“So you see, Chief, Benjy didn’t know anything about it until, as he says, he felt something heavy in his pocket, and when he pulled that gold watch out he just stood and stared at it till Mr. Garrison saw him. And of course you wouldn’t want to arrest a boy who was helping to recover the lost goods, would you, sir?”
A general laugh went up at that. The baffled clerk saw that it would be only foolishness for him to persist in his charge after this manful defense of Benjy.
“Oh, if that’s the case and you saw all that happened, Hugh, of course I withdraw my charge. But as you said, I’m so flustrated by this terrible event that I hardly know what I’m doing. So let it drop, Chief, and please get started after the thief. He is in a buggy, and surely you ought to overtake him with your swift auto. If the neighboring towns are notified, he would be apprehended should he try to pass through any of them. It is a serious business with my employer, because the best goods in the store were taken.”
Lige gave the clerk a long, savage look, as though the incident had made such an indelible impression on his mind that it must haunt him for many a day.
Some of those present followed the Chief as he hurried back to police headquarters. Others remained to listen to what was said by the clerk in answer to the numerous sharp questions put by the shocked owner of the establishment, who was engaged in shaking his head and walking nervously up and down, now and then wringing his hands and declaring that he would be ruined unless the thief were apprehended and the goods reclaimed.
Hugh and Billy were about to walk away when Lige strode sullenly up to them. He looked straight into the eyes of the scout leader, and there was an expression on his dark face that probably no one had ever seen there before. Hugh understood. He realized that his simple little defense of Benjy had done more to reach the depths of this wild boy’s heart than anything that could possibly have happened. Had it been a favor done toward himself, Lige would doubtless have striven to pay it back and then wiped the remembrance of the whole occurrence from the tablets of his mind. But he had received such a cruel shock at hearing his little brother accused of being a thief and threatened with arrest, that the act of Hugh in clearing him assumed a magnitude in his opinion far beyond its real value.