“Did you think I didn’t know what I was doing when I picked you, Tommy?”
Tom could not answer, but sat there with his breast heaving, his hand on Mr. Conne’s knee.
“Did you just find your brother there by accident, Tom?”
“I—I got to be—ashamed——”
“Yes,” Mr. Conne said kindly; “you’ve got to be ashamed of him. But you see, I haven’t got to be ashamed of you, have I? How’d you find out about it? Tell me the whole thing, Tom.”
And so, sitting there with this shrewd man who had befriended him, Tom told the whole story as he could not have told it to anyone else. He went away back into the old Barrel Alley days, when he had “swiped” apples from Adolf Schmitt and his brother Bill had worked in Schmitt’s grocery store. He told how it used to make him mad when his brother “got licked unfair,” as he said, and he did not know why Mr. Conne screwed up his face at that. He told about how he “had to decide quick, kind of,” when the officers confronted him in his brother’s stateroom, and how the thought about Uncle Sam being his uncle had decided him. He told how he had had to keep his face turned away from his brother so that he “wouldn’t feel so mean, like.” And here again Mr. Conne gave his face another screw and Tom did not understand why. That was one trouble with Tom Slade—he was so thick that he could not understand a lot of things that were perfectly plain to other people.