“I tell you what, fellows,” whispered Phil Adams, “it is lucky we didn’t try to touch ’em off with punk.  They’d have blown us all to finders.”

The destruction of Bailey’s Battery was not, unfortunately, the only catastrophe.  A fragment of one of the cannon had earned away the chimney of Sailor Ben’s cabin.  He was very mad at first, but having prepared the fuse himself he didn’t dare complain openly.

“I’d have taken a reef in the blessed stove-pipe,” said the Admiral, gazing ruefully at the smashed chimney, “if I had known as how the Flagship was agoin’ to be under fire.”

The next day he rigged out an iron funnel, which, being in sections, could be detached and taken in at a moment’s notice.  On the whole, I think he was resigned to the demolition of his brick chimney.  The stove-pipe was a great deal more shipshape.

The town was not so easily appeased.  The selectmen determined to make an example of the guilty parties, and offered a reward for their arrest, holding out a promise of pardon to anyone of the offenders who would furnish information against the rest.  But there were no faint hearts among the Centipedes.  Suspicion rested for a while on several persons—­on the soldiers at the fort; on a crazy fellow, known about town as “Bottle-Nose”; and at last on Sailor Ben.

“Shiver my timbers!” cries that deeply injured individual.  “Do you suppose, sir, as I have lived to sixty year, an’ ain’t got no more sense than to go for to blaze away at my own upper riggin’?  It doesn’t stand to reason.”

It certainly did not seem probable that Mr. Watson would maliciously knock over his own chimney, and Lawyer Hackett, who had the case in hand, ’bowed himself out of the Admiral’s cabin convinced that the right man had not been discovered.

People living by the sea are always more or less superstitious.  Stories of spectre ships and mysterious beacons, that lure vessels out of their course and wreck them on unknown reefs, were among the stock legends of Rivermouth; and not a few people in the town were ready to attribute the firing of those guns to some supernatural agency.  The Oldest Inhabitant remembered that when he was a boy a dim-looking sort of schooner hove to in the offing one foggy afternoon, fired off a single gun that didn’t make any report, and then crumbled to nothing, spar, mast, and hulk, like a piece of burnt paper.

The authorities, however, were of the opinion that human hands had something to do with the explosions, and they resorted to deep-laid stratagems to get hold of the said hands.  One of their traps came very near catching us.  They artfully caused an old brass fieldpiece to be left on a wharf near the scene of our late operations.  Nothing in the world but the lack of money to buy powder saved us from falling into the clutches of the two watchmen who lay secreted for a week in a neighboring sail-loft.

It was many a day before the midnight bombardment ceased to be the town-talk.  The trick was so audacious and on so grand a scale that nobody thought for an instant of connecting us lads with it.  Suspicion at length grew weary of lighting on the wrong person, and as conjecture—­like the physicians in the epitaph—­was in vain, the Rivermouthians gave up the idea of finding out who had astonished them.