However, the statement that no sensible person could have connected the Magsworth Bitts family with the arsenical Rena takes no account of Penrod Schofield.
Penrod never missed a murder, a hanging or an electrocution in the newspapers; he knew almost as much about Rena Magsworth as her jurymen did, though they sat in a court-room two hundred miles away, and he had it in mind--so frank he was--to ask Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior, if the murderess happened to be a relative.
The present encounter, being merely one of apathetic greeting, did not afford the opportunity.

Penrod took off his cap, and Roderick, seated between his mother and one of his grown-up sisters, nodded sluggishly, but neither Mrs.Magsworth Bitts nor her daughter acknowledged the salutation of the boy in the yard.

They disapproved of him as a person of little consequence, and that little, bad.

Snubbed, Penrod thoughtfully restored his cap to his head.

A boy can be cut as effectually as a man, and this one was chilled to a low temperature.