I drew a deep breath. I thought for a minute that, after all, there was a little fair play in the game—that I had a decent, fair, blue-eyed man in front of me. He looked hard at me; I hard at him; it was as if we were going to wrestle for a belt. The young girl on the bench had her lips parted and leant forward, her head a little on one side.
I said, “You won’t swear I was the man... Nikola el Escoces?”
He looked meditatively into my eyes; it was a duel between us.
“I won’t swear,” he said. “You had your face blacked, and didn’t wear a beard.”
A soft growth of hair had come out over my cheeks whilst I lay in prison. I rubbed my hand against it, and thought that he had drawn first blood.
“You must not say ‘you,’” I said. “I swear I was not the man. Did he talk like me?”
“Can’t say that he did,” Sadler answered, moving from one foot to the other.
“Had he got eyes like me, or a nose, or a mouth?”
“Can’t say,” he answered again. “His face was blacked.”
“Didn’t he talk Blue Nose—in the Nova Scotian way?”