The visitor caught his breath. It came to him with a shock of realization that many days and nights might pass before he could forget that straight glance of quivering pain and humiliation, of proudly endured hopelessness.
"Yet I ask it," he insisted.
"Very well. If I am not here it will be because it was not possible."
The visitor turned away with well-assumed carelessness.
"I fancied your prisoner there was a fellow-countryman," he remarked to the official, in passing on. "But he appears to be French."
"Yes, sir. He said he came from the South, at his trial."
The man had necessarily kept beside the visitor to reply, and they walked down the room so together.
"What is he here for?" came the idle inquiry.
"Counterfeiting, sir. Right over on that mountain across the river, they captured him and killed one of his comrades. The rest got away in time, and they never were found because this man would tell nothing, even to save himself. He might have turned state's evidence and got off with a light sentence, for he was young and not known to the police. But he wouldn't and he got the whole thing. Leroy, his name is. The officers who captured him believe he never meant to be taken alive; for they found him unconscious, with a little pistol in his hand, and they guessed that he fainted before he could use it. He had to spend weeks in a hospital before he could be tried, getting over a broken ankle and some other worse injuries. But he and his fellows had done clever work, no one knows how much. This Leroy might have been from across the water, as you say, sir; no one knows him here."
"How long has he been here?"