‘Please, sir, the other boy didn’t have nothing to do with it; he were only doing coach-wheels so as folks should throw him halfpennies,’ broke out Diamond Jubilee all of a sudden.
‘Do you mean to say he didn’t know what you were up to?’ asked the policeman in an incredulous voice.
That question spoilt it. To own that he himself had been up to anything was more than could be expected of Diamond Jubilee’s generosity. ‘I weren’t up to nothing,’ he whined; ‘I’m sure I never took the wipe. All I done were to pick it up to give the lady.’
‘Now, there’s no use in going back to that silly lie,’ said the policeman sharply, ‘for I saw you pull it out myself.’ For an instant his belief in Micky’s being an accomplice had been somewhat shaken—though the boy would surely have joined in defending himself if his conscience had been clear—but this last untruth made him set Diamond Jubilee down as an inveterate little liar whose testimony was worth nothing at all. When the child began to repeat the assertion that the other boy anyhow had had nothing to do with it, he was silenced at once with a stern ‘I can’t believe anything you say.’
As to Micky, he said not a word, partly out of a sense of chivalry towards Diamond Jubilee—if it would have been sneakish before to leave him to bear all the blame, it would be far worse now that he had been so decent—and partly because he was too proud to stand up for himself when he was sure to be disbelieved.
As the two boys and the policeman walked along more and more people kept rushing out from side streets to see what was happening, until it seemed to poor Micky that all Eastwich must be there to witness his disgrace. Well, as soon as ever he was free again, he should flee the country, he resolved fiercely. It would be unbearable to live any longer in a land where such thousands of people—Micky felt sure there must be thousands at least—where such thousands of people came to stare at you being taken to prison.
Before they had gone far, the policeman stopped at the door of a tall grim building with many windows, some of which had bars. Into this grim building he took the boys.
The crowd of gazers was just beginning to scatter, when a white-faced little girl, whose eyes were wide open with terror and dismay, came running up breathlessly from the opposite direction from the one in which the Fair lay. She looked about her distractedly as if she were hoping against hope to see somebody, and then leaned heavily against the wall of the tall grim building as though trying to steady herself.