Fibsy stared at him, and then a strange look came over his face.
“I got you!” he fairly screamed; “I’m onto you! You know I’m nobody’s fool and you’re afraid I’ll queer your client!”
Judge Hoyt didn’t so much as glance at the angry boy. He addressed himself to Avice. “My dear, I protest. And I demand that this impossible person be removed.”
But Fibsy possessed a peculiar genius for making people listen to him.
“Him!” he said, and the finger of withering scorn he pointed at Judge Hoyt was so audacious, that the others held their breath. “Him! He sent me to Philadelphia to get me outen his way! That’s what he did!”
“A sample of his celebrated falsehoods,” said the judge, now smiling broadly. “The little ingrate! I did get him a position in Philadelphia, as he could no longer be in Mr. Trowbridge’s office. But I fail to see how even his fertile imagination can make it appear that I did this to ‘get him out of the way.’ Out of whose way may I ask. He certainly wasn’t in mine.”
Whiting stared. He was trying to put two and two together to make some sort of a four that would worry his opponent, and for the life of him he couldn’t do it.
Why, he thought, would Judge Hoyt want to get rid of this boy, unless the chap knew something detrimental to his client? There could be no other reason, and yet what could the boy know? Hoyt had said he was a bright boy, so he must be afraid of that brightness. And yet—and this point must be well considered—it might well be, if the boy were really an abandoned liar, that Hoyt only feared the falsehoods he could make up, and which might be adverse to Landon’s interests even though untrue.
And so, in spite of Hoyt’s protests, indeed, really because of them, Whiting insisted on questioning the boy.
The first questions put to him were of little interest, but when Fibsy, in his dramatic way, announced the finding of a button on the scene of the crime, Whiting pricked up his ears. Could it be a button of Landon’s clothing? Could it be traced to the prisoner?