第50章

After that, Nivens stood looking quietly at Mullins.You could feel that he was thinking pretty deeply before he shot the next question at him.

"Where did you go to school?"

Mullins answered straight off: "The high school down home," and Nivens thought again for a while and then asked:

"How many boys were at the school?"

"About sixty."

"How many masters?"

"About three."

After that Nivens paused a long while and seemed to be digesting the evidence, but at last an idea seemed to strike him and he said:

"I understand you were not on the bank premises last night.Where were you?""Down the lake duck shooting."

You should have seen the excitement in the court when Mullins said this.The judge leaned forward in his chair and broke in at once.

"Did you get any, Harry?" he asked.

"Yes," Mullins said, "about six."

"Where did you get them? What? In the wild rice marsh past the river? You don't say so! Did you get them on the sit or how?"All of these questions were fired off at the witness from the court in a single breath.In fact, it was the knowledge that the first ducks of the season had been seen in the Ossawippi marsh that led to the termination of the proceedings before the afternoon was a quarter over.Mullins and George Duff and half the witnesses were off with shotguns as soon as the court was cleared.

I may as well state at once that the full story of the robbery of the bank of Mariposa never came to the light.A number of arrests--mostly of vagrants and suspicious characters--were made, but the guilt of the robbery was never brought home to them.One man was arrested twenty miles away, at the other.end of Missinaba county, who not only corresponded exactly with the description of the robber, but, in addition to this, had a wooden leg.Vagrants with one leg are always regarded with suspicion in places like Mariposa, and whenever a robbery or a murder happens they are arrested in batches.

It was never even known just how much money was stolen from the bank.

Some people said ten thousand dollars, others more.The bank, no doubt for business motives, claimed that the contents of the safe were intact and that the robber had been foiled in his design.

But none of this matters to the exaltation of Mr.Pupkin.Good fortune, like bad, never comes in small instalments.On that wonderful day, every good thing happened to Peter Pupkin at once.The morning saw him a hero.At the sitting of the court, the judge publicly told him that his conduct was fit to rank among the annals of the pioneers of Tecumseh Township, and asked him to his house for supper.At five o'clock he received the telegram of promotion from the head office that raised his salary to a thousand dollars, and made him not only a hero but a marriageable man.At six o'clock he started up to the judge's house with his resolution nerved to the most momentous step of his life.

His mind was made up.

He would do a thing seldom if ever done in Mariposa.He would propose to Zena Pepperleigh.In Mariposa this kind of step, I say, is seldom taken.The course of love runs on and on through all its stages of tennis playing and dancing and sleigh riding, till by sheer notoriety of circumstance an understanding is reached.To propose straight out would be thought priggish and affected and is supposed to belong only to people in books.