"Shut up, I tell you!"
There was silence for a moment and then Gell began to cry openly, and to pour out a torrent of self-reproaches. He was a coward; a wretched, miserable, contemptible coward—that's what he was and he had always known it. He would never forgive himself—never! But perhaps he had not been thinking of saving his own skin only.
"That was little Bessie Collister."
"I know."
If he had stood up to the confounded thing and confessed, and given her away, after she had been plucky and refused to speak, and his father had heard of it.... her father also.... her stepfather....
"Dan Baldromma, you know what he is, Vic?"
"Oh, yes, there would have been the devil to pay all round."
"Wouldn't there?"
"The College, too! Dan would have had something to say to old Peacock (nickname for the Principal) on that subject also."
Yes, that was what Gell had thought, and it was the reason (one of the reasons) why he had stood silent when the Principal challenged them. Nobody knew anything except the girl. The Police didn't know; the Principal didn't know. If he kept quiet the inquiry would end in nothing and there would be no harm done to anybody—except the town ruffians, and they deserved all they got. How was he to guess that somebody else was out after hours, and that to save him from being exposed, perhaps expelled, his own chum, like the brick he was and always had been....