“Eight hundred dollars!” he cried out wildly. “Do you hear, you, the mother of that brat? Eight hundred dollars! All I have on earth! And it is gone! Stolen by that cursed young prison bird of yours! So he did not tell you, eh, that I discharged him this afternoon because I was sure he was making little stealings from me all the time? But you are not surprised, eh? Maybe he has stolen from you, too, eh?”
The woman did not answer. She seemed to shiver suddenly, and then sank down heavily in the chair before the table, near which she had been standing.
Marco paced up and down the room, back and forth, from the table to where the floor was littered with the erstwhile contents of the rifled safe.
Billy Kane’s puzzled frown grew deeper. Evidently there _had_ been money in the safe, but in some way Laverto had got it before he had set Whitie Jack at work upon a stall, and it was obvious that Laverto had maneuvered to plant the crime on the shoulders of this woman’s son. But what then had been Laverto’s object in bringing Whitie Jack into it at all? It did not somehow seem to fit, or dovetail, or appear logical, or—— And then, with a sudden start, Billy Kane leaned tensely forward, his eyes fixed narrowly on Marco. Yes, it _did_ dovetail! He had it now—all of it—all of the damnable, unscrupulous ingenuity of the plot that had been hatched in Laverto’s cunning brain. The frown was hidden now by the mask which Billy Kane slipped quickly over his face, but his lips just showing beneath the edge of the mask were tight and hard.
“I was a fool—a fool!” Marco cried out sharply. “A fool, ever to have taken him in here as my clerk! I might have known! He has already been in jail!”
“It was only the reform school.” Mrs. Clancy was wringing her hands piteously. “He is only a boy—only seventeen now. And he did not mean any harm even then—and—and since then he has been a good boy.”
“Has he?” Marco flung out a clenched fist and shook it in the air. “He has—eh? Well, then, where did he get this? Answer me that! Where did he get this?” Marco’s closed hand opened, and he threw what looked to Billy Kane like a little brooch, a miniature in a cheap setting, upon the table. “That’s you, ain’t it? That’s his mother’s picture, ain’t it? Do you think I do not recognize it? That’s you twenty years ago—eh? Did you _give_ it to him—eh? Answer me that—did you _give_ it to him?”