“I didn’t know; I guessed. Well, get on; they wanted to pump you when they got you safely out of sight?”
“Yes,” Archie said, “they put me into the sweat-box, all right.”
“Did you tell them anything?” asked Mrs. Winter.
Archie looked at her reproachfully. Did she think that he had gone to boarding-school for nothing? He explained that, being a stranger in the town, he could not tell anything about where he’d been. There was an agent at the house trying to sell stoves, and they let him take him off back to the hotel. The man seemed to know all about who he (Archie) was, and about his having gone away. The men asked him an awful lot of questions about how he was taken away. He said he didn’t know, and he’d promised not to tell. He couldn’t tell. They said he would have to go to jail if he didn’t tell, because the men who had him were such bad men. But he didn’t tell.
“Did they try to frighten you—to make you tell?” said Mrs. Winter.
“Oh, they bluffed a little,” returned Archie carelessly, yet the keen eyes on him—eyes both worldly-wise and shrewd—noted that the lad’s color shifted and he winced the least in the world over some remembrance.
“But they didn’t hurt you? They didn’t burn you or cut you or twist your arms, or try any other of their playful ways?” Mrs. Winter demanded; and Janet began feeling the boy’s arms, breathing more quickly. The colonel only looked.
“No, they didn’t do a thing. I knew they wouldn’t, too,” Archie assured her earnestly. “I told them if they did anything, Uncle Rupert and you would make them pay.”
“And you weren’t frightened, away from every one—in that hideous quarter?” cried Miss Smith. “Oh, my dear!” She choked.
“Well, maybe I was a little scared. I kept thinking of a rotten yarn of Kipling’s; something happened to him, down in the underground quarter, in just such a hot, nasty-smelling hole, I guess, as I was in; you remember, Miss Janet, about the game of cards and the Mexican stabbing a Chink for cheating, and how Kipling jumped up and ran for his life, never looked around; and don’t you remember that nasty bit, how he felt sure they had dealt with the greaser their own way and he’d never get up to the light again—”