Gibbs looked hurt.
"Joe," he said, "I've known you for forty years, and that's the only mean thing you ever said to me."
"Well, don't get sore, Dan," Mason said. "I knew you would--only--"
The marshal cut them short and marched the prisoners out of the court-room. Outside in the street the prison-van was waiting, the van that had been ordered before the hearing, to take the prisoners to the station.
IX
It was several days before Marriott saw Gibbs again, and then he appeared at Marriott's office with a companion and leaned for an instant unsteadily against the door he had carefully closed. Marriott saw that he was changed, and that it was the change drink makes in a man. Gibbs sank helplessly into a chair, and stared at Marriott blankly. He was not the clean, well-dressed man Marriott had beheld in him before. He was unshaven, and the stubble of his beard betrayed his age by its whiteness; the pupils of his eyes were dilated, his lips stained with tobacco. His shoes were muddy, one leg of his trousers was turned up; and his lack of a collar seemed the final proof of that moral disintegration he could not now conceal. When he had been there a moment the atmosphere was saturated with the odor of alcohol.
"My friend, Mr. McDougall," said Gibbs, toppling unsteadily in his chair, as he waved one fat hand at his companion, a heavy blond fellow, six feet tall, well dressed and dignified.
"I've gone to the bad," said Gibbs. Marriott looked at him in silence. The fact needed no comment.
"The way those coppers jobbed Mason was too much for me," Gibbs went on. "Worst I ever seen. I couldn't stand for it, it put me to the bad."
"Well, you won't do him any good, at that--" McDougall began.