“Every one seems insane to a lunatic,” answered Varrell, sharply. “If you aren’t crazy, you are at least too stupid to live with sane people. Can’t you see how he might have been able to do it? Just think.”
Dick pondered a moment and then lost his patience.
“No, I can’t, nor any one else,” he answered hotly. “Bosworth is a bad lot and a school fraud and capable of almost any ordinary meanness, but that doesn’t make him a burglar or a murderer. Perhaps if he’d tripped me up in the hockey game instead of you, I might have a different opinion.”
Varrell laughed with the satisfied air of one who knows that he has the better end of the argument. “You’re wrong there, Dicky old boy,” he said, clapping his irate friend cordially on the shoulder. “You could forgive him far more easily for tripping you than for tripping me. I know you better than you do yourself.”
“All the same, I don’t see any connection between Bosworth and the safe breaking.”
“Well, listen. Eddy stood behind Miss Devon in the office when she was working on the lock. He saw the combination and told Bosworth of it when he was in Bosworth’s room about half-past nine. I know he was there then, for I saw him there from my window. This suggested to Bosworth an easy way in which to make good his losses and pay for the clothes,—as he certainly did pay a few days after. That, I believe, was the course of events, but I can furnish no evidence, and I don’t see how any can be furnished, unless Eddy can be made to squeal.”
“What about the check?”
“He probably burned that.”
They stood at the point at which their ways parted. Melvin was thinking hard and kicking the gravel recklessly with his foot. A squall of dust and stones struck his companion in the knee.
“Come, let up on that!” said Varrell, brushing off his trousers with a show of indignation. “Can’t you think without using your feet? There are disadvantages in this football training of yours.”