'This gentleman is--eh--a chiropodist, and eh--come, come!' Joel Ham slashed the desk: the boys hastened to remove their left boots, handed them to the stranger, and watched him curiously as he examined them at the desk.

The astonished scholars could see little, but the man in drab had two plaster casts before him and he was deliberately comparing the boys' boots with these.
When he came to Dick's boot he turned carelessly to the master and said: 'This is our man.' 'Richard Haddon, the first boy on the back seat.' The chiropodist did not look up.
'Boy with red hair,' he said.

'Mixed up in that Cow Flat road affair.
Evidently an enterprising nipper, on the high road to the gallows.' Joel Ham drew thumb and forefinger from the corners of his mouth to the point of his chin, and blinked his white lashes rapidly.
'No,' he said, quite emphatically; 'I don't often give advice--sensible people don't need it, fools won't take it--but you might waste time by regarding that boy's share in this business from a wrong point of view.
If he has had a hand in it--and I have no doubt of it since his foot appears--think of him at the worst as the accomplice of some scoundrel cunning enough to impose upon the folly of a romantic youngster stuffed with rubbishy fiction, and gifted with an extraordinarily adventurous spirit.' This was perhaps the longest speech ever made by Joel Ham in ordinary conversation since he came to Waddy, and it quite exhausted him.

The stranger yawned pointedly.
'Where does he live ?' he asked.
'Third house down the road.

Mother a widow.' 'Right.