Justice Winters said, “Well, what’s all the trouble?”
The big man told him that they gave us the chase out of Utica. Can you beat that? A flivver chasing a Cadillac! Excuse me, while I laugh. He told the Justice how we had reached Utica very early in the morning and had stopped at a hotel, and how a porter who was cleaning up in the sheds had seen the things under the back seat of the car. Then he said how we left very suddenly and, several hours later, were seen passing through Utica again with a different number on our machine. He didn’t say anything about Mr. Ragtime Sandbanks. Gee whiz, I didn’t blame him for that.
But Harry wasn’t going to let him off so easy. He said, “You forgot to tell the Justice about the murder we committed. We wish to plead guilty to that.”
Oh, gee, that poor man; he had to tell about the whole business, how they hunted around in the water and found the rag dummy. That Justice scowled, kind of, and I guess he didn’t know what it all meant, but anyway, he had to smile. “That shows we’re innocent,” Pee-wee spoke up, “because if a thing isn’t alive, you can’t murder it, can you?”
Justice Winters sort of smiled and he said, no, you couldn’t.
After he had listened to what all those men had if say, he said, “Well, you wish to make a charge against these people?”
“I want ’em held for complicity,” that’s what the big man said.
“That’s one thing we didn’t do, anyway,” Pee-wee said; “complicity. How did we complicit?” Justice Winters smiled kind of, and began rooting around among a lot of papers. He said, “Well, I’m glad you caught these fellows, because they’re wanted.”
The big man said, “I knew there was something wrong when I heard of their coming back through Utica with a different license plate and getting off the state road and cutting up through the hills. They was looking to get off the main line of travel.”
Justice Winters said, “We have already received a phone message to have them stopped when they passed through the town. Judge West of Crystal Falls, lost no time in having them traced. It is fortunate that you caught them, though our own authorities were on the watch.” He began rooting among his papers some more, and pretty soon he picked up a long envelope.