Now, if this goes agin me, I'm out at least thirty thousand dollars; and between you and I, I don't mind givin' a cool two thousand, or three, or mebby five, right out of pocket, cash down, to anybody whose testimony, without bein' a lie--I don't want nobody to swear false, remember--but, heaven and earth, can't a body furgit a little, and keep back a lot if they want to ?' 'What are you trying to say to me ?' Harold asked, his face pale with resentment, as he suspected the man's motive.
'Say to you?
Nothin', only that I'll give five thousand dollars down to the chap whose testimony gits me off and flings old Wilson.' 'Mr.Peterkin,' Harold said, looking the old wretch full in the face, 'if you are trying to bribe me, let me tell you at once that I am not to be bought.

I shall not volunteer information, but shall answer truthfully whatever is asked me.' 'Go to thunder, then! I always knew you were a bad aig,' Peterkin roared; and as there was nothing to be made from Harold, he changed his seat to try his tactics elsewhere.
Left to himself, Harold had time to think of the diamonds, which, indeed, had not been absent from his thoughts a moment, since Jerrie gave them to him.

They were closely buttoned in his coat pocket, where they burned like fire, as he wondered where and how Jerrie had found them.
'In the Tramp House it must have been,' he said to himself; 'but who put them there, and how did she chance to find them, and why did she look so wild and excited, so like a crazy person, when she gave them to me, bidding me let no one see them ?' These questions he could not answer, and his brain was all in a whirl when the train reached Springfield, and, with the others, he registered himself at the hotel.

Suddenly, like a gleam of lightning seen through a rift of clouds, there came back to him, with a horrible distinctness, the words the child Jerry had spoken to him that day years ago, when he had walked homeward with her through the leafy woods from the Park House, where he had been questioned so closely by Mrs.Tracy with regard to her diamonds and what he had been doing in the house on the morning of their disappearance.
'I know where those diamonds are, but I shan't tell while there is such a fuss,' she had said, and in his abstraction he had scarcely noticed it then, but it came back to him now with fearful significance, making him sick, and faint, and cold, although the great drops of sweat stood thickly upon his lips and under his hair, as, after the gas was lighted, he sat alone in a little reception-room opening from one of the parlors.
Did Jerrie know where they were, and had she known all the time and not spoken?
And, if so, was she not guilty as an accessory, at least in trying to shield another?
For that she took them herself he never for a moment dreamed.

It was some one else, and she knew and did not tell.