“You’ve been doing me dirt, Crawford, and this is payday,” he snapped, trying to say it calmly. [“Will you peel your coat?”]
A frenzied outburst of denial was the answer to this. Like any fellow who would stoop to the things he had been doing, Crawford was a shrinking coward at heart; this though he would have tipped the scale at twelve or fifteen pounds more than Larry.
“Oh, good gosh!—hold on—somebody’s been lying to you!” he protested. “I——”
“Cut it out,” said Larry. “I caught you at it in the shop this morning, and I’ve got Dowling for a witness. You did everything you could think of to make me get a goose-egg marking, and you’ve been doing it right along for two weeks. What did you put into my fire in the blacksmith shop so that I couldn’t make a weld? Tell the truth!”
Crawford hung his head. “It was only a joke,” he mumbled. “I just put a li’l’ pinch of sulphur in the fire, to see what you’d do.”
“A joke, was it? And I suppose it was a joke to knock my flasks down in the foundry, and to nick my planes and chisels on the pattern bench. Now, one question more: who put you up to all this?”
For some little while Crawford wouldn’t answer this direct question, filling the air with shrill protestations of his innocence of any malicious motive, and the like. But Larry pinned him down savagely.