“Let go of me!  What do you want?” he cried, struggling to get free.

“You breakee glass.  You go to jailee.  Here pleecyman now.”

True enough, among the crowd that had hastily collected, was a blue-coated officer.

“Make him let me go,” exclaimed Rex, appealing to the representative of the law.  “I didn’t do anything to him.”

“Yes, he did,” called out a bystander, whose sympathies had been awakened for the much suffering heathen.  “I saw him running for all he was worth.  That’s pretty strong evidence, isn’t it?”

The policeman appeared to think so, for he came up and caught Rex by the arm.

CHAPTER VII

 REGINAND’S humiliation

Rex never felt so humiliated in his life.  Here he was, surrounded by a crowd, captured by a policeman and accused by a miserable Chinaman of breaking a pane of glass.

“It’s all a mistake, I tell you,” he cried, starting to wrest himself loose from the officer’s grasp, and then suddenly remaining passive as he reflected that this was undignified.

“What did you run for then!” questioned the policeman.

“Because he told me to—­ the fellow with the red face,” and Rex looked around in the throng to pick out the cause of his misfortune, but that individual had discreetly disappeared.

“I don’t see him now,” he went on.

“I guess you don’t,” put in the bystander who had already spoken.  “Do you run every time anybody tells you to?”

“He said there was a runaway team behind me.  Then I heard the glass break.  He must have thrown the stone himself.”

Rex tried to speak calmly, but he was boiling over with rage at the trick which he now realized had been played upon him.

“Me wantee new glass,” the Chinaman insisted.  “Play money.”

How fervently Rex wished at that moment that they had come into their inheritance.  He would have put his hand into his pocket, drawn out a five dollar bill with a lordly air and handed it over with the words:  “Take this.  I didn’t break the glass, but I pity the poor heathen’s distress.”

As it was, he had not a penny about him.  It was difficult to keep up an air of bravado under these circumstances.

The crowd was growing bigger each minute.  The policeman looked somewhat perplexed.  He judged from Rex’s appearance that he was not a hoodlum who would be likely to throw a stone at a Chinaman’s window, but he admitted that he had been running, and here was a man ready to swear that he saw him throw the stone.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Reginald Bemis Pell,” replied Rex promptly.  He was proud of his name, and brought it out now with a kind of flourish.

“Where do you live?” went on the officer, while the crowd pressed closer to hear the replies.

“At Marley.”

“You don’t look like a boy who would break windows for the fun of it.”