He stopped dead in his tracks, and his companions did the same as he held up his hand in warning.
“We certainly did put it over on those boobs all right,” Buck was saying, and the remark was followed by laughs of satisfaction.
“Yes, but we’re not yet out of the woods,” came the voice of Carl Lutz, with a touch of uneasiness in the tone. “Suppose when they put us on the stand to testify that we found Bob Layton and the other fellows in the cottage the evening before it burned, their lawyer asks us if we were in it too?”
“Well, let them ask,” replied Buck. “All we’ll have to do is to deny it. We know they were in it. They don’t know we were in it. Who knows that we slipped in later and sat there until nearly midnight smoking cigarettes?”
With a bound Bob was at the door of the shack.
“I know it!” he cried. “I didn’t know it till just this minute, but now I know it by your own confession.”
“We all heard it,” echoed Joe, as he, with Herb and Jimmy, followed Bob into the shack.
Consternation and conscious guilt was written on every one of the three faces.
Buck was the first of the cronies to recover some measure of self-possession.
“Think you’ve put something over, don’t you?” he sneered. “Well, you’ve got another think coming to you. This won’t do you a bit of good in court. I’ll simply swear that I didn’t say anything of the kind and that you’ve made up the story out of whole cloth. It’ll be simply my word against yours, and you’d be interested witnesses trying to help your fathers out by cooking up this story. So what are you going to do about it?”