"You're taking a sentimental attitude about a business matter. It's natural enough that you should. I'm sorry for you, son."
"Why——"
The Judge drew himself up a shade straighter in his chair, and met the boy's insistent challenge with sudden dignity, kindly but judicial, peculiarly his own, but his flashes of it were not very frequent now.
"Neil," he said deliberately, "I've got nothing to say to you alone. I've got nothing to say to you at all that Mr. Burr hasn't said. Is that quite clear to you?"
It was entirely clear. The Judge had left no room for uncertainty or argument, and the boy did not attempt to argue or even to answer. He stood looking uncertainly down at the Judge, as if for the moment he could not see anything in the room quite distinctly, the Judge's face, with its near-sighted blue eyes and red-gold beard and thinning hair, or Colonel Everard's clear-cut profile.
"Better go," said the Judge gently.
"I'd better go," the boy repeated mechanically, but he did not move.
Colonel Everard put down his papers deliberately, and favoured him with a glance, amused and surprised, as if he had not expected to find him still in the room, and was prepared to forget at once that he was there; a disconcerting sort of glance, but the boy's brown eyes met it gallantly, and cleared as they looked. They grew bright and defiant again, with a little laugh in the depths of them. The ghost of a laugh, too, lurked in the boy's low voice somewhere.
"You're right, Judge. I'll go. I'm wasting my time here," he said, "asking you who's back of what you've done to me—when I know. I won't ask you again, but I'll ask you, I'll ask you both, who's back of everything that's crooked or wrong in this town? Little or big, he's back of it all; straight back of it, or well back of it, hiding his face and pulling the wires. He's to blame for it all, for he's made the town what it is.
"He's got his hand on the neck of the town, and got hold of it tighter, gradual, so nobody saw it and knocked it off; tighter and tighter, squeezing the life out. He never made a gift to the town with one hand that he didn't take it back with the other. What the town gets without him giving it, he won't let it keep. The whole town's got his stamp on it, grafting and lying and putting up a front. The whole town's afraid of him. The Judge here, that's the best man in town, don't dare call his soul his own. Me, I'm afraid of him, too, and the only reason I dare stand up and say to his face what's said behind his back is because I've got nothing to lose. It's him, there——"