“Say you took them, boy, say you took them, then he won’t beat you much,” said the Dutch-woman good naturedly, getting a little sorry for him.

The boy raised his eyes slowly and fixed them vacantly upon her, then suddenly his face grew dark with blood.

“So, you haven’t got anything to say to us, my lad?” said Bonaparte, momentarily forgetting his dignity, and bending forward with a little snarl. “But what I mean is just this, my lad — when it takes a boy three-quarters of an hour to fill a salt-pot, and when at three o’clock in the morning he goes knocking about the doors of a loft, it’s natural to suppose there’s mischief in it. It’s certain there is mischief in it; and where there’s mischief in it it must be taken out,” said Bonaparte, grinning into the boy’s face. Then, feeling that he had fallen from that high gravity which was as spice to the pudding, and the flavor of the whole little tragedy, he drew himself up. “Waldo,” he said, “confess to me instantly, and without reserve, that you ate the peaches.”

The boy’s face was white now. His eyes were on the ground, his hands doggedly clasped before him.

“What, do you not intend to answer?”

The boy looked up at them once from under his bent eyebrows, and then looked down again.

“The creature looks as if all the devils in hell were in it,” cried Tant’ Sannie. “Say you took them, boy. Young things will be young things; I was older than you when I used to eat ‘bultong’ in my mother’s loft, and get the little niggers whipped for it. Say you took them.”

But the boy said nothing.

“I think a little solitary confinement might perhaps be beneficial,” said Bonaparte. “It will enable you, Waldo, to reflect on the enormity of the sin you have committed against our Father in heaven. And you may also think of the submission you owe to those who are older and wiser than you are, and whose duty it is to check and correct you.”

Saying this, Bonaparte stood up and took down the key of the fuel-house, which hung on a nail against the wall.

“Walk on, my boy,” said Bonaparte, pointing to the door; and as he followed him out he drew his mouth expressively on one side, and made the lash of the little horse-whip stick out of his pocket and shake up and down.

Tant’ Sannie felt half sorry for the lad; but she could not help laughing, it was always so funny when one was going to have a whipping, and it would do him good. Anyhow he would forget all about it when the places were healed. Had not she been beaten many times and been all the better for it?

Bonaparte took up a lighted candle that had been left burning on the kitchen table, and told the boy to walk before him. They went to the fuel-house. It was a little stone erection that jutted out from the side of the wagon-house. It was low, and without a window; and the dried dung was piled in one corner, and the coffee-mill stood in another fastened on the top of a short post about three feet high. Bonaparte took the padlock off the rough door.