The room was no size at all, with one long high window boarded up to the top so that little light got in and the gas had to burn all day. There was a good fire leaping in the grate; but the air was stale and thick, and hazy with tobacco smoke. There was nothing but the names of past prisoners written in pencil on the walls from which the plaster was falling, and in a corner some blankets filthier than those we had left behind us. Three or four men sat on the ground round the fire talking in whispers.
They looked up as we stood just inside the door discovering what had happened to us, and beckoned us to the fire. We joined the sad circle.
“Have you got in here, too?” said a dark fellow like a Spaniard.
“It looks like it,” I answered, gaping at the desolate prospect.
“What was the trouble?”
“They found some ammunition under somebody else’s bed and said it was mine.”
My listener looked respectful. “Ammunition! That’s bad,” he said.
Everybody was smoking. The smoke curled up and made the thick air thicker. O’Grady pulled a pipe out of some part of him, and I found a cigarette.
“How long are we going to be here?” I said.
“Until you go up for interrogation.”