De Armijo smiled, showing even white teeth. He rather liked this game of playing with the rat in the trap. So much was in favor of the cat.
"It is not a possibility with which one can reckon," he said, "and I should think that the desire to be free would be overpowering in one so young as you."
"Have you come here to make sport of me?" said John, with ominous inflection. "Because if you have I shall not answer another question."
"Not at all," said de Armijo. "I come on business. You have been here, as I said, a long time, and in that time many changes have occurred in the world."
"What changes?" asked John sharply.
"The most important of them is the growth in power of Mexico," said de Armijo smoothly. "We triumph over all our enemies."
"Do you mean that you have really retaken Texas?" asked John, with a sudden falling of the heart.
De Armijo smiled again, then lighted a cigarette and took a puff or two before he gave an answer which was really no answer at all, so far as the words themselves were concerned.
"I said that Mexico had triumphed over her enemies everywhere," he replied, "and so she has, but I give you no details. It has been the order that you know nothing. You have been contumacious and obstinate, and, free, you would be dangerous. So the world was to be closed to you, and it has been done. You know nothing of it except these four walls and the little strip of a mountain that you can see from the window there. You are as one dead."
John Bedford winced. What the Mexican said was true, and he had long known it to be true, but he did not like for de Armijo to say it to him now. His lonesomeness in his long imprisonment had been awful, but not more so than his absolute ignorance of everything beyond his four walls. This policy with him had been pursued persistently. Old Catarina, before her departure, had not dared to tell him anything, and now the soldier who served him would not answer any question at all. He had felt at times that this would reduce him to mental incompetency, to childishness, but he had fought against it, and he had felt at other times that the isolation, instead of weakening his faculties, had sharpened them. But he replied without any show of emotion in his voice: