“Oh, yes, you are—not,” flung back Fred scornfully. “After what you’ve done——”
“Now wait; stop right there,” interrupted Sleuth. “I’ve simply done my duty, although in your position you may not regard it as such. If my brother was a bank robber and an escaped convict, perhaps I’d feel hard toward anyone who tried to send him back to prison, but at the same time I’m sure my sense of justice——”
“Bosh! That sort of tommyrot gives me a cramp. Besides, my brother is an innocent man.”
Sleuth lifted his eyebrows and shrugged incredulously.
“He’s innocent, I tell you!” panted Fred fiercely.
“It looks that way, don’t it!” said the young amateur detective, unable in spite of his professed sympathy for Sage, to repress a slight sneer.
“No, it doesn’t look that way,” admitted the other boy. “I own up that it must seem that he’s surely guilty. Here come some people, Piper. They’ll stand around and listen. We can’t talk here. Won’t you come with me some place where we’ll be by ourselves, with no rubbernecks around?”
Sleuth hesitated a moment. “I can see the lawyers later,” he muttered presently. “As long as it’s you, Fred, and you’re so badly broken up, I’ll do what you want, though again I must say I’m sure it’s useless.”
When Sile Crane and Chub Tuttle attempted to follow them as they turned down the street Fred whirled and almost snarled:
“What do you fellows want? Can’t you let us have a little private talk?”