Well, vacation got over, and school started again, and me and Swatty and Bony got promoted into the A Class in Miss Carter's room, and so did Mamie Little and Scratch-Cat. Lucy got promoted into the B Class in Miss Carter's room, and she hated Miss Carter. I guess the reason was because Miss Carter got in love with Herb Schwartz when Fan was mad at him.

Anyway Miss Carter heard Lucy tell somebody that if Fan wanted Herb Miss Carter would never have got him, and that anybody could catch a second-hand fellow that a body had thrown away, so Miss Carter and Lucy didn't like each other. But I guess it was Lucy's fault, because I always liked Miss Carter all right. Most always.

So school started again. Professor Martin came back with only a limp in his leg and Herb Schwartz stopped being a professor and was in Judge Hannan's law office all the time. He began smoking a curved pipe and wearing spectacles and his hair pompadour, because he would pretty soon be a lawyer, and he kept on going with Miss Carter, but I didn't care, because Fan had stopped dying of love. She was going with Tom Burton.

We liked Tom Burton good enough—me and Swatty and Bony did—until the time Dad Veek's barn burned, but after that we didn't. We had it in for him after that.

I guess old Dad Veek was a cabinet maker or something. Anyway, he used to work in his barn with a saw and a plane and he made a lot of shavings. His barn was level, but to make it level it had to be up on posts at the hind end because it was on a side hill, and that made a kind of cave under it, and sometimes me and Bony and Swatty, when we got tired playing in the creek, or it was raining, or we got cold skating, would go up there and maybe smoke com silk or maybe just talk. So we got all the shavings old Dad Veek swept out of his barn, and we made a kind of nest under the barn, and we called it that—the Nest.

Dad Veek did not like to have us under his barn, because when we smoked com silk the smoke would go up between the boards of the floor and he would come out and chase us. He didn't like us much, anyway, for any boys, because there were grapevines between his barn and his house and he thought maybe when we thought he wasn't around we crawled through the fence and took some grapes. And we did. But only when they were ripe and we happened to be over there.

So one night his barn burned down.

I guess that don't sound like much, but it was a good deal more than it sounds like. You don't know about Toady Williams and the Red Avengers and the fire insurance inspector yet. The fire insurance inspector was a man who came over from Chicago and said old Dad Veek had set the barn afire to get the insurance money, and said he guessed he would put old Dad Veek in jail for it, because there was too much of that sort of thing just now, and it was time to learn somebody a lesson. And I guess nobody would have cared much if it hadn't been for Mrs. old Dad Veek.

The reason my mother felt sorry for Mrs. old Dad Veek was because when my mother was a little girl Mrs. old Dad Veek's name was Tilly, and she worked for my mother's mother, and now she was a dear old lady and it was too bad her husband was going to jail. So she thought somebody ought to bestir themselves.

Well, while my mother and the Ladies' Aid were bestirring themselves me and Bony and Swatty and Toady Williams were out in our barn, and I felt pretty bad, because it was tough to have my mother bestirring herself about that barn fire when the chances were that I would be one she would bestir into jail if she kept old Dad Veek out. Now you know that much, you can see why we felt pretty sick out there in my barn.

It was winter when old Dad Veek's barn burned down, and it was about nine o'clock at night. I was going to bed because I had been skating all day. I wore boots to skate in, like all the fellows, and my boots kind of wrinkled around the ankles and they rubbed my ankles until they were raw. So about eight o'clock I said, “Aw, come on, Swatty! Let's go home!” but he wouldn't.

“Well, if you won't go home with me I'm going up to the Nest and I'll wait for you up there,” I said.

So then Toady came up, and he asked where I was going and I told him I was going to the Nest, and he said he was going to skate some more, but Swatty and Bony said, “All right, we'll go up with you awhile.” They didn't take off their skates. They walked up the hill to the barn on their skates and we sat awhile in the Nest under old Dad Veek's barn and smoked some com-silk cigarettes. Then Swatty and Bony wanted to skate some more, and they did and after a while I went home. Gee! but there was a raw spot on my ankle when I got my boot off! I was sitting on the edge of my bed looking at it, about nine o'clock, when the fire-house bell rang. Right away my mother came into my room and said:

“George, there is a fire across the Square, and I think it is Mr. Veek's barn. You can go if you want to.”

I hid my raw ankle, because if my mother knew it was so bad she would n't let me skate any more until it got well, and I pulled on my boot and went to the fire.

There was a pretty big crowd there already and the barn was burning bully. I found Swatty first and then we found Bony, and we watched until the fire burned out, and then we went home.

The next day was Sunday, and when I got up I told my mother I had a headache, like I always told her Sunday mornings; but I had to go to Sunday school just the same. After dinner I went over to the ruins, and Swatty and Bony and Toady and a lot of folks were there. It was good to see and smell. When we got tired we went back to my yard, and it was too cold to go into the barn, so we went up to my room. As soon as the door was shut Swatty sat down on the edge of my bed and said:

“Well, men, the Red Avengers have been true to their oath! The enemy's property lies in ruins!” You see it was like this: Me and Swatty and Toady and Bony were the Red Avengers. Maybe you never read the book—“The Red Avengers, or The Boy Heroes of the Trail”—but it is a bully book. It's a dime lib'ry, and if it hadn't been for Toady we would never have had it. There was one thing about Toady that was pretty good—he had lots of books. Dime lib'ry books. He got the new ones as fast as they were printed, and he read them behind his geography at school, and it was because he had them that we got to read “The Red Avengers.” The Chief of the Red Avengers was a boy named Dick, and when he was a young and tender nursling his fond parents took him out West and they started a ranch that covered almost a whole state. They had millions of cattle, but a lot of Mexicans came and burned the ranch and Dick's parents were burned to death and Dick only escaped by creeping into the chaparral and hiding until he grew up into a sturdy youthhood. So then the Mexicans had divided up the ranch and had built houses and barns and things, and when Dick asked for the ranch back they laughed at him. So he got together a lot of true and faithful youths and started the Red Avengers of the Trail and whenever they came to one of the Mexican houses or bams they burned it down. Whenever anybody did anything mean to anybody in the band of the Red Avengers, Dick wrote a note saying the mean person's house would be burned at a certain minute, and the note would appear mysteriously on the door of the house. And the house burned down just as the Red Avengers said it would, and right on the minute.

So me and Swatty and Bony we started a Red Avengers band. We swore a solemn oath never to divulge the secrets of the band or to tell what any of us did, and to follow the orders of the Chief, whate'er might betide. We had an election for Chief, and me and Swatty and Bony each got one vote, so we made Swatty the Chief. Swatty made us make him. So I was elected Secretary and Bony was elected Treasurer. The Secretary had to write the vengeance warnings and keep track of them in a memorandum book, so we wouldn't forget who we were going to be revenged on. The Treasurer didn't have anything to do. It was an easy job.

We did all that one day out in our barn, and, just when we had the Red Avengers all fixed up, in came Toady. He wanted the dime lib'ry back.

“Aw! come on, Toady!” Swatty said. “Let us keep it! You don't want it!”

“Yes, I want it,” said Toady.

“All right for you, then, Toady!” Swatty said. “I was going to tell you something, but if you're going to be that mean I won't.”

“What was it?” he asked.

“It's all right what it was!” said Swatty. “You'll never know! Think we'd tell you when you want your old dime lib'ry back? We won't ever tell him, will we, George? Will we, Bony?”

So we said no, we wouldn't.

So then Toady looked at us and his eyes popped out; but Swatty threw “The Red Avengers” book at him.

“Take it!” he said. “We don't want it anyway. We know everything that's in it and we don't need it. Only, if your house burns down you'll know why. Garsh! here we were all ready to make you one of the band, and give you the oath, and elect you—what were we going to elect him, George?” “Librarian,” I said.

“Yah!” said Swatty, as if Toady made him sick. “That's the kind of a fellow you are!”

So Toady didn't know what to do. He picked up the dime lib'ry and stood looking. So Swatty didn't pay any attention to him. He said to me:

“Seckertary, write in the Book of Doom that the first house the Red Avengers will burn down will be Toady Williams's house, because he's a stingy-cat and took his tom, old, no-good dime lib'ry away from us!”

Toady looked awhile. Then he said:

“Oh, I didn't know you were going to make me a librarian. I didn't know you were going to do that. What do I have to do if I'm Librarian?”

“Why, you keep charge of the library,” I said. “You take an oath to keep and preserve it, in that starch box over there.”

“And then you can be one of the band and take the oath, and if anybody is mean to you we'll burn their houses down,” said Swatty. So Toady said all right, he would be Librarian, and we gave him the oath, and he put “The Red Avengers” in the starch box, and we held a council. We talked about whose houses the Red Avengers ought to burn down first.

I guess we all thought about Miss Carter first, because she had kept us in school after hours that very afternoon; but she lived in a boarding house and we couldn't burn down her room without burning down the rest of the house, so we thought we would just record her in the book and wait until she got married sometime, and had a house of her own, and then burn that down. We thought of everybody, but the one we thought was the meanest was old Dad Veek. So we wrote his name at the top of the list in my memorandum book, and we said we'd burn his barn, and that we would do it at nine of night on the eighteenth of December. I wrote the letter of warning that was to be stabbed onto his door with a dagger, because I was Secretary, and I wrote the date of revenge in the memorandum book, and we all went out and over to Veek's barn.

We hid in the dead weeds at the side of the road and drew straws to see which of the Red Avengers had to go up and dagger the warning onto old Dad Veek's barn, and Bony drew the fatal straw; but of course he was afraid to do it, so Swatty did it. He sneaked through the fence into Veek's yard and up to the barn door. He didn't have a dagger, so he took a sort of splinter and ran it through the warning and stuck the point in a crack in the door, and scooted back to us. It was a daring deed, worthy of our fearless Chief, and we received him with silent cheers, because we had scarce hoped he would return from his perilous mission alive. (That's from the dime lib'ry book.)

Well, that was pretty good, and we felt bully. I guess we would have gone ahead and put up some more warnings another day, but it turned cold that night and the skating got good and we forgot to be Red Avengers. You can't be everything all the time. We didn't think any more about it until the day after the fire. That was the Sunday we were up in my room and Swatty said:

“Well, men, the Red Avengers have been true to their oath! The enemy's property lies in ruins!”

So I said:

“Yes, Chief, I carried out the orders of the band to the fullest. My trusty torch has laid the vermin's dwelling low.”

“You?” said Swatty. “You didn't do it. I did it.” Toady was sitting on the window sill, and Bony was in a chair looking at a magazine. Toady just sat and popped his eyes at us.

“Aw, now!” he said, “you didn't burn that barn down, either of you. You're just fooling.”

Well, I guess that was a little too much for anybody to say, especially when he was a member of the Red Avengers himself.

“I did, too!” I said. “I took my oath to do it, and I did it. Do you think I'd take my oath to do it, and then not do it? Of course I burned it down, when I said I would!”

“Of course you would,” said Swatty. “If you took your oath to burn down Veek's barn you'd do it. Only I was the one that took the oath; you wasn't. Toady had better not say I'd take an oath and then not do it! When you trust a job to the Chief of the Red Avengers it'll be done. At nine of night I sneaked up to old Dad Veek's barn—”

“Ho! Nine!” I said. “Well, no wonder! No wonder you thought you did it, sneaking up at nine! Now I know why you thought you did it, when I was the one that really did it! Why, I wouldn't wait until nine when I had promised to set a barn afire at nine. I'd be afraid I might not get the match lit in time, or something. I was there at a quarter of nine, and I had the barn on fire long before nine.” Swatty kind of looked at me.

“Oh!” he said. “Whereabouts did you set the fire going?”

I thought a minute.

“Around at the far side, away from the road, Chief,” I said.

“Well, then, no wonder!” said Swatty. “That's why I didn't see you doing it. I set the side toward the road burning. So I guess I was the one that set the barn afire first, because it would take you a long time to go around the barn to the other side.”

“Maybe we both set it afire at the same time,” I said.

“All right, maybe we did,” Swatty said. “Because,” I said, “I ain't going to be cheated out of having set it afire by you or anybody, Swatty, when I went to all the trouble I did.”

“I know,” said Swatty, “but you can't say I didn't set it afire, either, because when I was walking down to the creek from the West I turned my ankle and had to take my skates off and limp home. Ain't that so, Bony?” Bony said yes, it was. “And Bony thought I had really sprained my ankle,” said Swatty, “but you know what I was up to. Throw 'em all off the track! Be alone so I could do the deed!”

“Well, I guess we both did it at the same time,” I said, and Swatty said he guessed we did, so that settled it. But when Swatty got ready to go home I whispered to him:

“You didn't really do it, did you?”

“No,” he said, “I just wanted to make Toady and Bony think I did. I was in my kitchen putting arnica on my ankle. Did you really do it?”

“Of course I didn't!” I said. “I was up here in my bedroom looking at my raw ankle. But we won't let on.”

“Sure not!” said Swatty.

Well, pretty soon some of the fellows or somebody began saying maybe old Dad Veek would have to go to jail for setting his own barn afire, like I told you in the beginning. Then, after while, I heard my mother say to my father, that some of the Ladies' Aid ladies were bestirring themselves because they were sure that old Dad Veek wouldn't set his own barn afire, and they had asked Tom Burton to help them and he was helping. But one day we were up in my barn—me and Swatty and Bony—and Toady came up.

He came up the stairs far enough to see into the hayloft, then he stopped and when we saw him he came on up. I said:

“Hello, Toady!”

“Hello!” he said.

“What do you want?” I asked, because he hadn't been playing with us much.

“Oh, I just thought I'd get my dime lib'ry,” he said. “You don't want it any more, do you?”

“No, we don't want it,” I said, and he went to the starch box and got it, and he came over to where we were, and he said: “I guess you have n't set any more barns afire, have you?”

“What barns?” Swatty asked.

“Well, you did set one afire, didn't you?” said Toady. “You and George set Veek's afire, didn't you?”

Swatty stood up then, all right! He stood up and folded his fists.

“Who said we set Veek's barn afire?” he asked, and he was pretty mad. But I wasn't; I was just scared. It's incenderyism, or something like that, if you set a barn afire, and you get sent to reform school for life.

“Who said it? I didn't say it,” said Toady. “You said it. You and George said you did.”

Well, of course I hadn't been lying when I told Toady and Swatty and Bony how I had set Dad Veek's barn afire, but I had just been fooling. So I said:

“Aw! I never said no such thing! I never either said I set it afire. Swatty said he set it afire. I couldn't have set it afire, because I was sitting on my bed when it got afire.”

So Swatty got mad. I guess he wanted to lick somebody, but he didn't know whether to lick me or to lick Toady.

“Aw! I never either said I set it afire!” he said. “If anybody set it afire George did, because I was home, putting arnica on me, when the fire started.”

“Well, you said you did,” I said. “You said so right up in my room. You did so.”

“I did not! You said you did.”

“I did not! I never said anything like it. If anybody said he set Veek's barn afire, Swatty said it.”

“Aw! I did not!” Swatty said. “You said it. You said it. You said you took a torch, and went around to the far side and set the barn afire. I heard you say it. And you said I couldn't have set the barn afire because you had it all afire before I got there. Didn't he say that, Toady?”

Well, I guess Toady knew mighty well that if he was going to get mallered for saying either of us said it he had better say I said it, because Swatty could lick any of us. So he said I did say it.

So I went for him and mallered him as much as I could. I got so mad I cried, and I guess I kicked him. Not Swatty, Toady. So when I got tired I was still mad, and I sat down on a box and cried. Then Toady sneaked over to the stairs and went part way down, and just before he was out of sight he looked back.

“Cry-baby!” he said, and that meant me. Then he said: “All right, you'd better look out! You both said you did it, and you both said you said it, and Dad Veek's got that Red Avengers' notice you fastened on his barn door and Tom Burton knows all about it.”

Gee, we were scared! I was so scared I didn't throw anything at Toady, and Swatty was so scared he just said: “Garsh!” and stood there. Well, me and Swatty we talked it over.

We knew we hadn't set the barn afire, but we knew we had said we had, and we knew old Dad Veek would do 'most anything to keep out of jail, and that my mother and the Ladies' Aid ladies were bestirring. So then we knew why Toady had come up to get us to say again we had done it; he was one of the Red Avengers and unless we said we had set the barn afire ourselves all the Red Avengers would be sent to reform school, and he wanted to get out of it and had gone and told Tom Burton about us and the Red Avengers and that we had set the barn afire.

“Garsh!” said Swatty, “he took the memorandum book you had old Veek's barn wrote down at the top of the list of!”

And he had! So Bony sort of doubled down in his corner and cried, but me and Swatty sat down on a box to think and talk and see what we had better do.

Well, the way Tom Burton had gone to work to help my mother and the Ladies' Aid ladies who were bestirring themselves, was this: He found out that the reason old Dad Veek had so much insurance was because he was a slow worker, and sometimes he had the barn almost full of stuff he was working on, and then it was worth as much as it was insured for. So that helped some. Then old Dad Veek showed him the Red Avengers' warning Swatty had fastened on his barn door, and that was pretty bad, because the time it said the barn would burn down was the time it did burn.

I guess he might have thought it was some men or something, if it hadn't been for the name of the Red Avengers. It sounded like boys. So Tom Burton found out there was a dime lib'ry named “The Red Avengers,” because one was hanging in Toady Williams's father's store window, and then he knew it was boys. So he asked Toady Williams if he knew anything about it, and Toady went and told him. He told him me and Swatty and Bony was the Red Avengers and that we had set the barn afire.

We found all that out mighty soon, because it wasn't half an hour after Toady went out of the barn before Tom Burton came up. The tattle-tale had gone right to him.

Tom Burton came up and he stood and talked to us. He told us he knew all about the Red Avengers and that he had our memorandum book with Dad Veek's name in it and everything, and that he knew who had written the memorandum book, and the notice that was daggered on Dad Veek's door, and everything, and he asked us which one of us done it. Gee, I was scared! But none of us said anything. Maybe we were too scared to.

So then he said, “All right! it will only be a little while before all will be known, and the one that did it will surely be sent to reform school, so the other two, that didn't do it, had better tell on the one that did do it.”

But none of us said anything. So he talked awhile and then he went away. Me and Bony didn't say anything.

“Garsh!” Swatty said. “It's mighty bad.”

Me and Bony didn't say anything yet. We was too scared. Bony began to blubber.

“You don't need to cry,” Swatty told him. “You ain't going to be sent to reform school. You didn't do it.”

“Well—well,” Bony blubbered. “You and Georgie didn't do it, either.”

“Well, it don't matter whether we did it or didn't do it,” Swatty said. “We wrote down that we were going to do it, and they've got the warning and the memorandum book, and we both said we'd done it ourselves, and we both said the other had done it, and I guess they'll send us to reform school.” Bony kept on blubbering, so we told him he had better go home if he was a cry-baby, and he went. So then Swatty said:

“I guess it ain't much use; but we've got to say, no matter how they ask us, that we ain't the Red Avengers.”

“That'd be a lie,” I said.

“Well, no, it wouldn't,” said Swatty, “because there won't be any Red Avengers, and we'll say, 'No, we ain't!' and that'll be the truth, because we won't be then. We'll bust up the Red Avengers right now.”

So we took a vote and voted that we were not the Red Avengers any more and that we never had been the Red Avengers. So that settled that, but it didn't make us feel much better. We sat and thought awhile and then Swatty said:

“I know! Georgie, you can ask Fan to tell Tom Burton to let us go free.”

“Aw! that won't do any good,” I said.

And I didn't think it would, but Swatty said it was our only chance, so I said I would ask Fan, and I did. I hated to, but I did it.