Harry looked down upon his young friend curiously for a moment.
'D'you know,' he said, 'you're a most amazing kind of a kid?'
'How?' asked Dick shortly.
'Why in the way you get mixed up in things.'
'Tain't my fault if things happen, is it?' asked the boy in an injured tone.
'S'pose it ain't,' replied Harry with a grin; 'but they all seem to come your way somehow. Look here—it can't matter now—tell me how you came to be in the Stream drive that night?'
Dick kicked up a tuft of grass, bored one heel into the soft turf, and answered nothing.
'Come on, old man, I won't turn dog.'
'I'm goin' to tell it to Detective Downy first. 'Twasn't nothin' much anyhow. I jes' went down.'
Dick would say nothing more. He found himself on the side of the law for the first time, and felt he owed a duty to Downy, whom he regarded as almost as great a man as Sam Sagacious. Downy had come to his rescue in an hour of dire peril, Downy had trusted him and taken him into his confidence to some extent, and he was determined to do the fair and square thing by the detective, at least so far as he could do so without interfering with his sacred obligation to handsome, unhappy Christina Shine.