No answer.

“How much did you charge for butter?”

“Fifty cents a pound,” the prisoner replied, desperately or doggedly, it was difficult to determine which.

“Do you know that butter is selling now for thirty-nine or forty cents a pound?”

“Then it’s come down.”

“No, it hasn’t.  It’s been around forty cents a pound for several months.”

The prisoner fixed his eyes on the ground and said nothing.

“The trouble is, you haven’t done your wife’s grocery shopping, or you could tell a more plausible string of lies,” Mr. Buckley commented.  “Now, let me tell you this:  It’s been a long time since you saw the inside of a grocery store.”

“If you don’t want to believe me, it’s up to you,” snarled the prisoner.

“Now, Mr. Howard,” the inquisitor continued, “your friends, I am told, addressed you as Captain.  Why was that?”

This query stimulated a little brilliance in the fellow.

“I run a grocery boat on the river,” he said.  “I don’t do much clerking, but supply groceries to several stores from a wholesale house.”

“So that is your explanation for not being very familiar with retail prices, is it?” Mr. Buckley inferred.

“Yes.”

“Well,” the Government “sweater” went on, “your story doesn’t hang together very well.”

“You don’t want it to hang together,” the prisoner snapped.  “You’re here to make me out a liar.  You don’t want the truth.  You haven’t got no right to keep me here.”

“He claimed the rights of a citizen of the United States and defied us to interfere with him,” interposed Mr. Baker, who, together with Mr. Perry, had been listening eagerly to this quizzing process.

“How’s that?” Mr. Buckley demanded.

“Why, Mr. Perry’s son and I pulled guns on him and his three companions, when they threatened us with clubs, and this fellow pointed out what he said was the international boundary line between them and us and defied us to cross over and capture them.  I made my bull-dog look at him squarely in the eye and hypnotized him over onto this side of the boundary line between the United States and Canada and made a prisoner of him.”

“Where is that international boundary line?” Mr. Buckley asked.

“Right here,” Mr. Baker replied, rising from his camp chair and walking about fifteen feet to the stake that the prisoner had designated as indicating the line beyond which any hostile advance must be regarded as a foreign invasion.

“Who put that stake there?” he inquired, shifting his penetrating glance from one to another of the three men before him.

“I don’t know,” replied Mr. Perry and Mr. Baker almost in one breath.

The prisoner said nothing, and Mr. Baker spoke for him as follows: 

“If this fellow would answer, I presume the only statement he could make is that it was put there by surveyors of the Canadian and United States Governments.”