"My name," said the prisoner, "is Jason C. Mallard. I am a member of Congress."
The station master forgot to make the knot in the bandage he was tying about the sweeper's head. The sweeper forgot the pain of his new headache and the blood which trickled down his face and fell upon the front of his overalls. As though governed by the same set of wires these two swung about, and with the officer they stared at the stranger. And as they stared, recognition came into the eyes of all three, and they marvelled that before now none of them had discerned the identity of the owner of that splendid tousled head of hair and those clean-cut features, now swollen and red with an unreasonable choler. The policeman was the first to get his shocked and jostled senses back, and the first to speak. He proved himself a quick-witted person that night, this policeman did; and perhaps this helps to explain why his superior, the head of the St. Louis police department, on the very next day promoted him to be a sergeant.
But when he spoke it was not to Mallard but to the sweeper.
"Look here, Mel Harris," he said; "you call yourself a purty good Amurican, don't you?"
"You bet your life I do!" was the answer. "Ain't I got a boy in camp soldierin'?"
"Well, I got two there myself," said the policeman; "but that ain't the question now. I see you've got a kind of a little bruised place there on your head. Now then, as a good Amurican tryin' to do your duty to your country at all times, I want you to tell me how you come by that there bruise. Did somebody mebbe hit you, or as a matter of fact ain't it the truth that you jest slipped on a piece of banana peelin' or something of that nature, and fell up against the door jamb of that lunch room out yonder?"
For a moment the sweeper stared at his interrogator, dazed. Then a grin of appreciation bisected his homely red-streaked face.
"Why, it was an accident, officer," he answered. "I slipped down and hit my own self a wallop, jest like you said. Anyway, it don't amount to nothin'."
"You seen what happened, didn't you?" went on the policeman, addressing the station master. "It was a pure accident, wasn't it?"
"That's what it was—a pure accident," stated the station master.