The two men looked at each other with half affrighted glances.
“Can it be possible?” cried Mr. Wilson.
“Possible? It is a fact!” was the vehement answer. “The signature is good. I might be deceived by it myself, only that I know I did not write it. This is a bad business, Wilson.”
“A terribly bad business,” was the reply. “Who could have done it? There is a black sheep in our midst.”
“Can there be?” said the merchant, turning pale as he thought of the late robbery from his safe. “Do you suspect any one?”
“No one but yourself, sir,” said Wilson, in his slow, stilted manner. “I suspect you of undue faith in human nature. If you choose to take into your store a street boy of notorious character, what can you expect?”
“What do you mean?” said Mr. Leonard, in arms for his protege.
“I mean that that boy’s coming here was not without an object. I suspected from the first that he might have been sent here as the tool of some designing knaves, who knew your easy disposition.”
“You have no right to talk this way, Wilson.”
“Indeed I have,” said the clerk, with energy. “There is plainly a thief in your store. Yet the character of everybody here has been proved by years of trust. Two weeks ago you introduced here a boy of very doubtful antecedents, and in that two weeks two serious robberies have been consummated. What is the natural conclusion?”