It was on the fifth of June, a year to a day after the arrival of Mr. Camden in his automobile, that Miss Martin yielded to this last extortion, and her action made the day as memorable as that of the year before.  The janitor, carried away by his victory, celebrated his good fortune in so many glasses of hard cider that he was finally carried home and deposited limply on the veranda of his boarding-house.  Here he slept till the cold of dawn awoke him to a knowledge of his whereabouts, so inverted and tipsy that he rose, staggered to the library, cursing the intolerable length of these damn Vermont winters, and proceeded to build a roaring fire on the floor of the reading-room.  As the varnished wood of the beautiful fittings took light like a well-constructed bonfire, realization of his act came to him, and he ran down the valley road, screaming and giving the alarm at the top of his lungs, and so passed out of Hillsboro forever.

The village looked out of its windows, saw the wooden building blazing like a great torch, hurried on its clothes and collected around the fire.  No effort was made to save the library.  People stood around in the chilly morning air, looking silently at the mountain of flame which burned as though it would never stop.  They thought of a great many things in that silent hour as the sun rose over Hemlock Mountain, and there were no smiles or their faces.  They are ignorant and narrow people in Hillsboro, but they have an inborn capacity unsparingly to look facts in the face.

When the last beam had fallen in with a crash to the blackened cellar-hole Miss Martin, very pale and shaken, stepped bravely forward.  “I know how terribly you must be feeling about this,” she began in her carefully modulated voice, “but I want to assure you that I know Mr. Camden will rebuild the library for you if—­”

She was interrupted by the chief man of the town, Squire Pritchett, who began speaking with a sort of bellow only heard before in exciting moments in town-meeting.  “May I never live to see the day!” he shouted; and from all the tongue-tied villagers there rose a murmur of relief at having found a voice.  They pressed about him closely and drank in his dry, curt announcement:  “As selectman I shall write Mr. Camden, tell him of the fire, thank him for his kindness, and inform him that we don’t want any more of it” Everybody nodded.  “I don’t know whether his money is what they call tainted or not, but there’s one thing sure, it ain’t done us any good.”  He passed his hand over his unshaven jaw with a rasping wipe and smiled grimly as he concluded, “I’m no hand to stir up lawbreakin’ and disorder, but I want to say right here that I’ll never inform against any Hillsboro man who keeps the next automobile out of town, if he has to take a ax to it!”

People laughed, and neighbors who had not spoken to one another since the quarrel over the price of wood fell into murmured, approving talk.