"Did you?" responded Lyon, looking at his watch. "I must be going on. I've been killing time till I could see a man down town."
"It was a lively fight. There is a Boston terrier up in our neighborhood that is a fighter. I don't like fighting dogs myself,--and this one is a terror. He is always pitching on to some poor little fellow that isn't big enough to stand up to him, and doesn't have a chance to run. I broke my cane over him."
"Indeed?" murmured Lyon, with polite indifference. Then the echo of the words rang through the silence of his mind,--louder and louder, until he pulled up with a start, as though some one had been calling to him for a long time and he had just become conscious of it. "You broke your cane over him?" he repeated, and it seemed to him that everything about him suddenly stood still till he should get the answer. "Was that here,--in this hollow?"
"Yes. He's a big brute of a dog, and he had the little fellow by the throat--"
"Yes, yes. What did you do with the pieces?"
"The pieces of the cane?"
"Yes. What did you do with them?"
The old man laughed somewhat slyly. "Edith doesn't like to hear about things like that. She thinks that I am too old to go in and straighten out a dog-fight. I don't tell her when anything of that sort happens."
"I see," said Lyon eagerly. "So you hid the pieces?"
The old man nodded cannily. "She'd never miss the cane. I have a lot of other walking sticks. But if she saw the broken pieces, she'd get the whole story out of me."