"Ah!" he cried. "That's where I have you, sir! I only pretended to treat him. I didn't really. I only scribbled something on a piece of paper."
"You knew he couldn't read, of course?"
"Sure."
Mr. Tutt turned to the uplifted faces of the twelve. "So," he retorted, pursing his wrinkled lips and placing his fingers together in that attitude of piety which we frequently observe upon effigies of defunct ecclesiastics—"so you did the very thing for which you threw this old man at my side into jail—and for which he is now on trial! You lied to him about being a doctor! You deceived him about giving him the medical treatment he so much needed! And you arrested him after he had worked for hours to relieve the sufferings of a sick animal. By the way, it was a sick animal, wasn't it?"
"The sickest I could find," replied Brown airily.
"And he did relieve its sufferings, did he not?" continued Mr. Tutt gently.
"Very likely. I wasn't particularly interested in that end of it."
Mr. Tutt's meager frame seemed suddenly to expand until he hung over the witness chair like the genii who mushroomed so unexpectedly out of the fisherman's bottle in the Arabian Nights Entertainments.
"You were not interested in ministering to a poor horse, so sick it could hardly stand! You were only interested in imprisoning and depriving of his only form of livelihood this old man whose heart was not hardened like yours! May I ask at whose instance you went and lied to him?"
"Mr. Tutt! Mr. Tutt!" interjected the octogenarian angel. "Your examination is exceeding the bounds of judicial propriety."