"A crowbar? What would you do with a crowbar, Bob?" asked Lincoln, with a puzzled contraction of the brows. "You wouldn't try to whale the whole crowd with it, would you?"
"W'y, Abe, I 'low ef a rale tight pinch comes, to try a tussle weth that air jail. I don't know's I could prize out one uv them air iron grates, but ef 't wuz to come to that, I'd try to git Tom out uv harm's way. You say the word un I'll find some way to let 'im out anyhow."
"No, no; don't do that. If he runs away he'll be caught, and then he'll be sure to be lynched, or hanged. Let me try the law first, and then it'll be time enough to use crow-bars afterward if I fail. Do you know Dave Sovine?"
"When I see 'im. He's an ornery kind uv a cuss. I don't know 's he rickollecks me."
"So much the better if he doesn't. You must get him to tell you all about the shooting—his story of it. Get him to tell more than was brought out at the inquest. Make him explain it, and find out if he's going to clear out before the trial."
"I heern tell 't he won't talk," said Bob. "The prosecutin' attorney's shut 'im up tight 'z bees-wax, they say."
Lincoln mused awhile. "If the prosecuting attorney has shut him up, you must open him. Contrive some way to get his story and find out what he means to do."
But it was not easy to encounter Dave in these days. Since he had acquired notoriety, as the only witness of the murder, he had been seized with an unprecedented diffidence, and kept himself out of public gaze. The boys about the village conjectured that he was "laying low for big game." Bob, however, had no objection to waiting for Sovine's coming. He liked this lurking for prey as a cat likes the watching at a mouse-hole. Besides, loafing of any sort suited Big Bob's genius. He could sit astride a barrel on the shady side of a grocery for hours with no sense of exhaustion. More than one day McCord had passed in this way, when at last Dave Sovine came in sight, walking rather hurriedly and circumspectly toward the center of the village. Bob was in the middle of a hunting yarn which he was lazily telling to another loafer on the next barrel as he whittled a bit of hickory stripped from one of the hoops in front of him. Without betraying any excitement, he astonished his companions by bringing the long-drawn story to an abrupt conclusion. Then dismounting from his barrel he sauntered across the street in such a way as to encounter Dave and to fall in with the direction in which the latter was going.
"Hot day!" Bob said, as he intersected Dave's course at an acute angle.
"Yes," answered the other.