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“I guess you’d better set up,” said Philo Gubb. “You ain’t goin’ to be able to hold up your hands if you lay down that way.”

As he helped Wixy to a sitting position, he kept his pistol against the fellow’s head.

“Now, then,” said Philo Gubb, when he had arranged his captive to suit his taste, “what you got to say?”

“I got to say I never done what you think I done, whatever it is,” said Wixy. “I don’t know what it is, but I never done it. Some other feller done it.”

“That don’t bother me none,” said Philo Gubb. “If you didn’t do it, I don’t know who did. Just about the best thing you can do is to account for the chicken and pay my expenses of getting you, and the quicker you do it the better off you’ll be.”

Pale as Wixy was, he turned still paler when Philo Gubb mentioned the chicken.

“I never killed the Chicken!” he almost shouted. “I never did it!”

“I don’t care whether you killed the chicken or not,” said Philo Gubb calmly. “The chicken is gone, and I reckon that’s the end of the chicken. But Mrs. Smith has got to be paid.”

“Did she send you?” asked Wixy, trembling. “Did Mother Smith put you onto me?”

“She did so,” said the Correspondence School detective. “And you can pay up or go to jail. How’d you like that?”

Wixy studied the tall detective.

“Look here,” he said. “S’pose I give you fifty and we call it square.” He meant fifty dollars.

“Maybe that would satisfy Mrs. Smith,” said Philo Gubb, thinking of fifty cents, “but it don’t satisfy me. My time’s valuable and it’s got to be paid for. Ten times fifty ain’t a bit too much, and if it had took longer to catch you I’d have asked more. If you want to give that much, all right. And if you don’t, all right too.”

Wixy studied the face of Philo Gubb carefully. There was no sign of mercy in the bird-like face of the paper-hanger detective. Indeed, his face was severe. It was relentless in its sternness. Five dollars was little enough to ask for two nights of first-class Correspondence School detective work. Rather than take less he would lead the chicken thief to jail. And Wixy, with his third, and half of the Chicken’s third, of the proceeds of the criminal job that had led to the death of the Chicken, knowing the relentlessness of Mother Smith, that female Fagin of Chicago, considered that he would be doing well to purchase his freedom for five hundred dollars.

“All right, pal,” he said suddenly. “You’re on. It’s a bet. Here you are.”

He slipped his hand into his pocket and drew out a great roll of money. With the muzzle of Philo Gubb’s pistol hovering just out of reach before him, he counted out five crisp one hundred dollar bills. He held them out with a sickly grin. Philo Gubb took them and looked at them, puzzled.

“What’s this for?” he asked, and Wixy suddenly blazed forth in anger.

“Now, don’t come any of that!” he cried. “A bargain is a bargain. Don’t you come a-pretendin’ you didn’t say you’d take five hundred, and try to get more out of me! I won’t give you no more–I won’t! You can jug me, if you want to. You can’t prove nothin’ on me, and you know it. Have you found the body of the Chicken? Well, you got to have the corpus what-you-call-it, ain’t you? Huh? Ain’t five hundred enough? I bet the Chicken never cost Mother Smith more than a hundred and fifty–“

“I was only thinkin’–” began Philo Gubb.

“Don’t think, then,” said Wixy.

“Five hundred dollars seemed too–” Philo began again.

“It’s all you’ll get, if I hang for it,” said Wixy firmly. “You can give Mother Smith what you want, and keep what you want. That’s all you’ll get.”

Philo Gubb could not understand it. He tried to, but he could not understand it at all. And then suddenly a great light dawned in his brain. There was something this chicken thief knew that he and Mrs. Smith did not know. The stolen chicken must have been of some rare and much-sought strain. So it was all right. The thief was paying what the chicken was worth, and not what Mrs. Smith thought it was worth in her ignorance. He slipped the money into his pocket.