Colter, who had as he talked been dreamily staring at the river, sprang quickly back to an attitude of attention. Every motion he made, every slightest movement of hand or eyelash or the corners of lips, was under a remorseless observation, that of a genius for reading human beings.
"Who are you?" The question was repeated very quietly, but now it had the note of inexorable authority. It was asked on behalf of Sard, whose trusting face and figure made it on Shipman's lips, stern, uncompromising.
Colter, his face flushing, rose. The man had changed in a deadly sort of way. His head from which he had removed the cap sunk suddenly forward as if his face could not look into that old enigma "Who am I?" The hair, swept back in its curious boy-like wave, was of vital copper under which Shipman noted a very few gray hairs which seemed curiously premature for the face opposite. The white skin, slightly freckled, had a youthful, good modeling; the face bones made it of pure English build. Shipman, puzzled, tried to analyze the curious look of sorrow and patient suffering on it. His gaze went to one or two very small scars as of smallpox.
One or two very small scars, as of smallpox! The lawyer stared at the white teeth showing under a mustached lip set to a gaunt look of bravery and mental struggle.
"I beg your pardon," said the other, "I had forgotten—forgotten myself. You treated me like a friend, and I went along easily. Things came easily—I was remembering," Colter sat up, his hands working at his belt. "Things came to me, but," he shook his head, "you ask who I am."
The man turned the old mask of suffering on his interlocutor and shook his head. If the thing was acting, it was prodigious acting. Shipman told himself that such acting had gotten Sard's soul away from her. It should not, however, have her entire! That face with its strange look of sorrow suddenly maddened the lawyer. He straightened. This mask must be torn off. This charlatan must be shown up. Now an old vulpine habit of the court-room came on the legal face.
"Who are you?" Shipman thrust his chin forward in a curious wolfish way; his mouth grinned while his eyes stared implacably. It was the old terrorizing third degree method. The method of which the lawyer in his better moments was secretly ashamed, but on which he knew any human reserve could be broken. Watts Shipman, with a kind of battle scent, felt himself to be pitted against something too shrewd, too delicately perceptive and elusive, to respond to other methods. And, well, the lawyer was not accustomed to being beaten at his own game! His glance, like a look of dreadful night, a look of knowledge of all human hiding, turned on the man. It was as if with incandescent power he would trace the very vitals, sift the fugitive thought and judgment, drive to the wall all subterfuges, snap handcuffs on the very shadow in the eyes, see the very juices and chemistry of the living, breathing soul and body before him.
"Who are you?"
The other man, with a man's defiance, some dignity and assurance as of bygone things, had risen. "Of course, you had a right to ask that," he said slowly. "But I wish you had not because—because——" He passed his hand wearily over his forehead. "It is hard for me to keep things clear, to go straight ahead. I came up to you here to ask for work."
"To ask for work?"