Exhibit B is a bundle. Seventeen swamp-bucks checks, drawn on funds that never existed, gone out across the pond over one long and expensive spring, recovered from three separate shell ponds and counted twice before anyone trusted the number. Seventeen. Each one is signed. Each signature is a tongue-print — the flat, honest plank, PeePoo's print to the naked eye — pressed into the pay line with real ink and real nerve. Together they are the loudest thing in the locker, and taken alone they would sink an honest frog. They are not taken alone. That is the point of a locker.
The checks are signed 'PeePoo.' They are written by the hook. The hook is not his.
Look at what kind of crime this is before you look at who it points to. Forgery is the rare offense that leaves the truth lying right next to the lie, because to sign another frog's name you must first copy it, and a copy is not the thing. These seventeen prints were not pressed freehand. They were traced. Traced is worse than forged, because tracing requires a template — a real, honest print to copy from — and the only template for PeePoo's tongue in the entire swamp is PeePoo. Somebody studied that plank up close, for a long time, from very near the next pad over, back when the two of them still shared one.
Now the tell. Lay all seventeen beside a fresh, witnessed sample of PeePoo's actual tongue and the same small thing happens seventeen times: the honest plank, faithfully copied — and then, at the very tip, where a tired forger's hand relaxes and his own nature leaks back in, the faintest ghost of a hook. A curl the copyist could not fully un-curl. You can imitate a frog's manners for a season. You cannot imitate your way out of your own tongue. The checks are signed 'PeePoo.' They are written by the hook. The hook belongs to exactly one frog, and it is not the one in the dock.
What Exhibit B proves, once B is read next to A, is not that PeePoo is guilty but that he is precisely, expensively worth framing. Seventeen checks is not a moment of weakness; it is a spring of labor, a felt-topped operation, a frog turning his own brother's honest face into a signing machine. By the time any of it was under glass the money had cleared the three shell ponds and gone out the far side into whatever a card table converts swamp-bucks into. The trail, followed honestly, led home to a frog asleep on his own pad, having eaten a sensible number of flies, who had never in his life seen a single one of the seventeen checks his tongue had apparently signed.