“O, there’s a funny part to it, is there?” I remarked bitterly.

“Yes.  The moment Bill Conway saw the advertisement, he knew it was Harry Blake who cut that letter H on the bench; so off 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 shut both eyes tight as I pulled the trigger.  The hammer clicked on the cap with a dull, dead sound.  Then Harris tried it; then Charley Marden; then I took it again, and after three or four trials was on the point of giving it up as a bad job, when the obstinate thing went off with a tremendous explosion, nearly jerking my arm from the socket.  The smoke cleared away, and there I stood with the stock of the pistol clutched convulsively in my hand—­the barrel, lock, trigger, and ramrod having vanished into thin air.