“It’s not true! I tell you it’s not true! The boy never did it!”
“So!” It was a man’s voice now, caustic and unrelenting. “Well, where is he now, then?”
“I don’t know,” the woman replied. “I haven’t seen him since supper. But that’s got nothing to do with it. That doesn’t prove anything.”
“So!” It was the man again. “Well, maybe not! But I am not to be fooled! I am a poor man. I cannot afford to lose my money. So, it has nothing to do with it, eh? You say that because you are his mother, eh? But did he tell you at supper that I had discharged him this afternoon? Eh? Answer me that!”
“N-no.” The answer seemed to come reluctantly.
Billy Kane pushed the outer door a little wider open and slipped through. Keeping close to the wall, he edged forward until he could see into the back room through its open door. A frown came and knitted his brows in hard furrows. He was frankly puzzled now. The woman, a tall, powerful, muscular woman of middle age, but curiously frail now in obvious fear and emotion, was Mrs. Clancy, who kept the little notion shop next door on the corner; and the other, bent-shouldered, in long, greasy black coat, with long, untrimmed and dirty white beard, whose eyes were distorted behind the heavy lenses of his steel-bowed spectacles, was Marco, the proprietor of the second-hand store. Marco was apparently in a state of equal distress and excitement. He alternatively wrung his hands together and gesticulated furiously.
“Eight hundred dollars!” he cried out wildly. “Do you hear, you, the mother of that brat? Eight hundred dollars! All I have on earth! And it is gone! Stolen by that cursed young prison bird of yours! So he did not tell you, eh, that I discharged him this afternoon because I was sure he was making little stealings from me all the time? But you are not surprised, eh? Maybe he has stolen from you, too, eh?”
The woman did not answer. She seemed to shiver suddenly, and then sank down heavily in the chair before the table, near which she had been standing.
Marco paced up and down the room, back and forth, from the table to where the floor was littered with the erstwhile contents of the rifled safe.
Billy Kane’s puzzled frown grew deeper. Evidently there had been money in the safe, but in some way Laverto had got it before he had set Whitie Jack at work upon a stall, and it was obvious that Laverto had maneuvered to plant the crime on the shoulders of this woman’s son. But what then had been Laverto’s object in bringing Whitie Jack into it at all? It did not somehow seem to fit, or dovetail, or appear logical, or—— And then, with a sudden start, Billy Kane leaned tensely forward, his eyes fixed narrowly on Marco. Yes, it did dovetail! He had it now—all of it—all of the damnable, unscrupulous ingenuity of the plot that had been hatched in Laverto’s cunning brain. The frown was hidden now by the mask which Billy Kane slipped quickly over his face, but his lips just showing beneath the edge of the mask were tight and hard.