"How did you know me?" he asked abruptly.
Frisco smiled, "I heard the man who came with you, call you by your name. As for the rest, of course Robin has told me all about you. You are a clever man Dr. Herrick, and I think a kind one. If you had not been, you would not have burdened yourself with that miserable rat I have the misfortune to call my son. All the same," added Frisco with a scowl. "You trapped me in rather a shabby way."
"Ah! That is one reason why I came to see you," said Herrick coolly, "I did not trap you at all. No one was more surprised than I at the news of your arrest. It was Santiago who put that cipher in the paper and told the police about you. And Santiago is beyond your reach on the high seas. So you see that I am not so mean, as you thought me."
"That's it," said Frisco, "you always fought fair and I could not understand your playing low down like this. So it was the greaser was it? By Heaven! when I catch him--" Frisco doubled his arm. "It's time he was out of the world," said Frisco, "a beating's too easy. I'll go west for him."
"How do you mean you'll go west?" asked Herrick thinking of the man's position which was--apparently--considerably within the shadow of the gallows.
Frisco looked at him with a careless laugh. He understood, "Oh, I've been in worse holes than this," he said, "why once in California the rope was round my neck for horse-stealing. Carr got me out of that mess."
"You were a great friend of Carr's?"
"Why," said the man slowly, "he was my cousin you know, and we had the same blood in us--the bad Carr blood. How I ever came to have such a brat of a Methodist parson for a son I can't make out. Got it from his mother I suppose, she was always a whimpering devil.
"I didn't come here to discuss your son and wife Joyce----"
"Frisco's my name for the time being," said the man coolly, "when I get across the pond again I'll take to a more Christian one."