"Do you know why I have brought you here?" she asked, when he was sitting within arm's-reach of the small black box.
"How should I?" he said. "You take me where you please, and when you please, and I ask no questions. I am too well contented to be with you to care very much about the whys and wherefores."
"Oh, how nicely you say it!" she commended, with the frank little laugh which he had come to know and to seek to provoke. She was standing against the opposite cell wall with her shoulders squared and her hands behind her: the pose, whether intentional or natural, was dramatically perfect and altogether bewitching. "I was born to be your fairy godmother, I think," she went on joyously. "Tell me; when you bought your ticket to Wahaska that night in St. Louis, were you meaning to come here to find work?—the bread-and-butter work?"
"No," he admitted; "I had money, then."
"What became of it?"
"I don't know. I suppose it was stolen from me on the train. It was in a package in one of my suit-cases; and Doctor Farnham said——"
"I know; he told you that we had searched your suit-cases when you were at your worst—thinking we owed it to you and your friends, if you had any."
"Yes; that is what he told me."
"Also, he told you that we didn't find any money?"
"Yes; he told me that, too. We agreed that somebody must have gone through the grips on the train."