“Because I suspicioned the whole thing was a plant, just like it turned out to be, an’ I didn’t want to get an old pal into no trouble. The cipher’s an old one we used years ago, in the gang, an’ I know he wouldn’t forget it. I never thought he’d squeal on me to Blaine!”
“He didn’t. The letter––er––came into Blaine’s possession, and he read it for himself.”
“He did?” Pennold looked up quickly, with a flash of interest on his sullen face. “He’s a wonder, that Blaine! If he’d only got started the other way, the way we did, what a crook he would have made! As it is, I guess we ain’t afraid of all the organized police on earth combined, as much as we are of him. It’s a queer thing he ain’t been shot up or blown into eternity long ago, an’ yet they say he’s never guarded. He must be a cool one! Anyhow, I’m glad Jimmy didn’t squeal on me; I’d hate to think it of him. When I went to see him about the bonds, he wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with them. Swore they was a plant, he did, an’ warned me off. He seemed real excited, considerin’ he had nothin’ to worry about, but I took his word for it, an’ beat it. That’s the last I seen of him.”
“Did you send your nephew to him?”
“Me?” Pennold’s tones quickened in surprise. “I ain’t seen him in a long while, an’ I don’t believe he even remembers old Jimmy; he was only a kid when Jimmy went up the river. What would I send Charley for, when I’d gone myself an’ it hadn’t worked?”
It was evident to Morrow that the man he was interrogating was ignorant of Brunell’s connection with the Lawton case, and he changed his tactics.
“Tell me about Charley. You say you tried to do right by him.”
“Of course I did! Wasn’t he my brother’s boy?” 181 Pennold hunched over the table, and continued eagerly: “Mame kept him clean an’ fed, an’ we sent him to public school, just like any other kid. But it wasn’t no use. He had it in him to go wrong, without the wit to get away with it. He was caught pinchin’ lead piping when he was sixteen, an’ sent to Elmira for three years. Them three years was his finish. When he came out he’d had what you’d call a graduate course in every form of crookedness under the sun, from fellers harder an’ cleverer than he’d ever thought of bein’, an’ he was bitter besides, an’ desperate. There wasn’t no chance for him then, an’ he just drifted on down the line. I never heard of him turnin’ a real trick himself, an’ he never got caught at nothin’ again, but he chummed in with the gang, an’ he always seemed to have coin enough. I ain’t seen him in more’n a year. The last I heard of him, he was workin’ as a stool-pigeon an’ snitcher for the worst scoundrel of the lot.”
“Who was that?” asked Morrow.
Pennold hesitated and then replied with dogged reluctance.