“What you kickin’ about, Luke,” interjected the other youth, whom Dick thought he identified as a certain bad boy of Walkhill village named Tim Bunker. “A feller that’ll steal five dollars off his old man ain’t got no reason to grumble when he’s showed how he kin make twenty times that much without any risk to mention.”
The speaker leaned forward and squirted a stream of tobacco juice into the fire, while the bearded man nodded his approval.
“I didn’t steal five dollars,” said Luke, doggedly. “I borrowed it from the till because I needed it, and I was going to put it back when I got it again.”
“Ho, ho! That ain’t the way you give it to me first. You told me how slick you got away with it, ’cause you wanted it to buy a gun you saw advertised in a Syracuse paper, and your old man wouldn’t give you the price. Then you said the old man found out he was a fiver to the bad and charged Dick Armstrong with stealing it. He skipped out ’cause he couldn’t prove he didn’t take it and didn’t wanter go to jail for what he didn’t do. And you ain’t heard nothin’ from him since, have you?”
“No, we haven’t,” growled Luke.
“After doin’ all that damage, now you want to preach us a sermon ag’inst helpin’ ourselves to a nice little bunch of dough that’s just waitin’ to be put in circulation after lyin’ in old Miser Fairclough’s strong-box these forty years. He’s a peach, ain’t he, Mudgett?” appealing to the man beside him, who at that moment was taking another drink from his flask.
“A born chump,” admitted Mudgett, wiping his lips with the cuff of his jacket. “I’m disappointed in him, Tim.”
“So’m I. Thought he had more backbone. And it’s such an easy snap, too. Just like pickin’ up money, ain’t it?” grinned the Bunker boy.
“That’s what it is,” replied Mudgett, complacently. “It was a clever idea of mine to send that old miser a letter telling him his brother, who lives in Walkhill, was dead and had left him the bulk of his money.”
“That’s right,” grinned Bunker. “Fairclough has been waitin’ for his brother to die for twenty years or more. It’s the only thing that could have got him away from his house.”