Bartley Bradstone sank back out of sight, and, being out of sight, wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
Mr. McAndrew looked after the carriage for a moment or two, passing his hand over his mouth in the manner peculiar to him; then turned and made his way to the jail.
The governor of her Majesty’s prison at Wainford was a certain Colonel Summerford; a gentleman, and a man of sound common sense. He had been governor for nearly twenty years, but during all that long experience he had never had so strange and puzzling an inmate as Harold Faradeane. Colonel Summerford knew the ordinary jail-bird by heart, and understood every song that bird could sing; but this man, charged with the murder of a woman in Hawkwood woods, scattered all the good colonel’s experiential theories and ideas, like chaff before the wind. In the first place, the colonel saw that his “new man” was a gentleman; and, secondly, that he was no fool, as some gentlemen—too many, alas!—often are. He felt greatly interested in him, and did his best to make him as comfortable as a prisoner committed for trial on a capital offence can be made. He gave him the largest and airiest cell, and, in fact, treated him as a man who, though accused, has not yet been found guilty.
Mr. McAndrew arrived at the prison about half an hour after Faradeane’s return, and found the colonel walking up and down his office in deep thought.
“Good-morning, colonel,” said the detective, putting his head in at the door and touching his hat with his forefinger in farmer fashion.
“Ah! is that you, Mr. McAndrew? Come in,” responded the governor. “You have just come from court, I suppose? You have got a more interesting case than country ones usually are, eh?”
“Yes,” assented Mr. McAndrew; “it is rather interesting.”
“Confound the man!” exclaimed the colonel. “I wish they hadn’t brought him here,” and he tugged at his mustache.
“Gives you a lot of trouble?”
“Not a bit. That’s just it. Look here, McAndrew, I can’t make him out.”