"Are you trying to get my goat?"

"No. I'm stating bald facts."

"You're a queer kind of a guy. What was it, a diamond toothpick?" Murphy began to wander around the room. "A frame-up, and a bully one. The only way they could get you out of this room for a while until your identity was established. Why didn't you set up a holler?"

Mathison shook his head and sat down. "Am I your prisoner?"

"Prisoner my eye! Only, I'm naturally a curious cuss. Crook stuff?"

"Not in the sense you mean."

"Would it do any good to arrest them?"

"You couldn't arrest them."

"The hell I couldn't! What are they, pro-Germans from that dear Chicago?"

"No."