Rex never felt so humiliated in his life. Here he was, surrounded by a crowd, captured by a policeman and accused by a miserable Chinaman of breaking a pane of glass.
“It’s all a mistake, I tell you,” he cried, starting to wrest himself loose from the officer’s grasp, and then suddenly remaining passive as he reflected that this was undignified.
“What did you run for then!” questioned the policeman.
“Because he told me to—the fellow with the red face,” and Rex looked around in the throng to pick out the cause of his misfortune, but that individual had discreetly disappeared.
“I don’t see him now,” he went on.
“I guess you don’t,” put in the bystander who had already spoken. “Do you run every time anybody tells you to?”
“He said there was a runaway team behind me. Then I heard the glass break. He must have thrown the stone himself.”
Rex tried to speak calmly, but he was boiling over with rage at the trick which he now realized had been played upon him.
“Me wantee new glass,” the Chinaman insisted. “Play money.”
How fervently Rex wished at that moment that they had come into their inheritance. He would have put his hand into his pocket, drawn out a five dollar bill with a lordly air and handed it over with the words: “Take this. I didn’t break the glass, but I pity the poor heathen’s distress.”