“You couldn’t do anything else,” said Cooper.
“I could have told the truth, couldn’t I?”
“That would have been peaching; that would have been blowing on us all. You couldn’t do that.”
“If you fellows have got the notion that we’re going to hide and escape through lying and deception, you’d better give it up. We’ll have to shoulder our part of the blame, sooner or later.”
“That’s fine!” sighed Chipper dolefully. “My father hasn’t used the strap on me for some time, but I’m going to pad my trousers in preparation for the coming walloping.”
“I’d like to pup-punch old Shultz!” rasped Springer. “He’s the one that’s to bub-blame for it all.”
“No,” contradicted Piper promptly, “we can’t duck behind any such excuse. If we hadn’t been there it never would have happened, for it takes more than two or three to make up a decent game of poker. We were all doing something on the sly—something that we didn’t wish respectable people to know about, and something we mortally dread to have them find out about.”
“Dread it!” groaned Chipper. “I should say I do!”
“It wasn’t a cuc-crime,” spluttered Springer, in an attempt at justification.
“I don’t know about that,” snapped Billy. “Gambling is illegal, and so it was a crime.”