“You, Sanders! Git up and talk turkey! We’ve got you dead to rights. No lies, now!”
Snake, sitting up, dizzily eyed each hard face.
“Wha—wha’d ye want?” he muttered thickly.
“Stand up! Back against that wall! Come on, move! And don’t pull any gay stuff. You got some explainin’ to do, and the less wigglin’ and dodgin’ you try the better off you’ll be. Understand?”
Snake got up, looking confused. The other three also glanced in a puzzled way at the officers. Here was a murderer, condemned by the revelations of the woman whom he had hurled to her doom; why did they not drag him out forthwith? They acted as if they only meant to question him, and then, perhaps, let him go.
But Douglas, studying Ward, felt that the man-hunter knew what he was about, and said nothing. Marion and Steve, too, kept silence. Sanders slouched against the blank inner wall designated by Ward.
“Now git this in your head, first off,” Ward said crisply. “We’ve been in here quite awhile. We’ve been learnin’ a lot—about you. It’ll do you no good to try any lyin’. You come clean, and you may save a lot of trouble all around. Know what I mean?”
Snake nodded dubiously, but with hope beginning to glimmer in his shifting eyes. Douglas saw light. This assumption of omniscience and of infallibility in detecting falsehood, this intimation that full confession would benefit the prisoner—these were part of the stock-in-trade of policedom, as the ex-newspaperman well knew. They formed both a wordless threat and an unexpressed promise: absolutely non-committal, yet subtly potent.
“Well, then, what about this lad? Did he do that burnin’ and shootin’, or did you? Remember he’s right here, listenin’ to what you say. Bill, move over a little. Sanders, you look the kid right in the eye. Now then! What about it?”
As Bill, hovering ready at Sanders’ left, drew back, Snake turned unwillingly and looked at Steve. The youth made no movement, spoke no word; but his glittering eyes bored into Snake’s inmost being. Under that baleful glare, under the chill scrutiny of four other pairs of eyes, the yellow soul of Sanders shriveled. He quailed visibly. Shifting his gaze, he encountered again the piercing orbs of Ward.