"You'll find that out later. Will you go quietly, or do you want the nippers?"
The cooler second thought reassured me. It seemed entirely incredible that the news of the broken parole had already been put on the wires. In the natural order of things I should hardly be missed until after my failure to report to the prison authorities at the month end should raise the hue and cry.
"I'll go quietly, of course," I conceded; and then I added the lie of sham bravado: "I don't know of any reason why I shouldn't. You are the man who is taking all the chances."
With no further talk I was marched through the station building, out the long approach walkway to the foot of Seventeenth Street, and so on up-town, the plain-clothes man keeping even step with me and indicating the course at the corner-turnings by a push or a wordless jerk of his head.
As we went I was striving anxiously to invent a plausible story to be told at headquarters. It was an entirely new experience. Hitherto I had always told the plain truth, as the law required, and now I found the inventive machinery singularly rusty. But the wheels were made to turn in some fashion. By the time we were mounting the steps of the antiquated City Hall at the crossing of Cherry Creek, I knew pretty well what I was going to say, and how it must be said.
At first they gave me little chance to say anything. In the inspector's office my captor and two others got busy over a book of newspaper clippings, pictures and descriptions of "wanted" criminals. With wits sharpened now to a razor-edge, I came quickly to the conclusion that I had been mistaken for some one else. The conclusion was confirmed when they took an ink-pad impression of the ball of my right thumb and fell to comparing it with one of the record prints.
After a time the inspector put me on the rack, beginning by demanding my name.
Meaning to lie only when there should be no alternative, I told him a half-truth. Though every one at home called me "Herbert" and "Bert," and it was as "James Herbert Weyburn" that I had been arraigned and convicted, that was not, strictly speaking, my right name. I had been christened "James Bertrand," after my father. My mother had always called me "Jimmie," but for others the "Bertrand" was soon shortened into "Bert" and from that a few home-town formalists had soon evolved the "Herbert," a change which my own boyish and unreasoning dislike for "Bertrand" was ready enough to confirm. So, when the inspector asked me my name I answered promptly, "James Bertrand."
"Write it," was the curt command, and a pad and a pencil were shoved at me across the desk.
Since the name was two-thirds of my own, I was able to write it without any of the hesitation which might otherwise have betrayed me if I had chosen a combination that was unfamiliar.