Finally Whalen tired of the examination. He breathed with difficulty, but that may have been due to his disease. At last he raised his shaven head.
“Mr. Gilman,” he said, “I see what you’re getting at. I have told you I did not commit the crime for which I am here. For that matter, any of the three thousand other prisoners within these walls and wearing these clothes will tell you the same thing. I don’t know whether you believe me or not. It doesn’t make much difference. It doesn’t matter what becomes of me any more. I ain’t long for this world. So just let it drop—what’s the use of opening it up again?”
“But you haven’t answered my question,” said Gilman, interested in spite of himself, for a great fear was growing up within him; “you have not told me who did kill Brokoski.”
The convict lifted his eyelids slowly, and fastened his vision upon his interlocutor. And then he said very deliberately and distinctly:
“No, Mr. Gilman, and I never will!”
Gilman left the penitentiary with more than its gloom upon him. He declined the warden’s effusive invitation to stay to dinner. He wanted to get away. He could not forget the shine in Whalen’s eyes. And the fear within possessed him.
When he reached the city, after dining at the chop house where his old friends foregathered, he went out to Fifteenth Street. Costello had sold his barber shop, and the place had become a saloon. The saloon was quiet that night. Gilman drank with the bartender, and, of course, talked about the Brokoski killing. The bartender had made a study of that case, and discussed it with the curled lip of the specialist.
“They didn’t do a t’ing to Tom but t’row the hooks into ’im all right, all right. It was a case of him in the stripes from the start. Say, them lawyer guys and fly-cops’d frost you.”
Then carefully locating the actors in the tragedy, he reproduced it vividly before Gilman’s eyes. Brokoski had faced the wall where the hole was. Whalen’s back had been to it. Brokoski had sat with his back to the window. The barkeeper plunged his red hands into a drawer, rattled a corkscrew, a knife, a revolver and a jigger, and then drew out a small piece of lead. It was a thirty-eight caliber bullet.
“That’s the boy that done Brokoski,” he said.