“By golly, it begins to look to me like I was picked for the goat,” he muttered resentfully. “What I done ain’t a patch to what the rest of the crowd is up to, and it was all for their benefit, too. Yet, do they try to protect me in any way? Are they trying to hand the cops any false steer, as the chief promised they would? Naw, they ain’t. Instead, this stiff of a Pepernik, when they question him, comes out and gives me the worst kind of a black eye; says he’s seen me hanging around the rooming house often, and that he caught me once in his own room, being only kept from handing me over to the police by my claiming that the door was open, and I come in by mistake.
“Does that look like they was protecting me?” he demanded. “If they wanted to do what was right, would I be sitting here shivering for fear the detectives might pop in on me at any minute? No; I’d be a thousand miles away, with a good disguise on me, and plenty of money in my pocket.
“Why, how do I know”—he sprang to his feet and began excitedly pacing the floor—“but what the whole crowd is making a duck right now, and leaving me to hold the bag? Maybe this calling off Matschka is just a stall to give him a chance to blow with the rest. All the chief really wanted was to get the colonel. As he himself said, he didn’t have nothing against you two.”
Needless to say, Grail and Cato both sympathized with his complaints, and played upon his apprehensions, until[{46}] finally when he seemed sufficiently worked up, the adjutant made a flat-footed proposition.
“Turn State’s evidence on the crowd, while you have a chance, Simmons,” he urged. “Don’t let them give you the worst of it. Right now you have everything in your own hands, and by telling the truth and giving up this gang to justice, you yourself will get off scot-free, or with only a few years’ imprisonment at the most. To-morrow it may be too late.”
With these and many other persuasions they sought to convince him; but Simmons, although manifestly impressed, still hesitated.
“I don’t dare,” he whimpered. “That captain told me what would happen to me if I ever turned on him. There’s Russian spies all over this country, he says, and every one of them would make it his special business to hunt me down and get me. They never forget, he says, and they never give up; and, believe me, what he says they do when they finally land you is enough to make your blood run cold.”
Grail almost found it in his heart to pity the poor wretch thus tossed between contrary fears; but the important thing with him, of course, was to gain his freedom, and he labored all the more assiduously to allay the dread inspired by Rezonoff’s threats, and at the same time urge the advantages of coming over to the side of the law.
It was a purely commercial argument, however, which finally won the day.
“Simmons,” he said abruptly, “if you will release Cato and myself immediately, I will give you a thousand dollars the moment we get back to the fort.”