Perhaps your father can manage to prevent it somehow." It would not have been an easy thing to do, even for so good a lawyer as Mr.Foster, if Burgin himself had not saved them all trouble on that score.

Long before the slow processes of country criminal justice could bring him to actual trial, so many misdeeds were brought home to him, from here and there, that he gave the matter up, and not only confessed to the attack on Annie's pocket-book, but to the barn-burning, to which Dab's cudgelling had provoked him.

He made his case so very clear, that when he finally came before a judge and jury, and pleaded "guilty," there was nothing left for them to do but to say just what he was guilty of, and how long he should "break stone" to pay for it.

It was likely to be a good deal more than "ten years," if he lived out his "time." All that came to pass some months later, however; and just now the village had enough to talk about in discussing the peculiar manner of his capture.
The story of the demijohn leaked out, of course; and, while it did not rob Dab and Ham of any part of their glory, it was made to do severe duty in the way of a temperance lecture.
Old Jock, indeed, protested.
"You see, boys," said he, "real good liquor, like that, don't do nobody no harm.

That was the real stuff,--prime old apple-jack 'at I'd had in my cellar ten year last Christmas; an' it jest toled that feller across the bay, and captered him, without no manner of diffikilty." There were some among his auditors who could have testified to a decidedly different kind of "capture." One effect of Dab's work on the day of the yachting-trip, including his special performances as cook, and as milliner to the lobsters, was, that he felt himself thenceforth bound to be somewhat carefully polite to Joe and Fuz.