A Wicked Way to Burn Read Online Free Page A

French, even around here! Besides, Peter, the Frenchmen you mean aren’t exactly strangers. The Neutrals have lived next to us for nearly eight years now, and they’ve given no trouble to speak of, have they? I know the ones in Worcester as well as you. And from everything else I hear, they’re decent, honest folk.”
    “Whether they live here or anywhere else, I say they’re still Frenchmen! You can tell by their
smell.”
Peter Lynch caught the eyes of several of the others; one by one, his leer either convinced, or sickened, those who took it in with their drink.
    “I don’t know, though,” said a man over by the now dark west windows, “if the French can be called worse than any others in the war. If you’ll read your city papers, you’ll see it’s the Europeans all together who forced war on the rest of us—not only France, but England, too, as well as Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Sweden, and even—”
    “Oh, give it a rest, Eli,” called someone from across the room.
    “That may be,” said another by the cider kegs. “And you might even say, now, that there’s honor in fighting for your own country, whatever it may be—and whatever the reason. I suspect it’s some of our own men who ought to be ashamed, for doing business with the enemy just to get hold of their blessed sugar, and fa-la’s to sell to city folk, even while the fighting was going on! Your own brother, Dick, for one. So I wouldn’t be so quick to call the kettle—”
    “Oh, if we’re naming names, then, what about your three Falmouth cousins, Henry?” cried out a disgruntled neighbor. “Don’t we all know they were sending their grain and cattle up to Cannadee, across the blockade?”
    “Supplying the very ones who planned to come and lift my scalp in the night,” chimed in a farmer finishing a plate of heavy stew, “just waiting to run down and burn our houses soon as we marched off to fight! Though they never did manage to get here—”
    “At any road, we did our part,” boasted another. “And with precious little help from the bloody-backed lobsters, and their prissy lords sent to teach us how to fight!”
    “That’s
for certain!” came a quick reply. “They must’ve sent over some of their worst dunderheads, judging by what I saw with my own two eyes. Yet we
still
managed to snatch their bacon from the fire, didn’t we, lads?”
    Between vigorous assent and rolling laughter, several heads and chests rose and swelled.
    “And took many a fort for them, too! Beausejour, Frontenac, and Duquesne, Niagara, Fort Ti, and Crown Point, then Quebec—”
    “Oh, well, you’ll have to admit that Wolfe was an awfully good tactician—”
    “Now
that
was enough for young Montcalm—”
    “And finally, Montreal!”
    “Well I remember when we took Louisbourg, in ’45,” broke in one of the old birds roasting by the fire, who puffed with animation. “With old Pepperrell, bless him. Sailed up to Cape Breton, took it single-handed!”
    “The British Navy may deserve some small thanks,” observed a younger man rather dryly, causing the other quail to come alive with a sputter.
    “You can thank the British all you want for giving it
back
to the froggies, too, soon as peace was signed. If you’ll remember, that’s why the lobsters had to go up and do it all over again, and blow it to bits this time. And now, I wonder, just how long our latest peace will last?”
    It was a sobering question. The war just concluded had often seemed won. Yet hostilities had flared up again and again, like flames from a burning seam of coal. But tonight, many seated in the Blue Boar only laughed at this lesson. And all the while, the young Frenchman continued to sit, listening silently in his dark corner, waiting for a further goad. The miller soon supplied it.
    “What about your own pet frog, Phineas? When did he hop in this time? And why is it that you let him stay, when his kind is bound to give offense to all your decent