What was coming? He must keep his head now.
“You know how your father would feel if I couldn’t honestly say the same thing about you?”
“Why, what do you mean, Mr. Fielding?”
“Just tell me the truth, Junior, and it needn’t ever go out of this room. Does your father ever write to you at all?”
“Why, sir, you don’t think my father is the sort who wouldn’t write to his own son, do you?” Then the boy added desperately, “I don’t see why you all want to make him out a piker.”
“Did your father write the letter describing the fight with the python?”
“Look here, Mr. Fielding, you people don’t understand. I’m better friends with my father than most boys. You see, my mother’s dead and all that. So—well, don’t you see, he sort of takes it out in writing me long letters. He thought that stuff about the python would amuse me.”
He was a loyal little liar and the head master admired him for it. But it wouldn’t do. Mr. Fielding opened a drawer of his desk and took out an old magazine.
“Does your father take the National Geographic?”