"I won't if I can help it."
"By which you mean—?"
"If I'm asked right out, Did you throw the chisel at him? I'll have to say Yes; but short of that I'll do all I can to get you out of the scrape. I'd have been in it myself if I'd been standin' where you were."
"Only you'd have owned up at once, whereas I'm not going to," said Gardiner, with a short laugh. "I might have known you couldn't tell a lie, Denis. Here, I can't find this confounded thing. Where the devil can it have got to?"
Denis, putting his qualms in his pocket, went down on his knees and joined in the search. They looked all over the room, in every corner.
"I should say it must be underneath him," said Gardiner, with a reflective glance at the body, "but I don't know that I exactly want to look and see."
Denis with an uncontrollable shudder got up and retreated to the window.
"How can you talk like this? You make me sick!"
"My good Denis, I don't feel like a murderer before the corpse of his victim, if that's what you're driving at! I deny that I was in the least to blame. Anybody with a spark of decent feeling must have done what I did. If he broke his head, poor brute, that wasn't my fault; it's what you might call the act of God. I'm not going to prison, if I can help it, for a crime I haven't committed. In the meantime, I want my chisel."
"Well, it's not—where you suggest," said Denis with an effort, "for I remember seeing it after he fell."