“If you’ll only tell him I belong here——”
The boy did not finish the sentence, for now the ring of the officer’s club came on the door in good earnest, rattling the glass panel and echoing through the little space within like the crack of doom, as Alex afterward expressed it.
“Open up! Open up, or I’ll break the door in! I want the diamonds you stole, and I want you!”
The boys looked at each other with apprehension showing in their manner, and the stranger seemed to sense that something not on the surface was going on in their minds.
“Well, officer, what do you want?”
Clay spoke the words with his head half out of the doorway, his eyes momentarily blinded by the gleam of an electric flashlight in the red, wet hands of a heavy man in the uniform of the Chicago police.
There was a short hesitation on the policeman’s part.
“Where’s the lad who just ran in here?” he then demanded, inserting his club into the crack of the door and forcing it wide open, in spite of the efforts of the boy to retain control of it. “You?”
“No,” answered Clay, “I’m not the lad who just ran in here. What do you want?”
“You ought to know,” was the insolent rejoinder. “There’s been a diamond robbery somewhere about this pier, and I’m looking for the stones and the thief. Let me in for a look around, or it will be the station for yours.”