“You’re an ass, Harris,” said another voice. “What did you want to speak to him at all for?”
I opened my eyes at that, and saw Freeman and the other man looking down at me.
“He isn’t an ass; he’s a real good sort,” I announced. “And I didn’t murder Cassavetti, though I’d have murdered half a dozen Cassavettis to get out of that hell upon earth yonder!”
I shut my eyes again, settled myself luxuriously against my pillows, and went,—back to Anne and the rose-garden.
I suppose I began to pull round from that time, and in a few days I was able to get up. I almost forgot that I was still in custody, and even when I remembered the fact, it didn’t trouble me in the least. After what I had endured in the Russian prison, it was impossible, at present, anyhow, to consider Detective-Inspector Freeman and his subordinate, Harris, as anything less than the best of good fellows and good nurses. True, they never left me to myself for an instant; one or other of them was always in close attendance on me; but there was nothing of espionage in that attendance. They merely safe-guarded me, and, at the same time, helped me back to life, as if I had been their comrade rather than their prisoner. Freeman, in due course, gave me his formal warning that “anything I said with respect to the crime with which I was charged would be used against me;” but in all other respects both he and Harris acted punctiliously on the principle held by only two civilized nations in the world,—England and the United States of America,—that “a man is regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law until he has been tried and found guilty.”
“Well, how goes it to-day?” Freeman asked, as he relieved his lieutenant one morning. “You look a sight better than you did. D’you think you can stand the journey? We don’t want you to die on our hands en route, you know!”
“We’ll start to-day if you like; I’m fit enough,” I answered. “Let’s get back and get it over. It’s a preposterous charge, you know; but—”
“We needn’t discuss that, Mr. Wynn,” he interrupted hastily.
“All right; we won’t. Though I fancy I shouldn’t have been alive at this time if you hadn’t taken it into your heads to hunt me down as the murderer of a man who wasn’t even a naturalized Englishman. You came just in the nick of time, Mr. Freeman.”