Page:Train - Tutt and Mr Tutt (Scribner, 1922).djvu/214

 "I want you to have them!" His voice trembled.

"Well, well!" answered Mr. Tutt. "Leave it that way; but if you ever should want them they'll be here waiting for you."

"I'm no Indian giver!" replied Doc with dignity. "Give, give, give a thing—never take it back again."

He laughed rather childishly. He was evidently embarrassed.

"Could—could you let me have the loan of seventy-five cents?" he asked shyly.

Down below, inside a doorway upon the other side of the street, Sergeant Murtha of the Detective Bureau waited for Doc Barrows to come out and be arrested again. Murtha had known Doc for fifteen years as a harmless old nut who had rarely succeeded in cheating anybody, but who was regarded as generally undesirable by the authorities and sent away every few years in order to keep him out of mischief. There was no danger that the public would accept Doc's version of the nature or value of his securities, but there was always the chance that some of his worthless bonds—those bastard offsprings of his cracked old brain—would find their way into less honest but saner hands. So Doc rattled about from penitentiary to prison and from prison to madhouse and out again, constantly taking appeals and securing writs of habeas corpus,