He paused and I meditated awhile, puzzling as to how I could have incurred the vindictive rancor of any secret-service agent.
Presently I said:
"Tell me how you came to be King of the Highwaymen."
"My boy," he said, "my case is far different from yours. You had an honorable origin and an honorable past. Nor were any of your adventures discreditable to you, even if some situations you have been in were distressing then and are humiliating to remember. You have nothing to be ashamed of unless it be such a trifling peccadillo as impersonating Salsonius Salinator.
"My origin I shall never disclose, not even to a brother in misfortune. My life has been one long series of perjuries, murders, robberies, debaucheries and ruthless cruelties. I have been deaf to all considerations of decency, pity and mercy; as unmoved by such feelings as will be the savage beasts which spared you but will rend me to shreds. I am at the end of my crimes; let me hide them. My doom is at hand. Why should I defile your ears with the tale of my atrocities? Let them remain untold."
"You slander yourself," I demurred. "You cannot make me believe that a man capable of condoning my balking of your great coup on the Flaminian Highway, capable of guiding me to this bed of straw and of offering me a share of his bit of stale bread can be all bad. There must be much in your past life less dark than you indicate."
He ruminated.
"Frankly," he said, "I cannot recall anything I ever did at which a man like you would not shudder. I have been a good sport, that is why I could not but chuckle, after my first wrath cooled, at your spoiling my great coup, as you call it. But, all my life, I have gloried in my treacheries and cruelties. I have hated all mankind and been merciless to foes, if they came into my power, and have pretended friendliness I did not feel so as to make use of those who thought me friendly.
"I can well recall only one human being I really loved: my wife. She had her weak points, for she was a despiser of the gods, mocking all religion and addicted to some contemptible Syrian cult of superstition and puerilities. But I loved her in spite of that failing, for, in every other way, she was a paragon. She is dead now and spared the agonies she would have suffered at my capture and fate. Our two daughters are safe; both healthy, both with the full status of citizens of the Republic, both well provided with possessions, each married to a good, reliable husband, though the younger is almost too young to be a wife. I feel at peace about them.
"I really loved my wife and in a way, her two girls. But, except for them,
I have cheated, ensnared, robbed and killed without pity or remorse."