“This is Christina, Steve,” Jerry told me in that same, dull voice, purposely deadened to keep out emotion. “Christina,” he said to her, “this is Steve.”
“Who’s Christina, Jerry?” I said; stupid thing to ask. He knew it was stupid and he smiled, as Jerry always did; he was used to my being stupid. He simply nodded toward her to say, “You see; there she is.”
I stared from her and looked about the room, which was a square, bare place with whitewashed walls, corresponding to an ordinary cellar room.
Considered from the street side of the building, a hundred feet or so away, it was a cellar, though its riverside door was eight or ten feet above the water. A single window, with a drawn blind, was beside that door; in the opposite wall, beside the light, was another door, leading either to a basement cavern which could have no outside light, or to a stair; I could not know, for the door was closed and bolted.
The floor was cracked cement, strewn with straw and wisps of excelsior; old, open boxes and barrels stood about and a broken desk and chairs. Evidently the place had once been used as a shipping room but had been deserted. I tried to locate it in connection with some particular building, but failed, for I had not kept track how far I’d walked.
Suddenly Jerry told me, as though he’d seen my thought, “We’re back of Linthrop’s old warehouse, Steve.”
Then I knew that the building above us was empty; and I knew, as I gazed at Jerry, that he’d chosen this place to stop me because of his uncertainty of me.
And here I stood before Jerry shaking with my uncertainty of him! He saw it. An impulse swept over me to seize him and drag him through that door to an arrest; for the instant, I stood before Jerry, not as his brother who believed in him—I who had given my word to believe in him—but as a representative of society which hunted him for his treacherous, savage attack upon Dorothy Crewe. For the instant, I saw him as others thought,—my brother with a beast inside him which had struck, through him, at Dorothy Crewe.
Then the sight of his face heaped upon me too many other memories of Jerry and me through twenty-eight years. He was not quite as he had been; how could he be? He was hunted for crime; for nine days he had known that all his world—all the world which we had made his—believed he had committed that attack on Dorothy Crewe. And she had believed!