"Yes. We dined with him at the club that evening, and adjourned afterward to his rooms to have a little music."
"Ah! Just so. Seeing how pleasantly things had been going in the bank that day, and that his particular friend Cresswell had decamped with fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Hampstead was celebrating the occasion. Now, I suppose that, taking in the cost of the dinners and the wine—or rather, excuse me—the music, and all the rest of it, you got the impression that Mr. Hampstead had a good deal of money that night?"
"That's none of your business," said Sappy, firing up. "Mr. Hampstead spends his money like a gentleman. I suppose he did spend a good deal that night, and generally does."
"Very good," said Rankin.
He then went on to ask questions about Hampstead's salary and his probable expenses, but perhaps this was to kill time, for he kept looking toward the door, as if he expected somebody to come in. Finally he let poor Sappy depart in peace, after making him show beyond any doubt that Geoffrey wore this waistcoat at the time of the theft at the bank—that the garment was old fashioned, and that it had seemed peculiar that Hampstead, a man of some fashion, should be wearing it.
Patsey Priest was now called, and he slunk in from an adjoining room, in company with a policeman. He had a fixed impression in his mind that Geoffrey was his prosecutor, and that he was going to be charged with stealing liquors, cigars, tobacco, and clothes. He was prepared to prove his innocence of all these crimes, but he trembled visibly. His mother had put his oldest clothes upon him, as poverty, she thought, might prove a good plea before the day was out. The difference between his garments and those of the previous witness was striking. His skin, as seen through the holes in his apparel, suggested how, by mere laches, real estate could become personalty.
"Where were you on Wednesday night last, about one or two o'clock in the evening?"
"I wus in Mr. 'Ampstead's rooms part of the time."
"Did you ever see that waistcoat before?"
"Yes, I did, and he gev it to me, so help me on fourteen Bibles, as I kin prove by five or six gents right in front of me over there, and its altogether wrong ye are fur to try and fix it on to a poor boy as has to get his livin' honest and support his mother, and her a widder—"