But George still felt too sore—perhaps, too obstinate—to yield.
“Look here, Marmaduke,” he said, “how are you going to prove that somebody was murdered here? Perhaps he was gobbled up by an unprincipled and broken-down quadruped—say, a shipwrecked gorilla.”
“Yes,” chimed in Steve, “perhaps a devouring monster of a famished sea-cow fell on him, and gnawed him, and wallowed him around, and extinguished him!”
Marmaduke was now being jeered in his turn. Considering that he was only a boy, he put up with their banter with stoical unconcernedness; but his quivering lips and humid eyes betrayed that he felt it, and turning to Will, he said, “In such a case as this, you always find something to discover the guilty one,—a pet dog’s collar, a monogrammed metal tooth-pick, an old card case, a seal-ring, a gold watch-key, a book-mark, a—a—or something else.”
“Why, have you found anything?” Steve asked quickly.
No answer. Silence, in this instance, was peculiarly golden; more, it was sufficient.
“Then how do you know, and how are you going to prove it was murder?”
Then Marmaduke’s indignation was roused, and he scowled upon Stephen so malignantly that this worthy quailed, unable to bear up under that “steady gaze of calm contempt.”
Turning to Will and Charles, the persecuted boy thus explained himself: “Not long ago, I read in a story how an awful murder was cleared up, simply because a cast-off wig, that had fallen into the murderer’s pocket by accident, and belonged to nobody in particular, fell out again at the fatal moment, and proved the whole crime. You boys might read about such things from to-day till your hair turns gray; and you would find that some little trinket, some trifle, turns the evidence one way or the other, and decides the verdict. Why, where would the romance of romances be, if it wasn’t so?” excitedly. “I mean to hunt for that lost trinket when I get ready; it has been here all this time, and it isn’t going to disappear forever now.”
“How long has it been here?” asked George, laying stress on the word how.