“Don’t you try to run!” bawled the hotel-keeper.
“I’m armed,” added the keeper of the town lockup, suggestively.
“I don’t intend to run, Mr. Sparr,” answered Dave.
“Why should we run, since we have done nothing wrong?” added the senator’s son. He tried to follow Dave’s example and remain calm, but he was tremendously disturbed.
“Did those three fellows do it alone?” queried 174 the hotel man, eagerly. “If they did, you had better confess to it, and clear yourselves.”
“None of us are guilty,” answered Dave.
“I know better.”
“You do not. Since we didn’t do it, Mr. Sparr, I don’t see how you can prove that we did,—unless you have manufactured some evidence against us,” went on our hero, pointedly, a new idea coming into his head.
“I ain’t manufactured no evidence!” bawled Jason Sparr. “Didn’t that young rascal of a Lawrence say he’d get square with me, and didn’t all of you say the same? Wasn’t you down to the blowing up of the bridge, right where they had all that dynamite stored? Wasn’t some of the dynamite sticks stolen? Didn’t you fellows come right by the hotel afterwards? Wasn’t the blowing up done by clockwork, made to go off hours after it was set? You can’t tell me! You are guilty. Besides, I got other evidence—I got a letter,” added the hotel-keeper, shrewdly.
“A letter? About us?”