. "Thar's consider'ble fac's agin him."

"You mean well, Jim," said the deputy, with a short, scornful laugh.

"But your performance ain't always equal to your intentions."

He lifted his eyebrows and nodded in a significant way that the crowd understood, for there was a stir of excitement in its midst; but poor Barney failed to catch his meaning. He hung upon every tone and gesture with the intensest interest. All the talk was about him, and he could comprehend no more than if the man spoke in a foreign language.

Still, he gathered something of the drift of the speech from the constable's reply.

"That thar boy's looks hev bamboozled more'n one man ter-day, jes' at fust," Jim Dow drawled. "_Looks_ ain't nothin'."

"I'd believe 'most anything a boy with a face on him like that would tell me," said the deputy. "And besides, you see, one of those scamps,"

with a quick nod toward the jail, "has turned State's evidence."

Barney's heart was in a great tumult. It seemed bursting. There was a hot rush of blood to his head. He was dizzy--and he could not understand!

State's evidence,--what was that? and what would that do to him?

CHAPTER V

Barney observed that these words produced a marked sensation. The crowd began to press more closely around the deputy-sheriff's foaming horse.

"Who hev done turned State's evidence?" asked Jim Dow.

"Little Jeff Carew,--you've seen that puny little man a-many a time--haven't you, Jim? He'd go into your pocket."

"He would, I know, powerful quick, ef he thunk I hed ennything in it,"

said Jim, with a gruff laugh.

"I didn't mean that, though it's true enough. I only went ter say that he's small enough to go into any ordinary-sized fellow's pocket. Some of the rest of them wanted to turn State's evidence, but they weren't allowed. They were harder customers even than Jeff Carew,--regular old jail-birds."

Barney began to vaguely understand that when a prisoner confesses the crime he has committed, and gives testimony which will convict his partners in it, this is called turning "State's evidence."

But how was it to concern Barney?

An old white-haired man had pushed up to the wagon; he polished his spectacles on his coat-tail, then put them on his nose, and focused them on Barney. Those green spectacles seemed to the boy to have a solemnly accusing expression on their broad and sombre lenses. He shrank as the old man spoke,--

"And is this the boy who was slipped through the window to steal from Blenkins?"

"No," said the deputy, "this ain't the boy."

Barney could hardly believe his senses.

"Fact is," continued the deputy, with a brisk wave of his hand, "there wasn't any boy with 'em,--so little Jeff Carew says. _He_ jumped through the window-pane _himself_. We wouldn't believe that until we measured one there at the jail of the same size as Blenkins's window-gla.s.s, and he went through it without a wriggle."

Barney sprang to his feet.

"Oh, tell it ter me, folkses!" he cried wildly; "tell it ter me, somebody! Will they keep me hyar all the same? An' when will I see G'liath Mounting agin, an' be whar Melissy air?"

He had burst into tears, and there was a murmur of sympathy in the crowd.

"Oh, that lets you out, I reckon, youngster," said Stebbins. "I'm glad enough of it for one."

The old man turned his solemnly accusing green spectacles on Stebbins, and it seemed to Barney that he spoke with no less solemnly accusing a voice.

"He ought never to have been let in."

Stebbins replied, rather eagerly, Barney thought, "Why, there was enough against that boy to have clapped him in jail, and maybe convicted him, if this man hadn't turned State's evidence."

"We hed the fac's agin him,--dead agin him," chimed in Jim Dow.

"That just shows how much danger an innocent boy was in; it seems to me that somebody ought to have been more careful," the old man protested.

"That's so!" came in half a dozen voices from the crowd.

Barney was surprised to see how many friends he had now, when a moment before he had had none. But he ought to have realized that there is a great difference between _being_ a young martyr, and _seeming_ a young thief.

"I want to see the little fellow out of this," said the old man with the terrible spectacles.