“I think you’re a little high,” returned Bob. “But that doesn’t matter. I didn’t say that we’d make the damage good. I said that if we’d broken it, it would be a matter of making good. But we didn’t break it, and that lets us out I’ll say.”
“It’s easy to say that,” sneered the merchant. “How do I know that you didn’t break it? It would of course be natural for you to try to lie out of it.”
“It wouldn’t be natural for us to lie out of it,” replied Bob, controlling his temper with difficulty. “That isn’t our way of doing things. Why do you suppose we stayed here when it would have been perfectly easy for us to get away? It wasn’t a snowball we threw that broke your window. It was one thrown by the fellows we were fighting with.”
“Always the other fellow that does it!” replied the storekeeper angrily. “Who was that other fellow or fellows then? Tell me that. Come on now, tell me that.”
Bob kept silent. He had no love for Buck Looker and his gang, who had always tried to injure him, but he was not going to inform.
“See,” said Mr. Larsen, misunderstanding his silence. “When I ask you, you can’t tell me. You’re the fellows that did it, all right, and you’ll pay me for it or I’ll have you put in jail, that’s what I’ll do.”
“I saw the fellows who were firing snowballs in this direction,” spoke up Mr. Talley, a caterer, pushing his way through the throng. “I nearly bumped into them as they were running away. Buck Looker was one of them. I saw his face plainly and can’t be mistaken. The others I’m not so sure of, but I think they were Carl Lutz and Terry Mooney.
“For my part, Mr. Larsen,” he continued, “I don’t see how a snowball could break that heavy plate-glass window, anyway. My windows are no heavier, and they’ve often had snowballs come against them without doing any harm. Are you sure it wasn’t something else that smashed the glass?”
“Dead sure,” replied Larsen. “Come inside and see for yourself.”
He led the way into his store, and Mr. Talley, the boys, and a number of others crowded in after him.