'I looked right down on him, close as I am to you. I was walking along over that cut where the train comes through. Gee, his head looked three-cornered! I yelled, but the engineer didn’t know what I meant. Anyhow, they wouldn’t have stopped—nothing but a hobo.'
'No good if they had,' an older speaker took up the words. 'He was done for. Didn’t speak but once after they got him off. "Don’t hit me," he says. I s’pose when they run into the tunnel and whatever it was jammed into him—'
'He didn’t get hurt in any tunnel,' Robbins asserted. The color flared into his face with the intensity of his conviction. The horrid memory of the man set him to blinking. 'He couldn’t get hurt if he was lying down, could he? And if he was standing up, it’d knock him off, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t any tunnel—'
He broke off, aware suddenly of the smiling ridicule in the faces round him. Grotend, brother-in-law to the coroner who had held the inquest, laughed good-temperedly.
'Go it, William J. Burns, Junior! I s’pose some fancy murderer crawled up on top between stations. Or he got jolted down out of an air-ship. It’d take something like that—'
Grotend was popular with the group. Their ready laughter rewarded the attack. And the younger boy’s crimson misery was an invitation to further teasing.
'You hadn’t ought to be stingy with bright ideas like that, Nelse. He sent you an anonymous letter, didn’t he? Or maybe you saw a man in a black mask beating him up—'
'No, I didn’t!' said Robbins loudly. He cast about desperately in his mind for a means of escape. 'I didn’t see anybody beating him up, but I saw Jim Whiting coming down off the end of the car.'
A hush followed his statement—a tribute to the weight of it. Grotend, his lips parted for a fresh jibe, drew in his breath sharply as though in the shock of a cold douche. Then,—
'You saw Jim Whiting?' he reiterated.