“So that’s what you were doing there, eh?” Mr. Brownell said.
The judge just said, “Let him tell his story.” I said, “We tracked him to the shop and from there we tracked him to the river. We found him asleep in the shack down there. That big box of matches belongs to him, so does the book. He admits he fell asleep in the shop, on the cotton waste, and he struck a match there——”
“Do I have to get hung?” the poor little kid cried.
I said, “He comes from the Willisville Home. He’s the kid they’ve been offering three hundred dollars’ reward for, but he’s worth more than that, that’s one sure thing——”
Then everybody began to laugh and the judge started pounding with his mallet. He said, to the kid, “Is all this true?”
“And I’m going to invent a submarine and get a thousand dollars,” the kid piped up. “These boys said I could be their partner.”
Then the judge started to ask him questions, nice and kind sort of, so as not to scare him. And everybody craned their necks and listened. I could see Charlie Slausen and he was smiling; he smiled right straight at me. I guess he saw the worst was over now, no matter what happened.
Gee whiz, nobody could say they didn’t believe that little fellow. He didn’t know how to lie, and besides he didn’t even seem to know it was wrong what he had done. So that way the judge got out of him the whole story, how he had bunked under Tony’s Lunch Wagon and all. The kid said, “So now can I be a bandit?”
The judge just said, “Well, here’s the cause of the fire, and that’s all there is to it.”
I said, “And if Chief O’Day had started to find out the way we did, he’d have been the one to discover it instead of us. You have to look for signs before you look for people. You’re supposed to make up your mind when you get through and not before you start.”