“I am.”
“Have ye been drinking?”
“I have not.”
“What did ye do to him?”
“I did everything,” said Mr. Miles Morse with a long reminiscent sigh of utter satisfaction, “but bite him.”
“Ye told me,” accused Molly with heaving bosom, “that it would be a strictly peaceable errand.”
“So it would,” replied the other calmly, “if he hadn't said something about you.” Molly's brown eyes widened and brightened with amazement. Her lips parted. “About me!” she said. Then she committed what the lawyers call a non sequitur. “Mother of all the Saints!” cried Molly. “How old are ye?”
“Thirty-seven years and four months,” replied the Meanest Man in Our Square gravely.
“And me thinking—” He never found out what she was thinking, for she broke off abruptly, and said: “Clap a bit of raw beef to that cheek,” and vanished from his sight.
No Molly appeared for breakfast in the morning. In her stead arrived a court officer with a warrant in which the term “feloniously” played a conspicuous and dispiriting part. At court Miles Morse, prisoner, found a delegation from Our Square awaiting him, including Molly, Cyrus the Gaunt, the Bonnie Lassie, Terry the Cop, and Inky Mike, the tipster disguised in a clean collar and taking copious notes with an absorbed and ferocious expression, with a view to daunting wrongdoers by the prospective fierce white light of the Press. This was part of the Bonnie Lassie's strategy. So also was the presence of Merrivale, the young lawyer of the Legal Aid branch, for the Bonnie Lassie had correctly guessed that the accused would disdain to spend money on a lawyer. As he awaited his turn at the bar of judgment (before Wolf Tone Hanrahan, the Human Judge, his friends remarked with satisfaction) Terry the Cop caught sight of his damaged knuckles. “I always said he had a grand pair of hands,” murmured Terry to the Bonnie Lassie.