The prisoner laughed in a coarse guffaw. Abruptly checking himself, he said in a whisper: “You get me out o’ here. Swipe the keys—any old way! Pass me in a saw—just so’s I get out to-night, an’ I’ll show you where you can find that automobile, good as ever she was. And—” the fellow swore venomously and wickedly—“you blab this an’ I’ll get ye fer it if I go to the chair!”
“Might as well be reasonable,” spoke the boy, frightened by the very nature of the proposal, but scarcely showing it. “I’ll help you get out if it means just paying a fine for you, if you can do all you say, but——”
“Do all I say? Don’t you think I couldn’t?”
Billy hardly knew what to say. For a few seconds he made no answer.
“Aw, I was just a kiddin’ ye,” the fellow said with a coarse laugh again, as if he had quite suddenly changed his mind.
“Oh! All right!” the boy replied indifferently. And then, moved by a sudden impulse, whose origin he could never have explained, he stepped close to the cell, “Mr. Smith, of Buffalo, has been staying at our hotel. Maybe you’d like to see him,” he said in a low tone. “He was looking for someone and I shouldn’t be surprised from what I saw of him that you are the man.”
In general it was a chance shot—a random word without particular aim, such as Fobes had used in his questioning, but Billy fully believed that the remark struck home.
“Say, kid, say, on the level is he the party His Nibbs was talkin’ about? Look ’e here, bub, you play fair with the old man that’s down an’ out. You won’t lose nothin’ by it. They’s none of ’em plays fair any more or I wouldn’t be here. You slip them very words to Smith fer me, and don’t ye breathe it to His Nibbs.”
“Where’s our machine?” persisted Worth soberly.
Again a vile oath came from the dirty lips pressed between the bars. The prisoner’s pleading manner had changed to anger. “Jest like ’em all, ain’t ye?” he said with a vicious sneer in his tone. Then he walked away. Nothing Billy could say served to draw another word from him and that young gentleman could only take his leave. This he did with the words: “We are over at the American hotel. You may want to send for us when you get a little sense.”