“He ought not to have sent you to jail,” said Mrs. Nelson, positively. “And I suppose they treated you awfully. Did they flog you much?”
“No, they didn’t,” said Jim. “They never flog anybody. It’s the best place in the world for loads of those boys. They get a chance to learn something and they have to behave themselves. What I mean is that I didn’t do anything to go there for, and I didn’t belong there. They’re the best kind of men for the boys that ought to be there.”
He really came up with a good deal of energy to the defence of the House of Refuge and its management, but he was tremendously in earnest in his assertion that he would not go back there again. He had hardly completed his wonderful story of escape, before the door of the kitchen opened, half stealthily, and they heard the voice of Mrs. Kirby:
“Go right in, Millie. Don’t say a word. Don’t speak about him. Somebody else might be there and hear you. Don’t you run any risk of anybody’s knowing what they’re for. If they don’t fit him, I can alter them——”
“Come right in, Mrs. Kirby,” called out Mrs. Nelson, but Millie was in first, with her arms full of coats, trousers and other matters, that had nothing grey about them.
“That’s the checker!” shouted Rod. “That old blue. It’s patched, some, but it’ll do first-rate. He won’t look like the same fellow. Come on, Jim. Come into the front room and put ’em on. Mother, you tell ’em just how it was.—Guess the cops won’t get him out of our house.”
There was plainly no danger that anybody now in it would help them, and Jim’s possible peril from anybody else was certainly very much less when, a few minutes later, he came back into the kitchen. Mrs. Nelson had, meantime, been telling his story, as he told it, with sympathetic additions of her own.
“It fits him!” shouted Millie, but her mother exclaimed:
“Rodney! What did you put on him that old red necktie for?”
“Guess there isn’t anything like it on Randall’s Island,” said Rodney. “All he’s got to do, now, is to keep still till they stop hunting for him.”