“Sergeant, that’s the rawest thing I ever saw you do.  I don’t believe that boy knows anything more about those ‘con’ men, and probably not as much, as you do.  It’s a shame to lock him up, and I am going to give you the hottest roast for doing so that the paper will stand for.”

“You do, and you’ll never set foot inside this station while I’m in charge,” retorted the officer.  “If you knew as much about old Dardus as I do, you wouldn’t be so keen to champion this boy.  The old man has been mixed up in many a questionable transaction, and I shouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he was in league with these fellows who got that country bumpkin’s seven hundred and fifty dollars, and that he put the boy up to playing the part he did.”

“I don’t know anything about Dardus,” announced the reporter who had taken up the cudgel in Bob’s behalf, “and I don’t care.  If he is mixed up in questionable dealings, that doesn’t mean that the boy is necessarily a party to them.  You can’t tell me that a chap, with a face as honest as that boy has, is a criminal.”

“When you’ve been doing police stations longer, Foster, you will learn that you can’t judge criminals by their faces,” snarled the sergeant, and as the other reporters heard this caustic comment, they laughed uproariously.

“Laugh if you want to,” returned Bob’s champion, “but I am going to prove the boy’s innocence of any complicity in the swindle.”

And without more ado, the reporter left the police station.

Although the representatives of the other papers had sided in with the police official who announced his belief in Bob’s guilt, they nevertheless experienced a feeling of uneasiness, lest Foster might after all be right, and they were holding consultation as to the advisability of investigating the story more thoroughly, when the sergeant exclaimed: 

“Don’t let that fellow worry you.  I’ve known Len Dardus for years.  He’s as crooked as they make them, and he never had an honest man work for him that I know of.”

As the acceptance of the police official’s theory would save them the necessity of investigating the story further, the reporters agreed to accept his version, and to accord with it they wrote their stories.

As Jack Foster left the police station, his anger at the system which made it impossible for a person without influence or money to obtain justice, was strong, and his heart went out to the boy, as he thought how he would feel, were he himself in his place.

“If that boy isn’t honest from the soles of his feet to the top of his head, I shall be the most surprised man in New York,” he said to himself, “and if my paper has any influence, I am going to get him out of his trouble.”

Occupied with considering various plans for aiding Bob, Foster quickly reached the store of Len Dardus, but as he entered and caught sight of an old, gray-haired man, with a face in which craftiness was the chief characteristic, he wondered if, after all, the police sergeant could have been right.