It was evidently Harry's idea that a man who had so sinned against his master should be allowed to find no other master--at any rate in that district; an idea with which the other man, who had lately come out from the old country, did not at all sympathize.
"Do you want me to dismiss him ?" said Medlicot, in a tone which implied that that would be the last thing he would think of doing.
"You haven't heard me yet." Then Harry went on and told of the fires in the heat of summer, and of their terrible effects--of the easy manner of revenge which they supplied to angry, unscrupulous men, and of his own fears at the present moment.
"I can believe it all," said Medlicot, "and am very sorry that it should be so.

But I can not see the justice of punishing a man on the merest, vaguest suspicion.

Your only ground for imputing this crime to him is that your own conduct to him may have given him a motive." Harry had schooled himself vigorously during the ride as to his own demeanor, and had resolved that he would be cool.

"I was going on to tell you," he said, "what occurred that night after I saw you up by the fence." Then he described how he and his boy had entered the shed, and had both seen and heard a man as he escaped from it; how the boy had at once declared that the man was Nokes; how the following day he had discovered the leaves, which Nokes no doubt had deposited there just before the rain, intending to burn the place at once; and how Nokes's manner to him within the last half hour had corroborated his suspicions.
"Is he the boy you call Jacko ?" "That's the name he goes by." "You don't know his real name ?" "I have never heard any other name." "Nor any thing about him ?" Harry owned, in answer to half a dozen such questions, that Jacko had come to Gangoil about six months ago--he did not know whence--had been kept for a week's job, and had then been allowed to remain about the place without any regular wages.

"You admit it was quite dark," continued Medlicot.
Harry did not at all like the cross-examination, and his resolution to be cool was quickly fading.