"Now, what are you thinking about?" asked the visitor, as Moran held his hand and looked him full in the face.
"Oh!" said the prisoner, motioning the reporter to a chair which the jailor had just brought in, "I was thinking what a waste of physical strength it was for you to spend your time pushing a pencil over a sheet of paper."
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure. What were you thinking about?"
"The trial of the robbers who held up the Denver Limited at Thorough-cut some eight or ten years ago. You look like the man who gave one of them a black eye, and knocked him from the engine, branding him so that the detectives could catch him."
Moran smiled. He had been thinking on precisely the same subject, but, being modest, he did not care to open a discussion of a story of which he was the long-forgotten hero. "It strikes me," said Moran, "as rather extraordinary that we should both recall the scene at the same time."
"Not at all," said the reporter. "The very fact that one of us thought of it at the moment when our hands and eyes met would cause the other to remember."
"Perhaps you reported the case for your paper, that we saw each other from day to day during the long trial, and that I remembered your face faintly, as you remembered mine. Wouldn't that be a better explanation?"
"No," said the journalist cheerfully. "I must decline to yield to your argument, and stick to my decision. What I want to talk to you about, Mr. Moran, is not your own case, save as it may please you, but about the mysterious death of Engineer Cowels."
"I know less about that, perhaps, than any man living," said Moran frankly.