"No! you get no 'scoops' here!" she would declare. For she believed that Bob Platt would not spare his grandmother had the ancient dame been capable of furnishing the paper with a genuine "scoop."
She had herself earnestly remonstrated with Ned and urged him to make a clean breast of the whole affair, and she believed faithfully that the boy had been terrorized into silence rather than was guilty of crime. When he resisted her arguments by simply maintaining a dumb persistence, she felt it was the part of wisdom to torment him no more. "Give him a chance to recover his spirits and his confidence in people! His whole life is at stake, and he shan't be scooped just for the paper!"
But she could not prevent the parrot from calling "Fi-ah! Fi-ah! Fi-ah!" as it often did, nor hinder Ned's guilty start at the sound. It would suddenly rouse him from his reverie, when he sat on the steps of the little side porch where the parrot's cage hung in a honeysuckle vine, and Bob Platt would mark the demonstration with an unconsciously knowing look as he smoked his pipe beneath the flowering tendrils.
The parrot had no sinister intention in the matter. The call was only one of its mimetic accomplishments acquired by much repetition, for there was an engine-house only a block away, and the bird had been accustomed to this shrill alarm for years.
Often Ned had been to this engine-house when the men were at their drill, and he generally escorted the four Platt girls, who could not squeal loud enough nor shrill enough to express their admiration,—not of the splendidly efficient men, swinging down so quickly into place, all equipped and ready in one swift moment as it seemed, but of the horses and their preternatural wisdom in taking up their proper position of their own initiative, without a word of command, at the familiar signal. Of these horses, the favorite was "John Smith," an ancient warrior indeed, who had fought fire many a year before any of the Platt girls were born! Superannuated in fact he was, and had been sold to a dairyman. He himself declined the transfer, and came back to the engine-house at every alarm in the district, scattering the cans from the wagon as he galloped till the streets seemed to be flowing with milk and honey. His loyalty carried the day and he was easily repurchased, the milkman declaring he must give up either the horse or the dairy. At each drill the Platt girls sued for permission to pat the triumphant animal, albeit he took no more notice of their little rosy paws than of so many apple-blossoms. This had always been an enjoyable occasion to Ned, who also admired deeply the veteran "John Smith;" but now he declined to go with the girls.
"I want to see an' hear no more about a fire while I live!" he declared doggedly.
"Fi-ah! Fi-ah! Fi-ah!" clamored Poll, catching at the word, fluttering her green and gold wings, and turning her head, with its crooked beak, downward while she held on to her perch with her hooking claws.
Ned winced anew at the sharp cry, and Bob Platt looked significantly at his wife. "Try him!" the look said openly. "You can get something out of him!"
But it was needless for Ned to brace himself for resistance. Mrs. Platt would not interfere. Her kindness to him was not diminished even after she had been to see his mother for the first time and had experienced a cold reception. She had heard from Ned in the early days of her acquaintance with the boy that his mother held aloof from strangers, and she had approved of this trait in the simple country woman transplanted to a new sphere, and said that she thought the better of Mrs. Macdonald for it. Perhaps she did not expect this reserve in her turn, when she went to urge the brightest view, and counsel hope and cheerfulness, and adduce reasons to believe that all the disaster would be finally explained and smoothed away. She thought, however, that the attitude of Ned's mother was not unnatural, and that her experience was not calculated to foster much confidence in city people and city ways.
Despite Mrs. Platt's caution and resolve to report, as it were, naught of the details of her visit, Bob Platt contrived to ascertain from his wife the fact that Ned's mother knew no more than they did of the whole strange affair, that Ned had kept his own counsel, and that she had evidently never before heard the names of the two men who had given bail for his appearance at the next term of the Criminal Court, and thus released him from jail.