“Or,” supplemented Gates, “he’d maybe have hit one of us a crool slap on the wrist as we run past him. Or he might go to where we live and bust one of our umbrellas, to punish us. So we stuck.”
“The judge looks pretty near as terrifyin’ as the chief,” confided Hegan to his companion in a loud whisper and shaking with simulated awe. “Most likely he keeps a ’lectric chair in his kitchen. We’d best be p’lite to him.”
Hammerton checked an angry forward movement on the part of Saunders and addressed the grinning prisoners.
“I have no legal right to enforce replies to the questions I am going to ask you,” he said quietly. “But it is only fair to tell you what rights I do possess. It is within my jurisdiction to commit you both, here and now, for vagrancy, since you have no visible means of support in this village. And before the thirty-day vagrancy term can expire there will be some new charge. So, to avoid these annoyances, I advise you to wipe those grins off your faces and to drop the attempt to insult anyone here and to answer the questions I shall put to you. Otherwise, you will leave here with handcuffs on and will proceed to the lock-up; thence to come before me in the morning on a vagrancy charge.”
The men looked at each other uncertainly. Gates seemed to be measuring the distance to the study door. Unobtrusively, Hammerton took a pistol from the drawer of his desk and laid it in his lap. Instantly the two men stiffened and lost their jauntily insolent manner.
“There’s no call to threaten us, Judge,” said Hegan, nervously. “We’re glad to answer any questions you care to spring on us. As for vagrancy—well, we’re no vags. We just got home to-day and, of course, we haven’t had time to look round us for any steady work yet. But——”
“You were let out of Logan Prison on the twenty-sixth of last July,” interposed Hammerton. “Where did you go from there? I mean as soon as you were let out.”
“We went straight to Paterson,” returned Hegan. “We got out of Logan at ten, on the morning of the twenty-sixth. We took the noon train to Paterson. We got work there and we stayed on the job till yesterday, when the works shut down for the winter. Then we come back here.”
“You hadn’t been here since you were sent to prison?”