I said “Yes, sir.”
I was still embarrassed and astonished almost beyond any expression; and, sitting thus primly on the edge of the chair, with my big hands folded in my lap, I must have seemed to the man irresistibly ridiculous, for he suddenly began to laugh.
“All right, Mr. Train Robber,” he said, “you will find some of your friends just outside of the door, and when you have spoken with them, go along the hall to the end of the building.... Dix is in the room on the right.”
I got up awkwardly and backed out of the room and through the door behind me.
It was only long afterwards that I learned by what agency these events had come to pass.
When Maggie had taken the traveling bag containing the stolen bank notes to the United States District Attorney on the day of Mooney’s death, she had not handed them over to him, straight out, as Mooney had directed. Instead, she had used the advantages of the situation to bring me clear of the business.
I do not know the details.
But she seems to have gone over the whole thing with the Federal authorities that morning, explaining all about my relations with the two highwaymen, how I had come to get into it and how I had been carried along; and then she promised to deliver the money to them provided the government would grant me immunity. The matter was taken up and discussed there in detail on that morning. The result was that Maggie got the promise, that, if everything proved to be as she described it, I should not be held responsible for the desperate crimes that these men had carried out.
She was in fact a very skillful person and she conducted it with immense cleverness.
They were amazed to find that she had the money in what they imagined, when she came, was merely a personal traveling bag. And they were astonished to discover that I was, in fact, merely the big awkward, thoughtless youth that she had described to them; as they were astonished to find the confirmatory discoloration of my burned hand.