"There he goes," cried Ganzler. "He's frightened off. He's guilty!"
"Maybe it was the honest man after all," said LeBeau, laughing. "Only honesty looks guilty nowadays. Too bad, that was your chance. Beware the honest man, though!"
The two reporters departed for the court after helping themselves to cigars. Immediately from the back of the room a voice cried peremptorily:
"Alonzo, you talk too damn much!"
"What of it?" Bofinger said, wincing under his chief's reproof. "I only told them what they knew."
"Say nothing and you risk nothing."
Extricating himself from his seat Groll moved into the light, discovering the shoulders of a hunchback, a massive bust on legs which were weak, ill-matched, and pitiful.
The heavy head fell from the high cheekbones and the yellowish eyes, which bulged like marbles, along the bold and fleshy nose to a lengthened jaw where the folded lips adhered to each other as though to repress all indiscreet speech. It was an unusual face, vacuous and immobile, that seemed to contain instead of blood some fishy fluid, which left it incapable of emotion.
On settling into his seat his arms sprawled over the desk, bracing the weight of the head and shoulders on the elbows, while from the mass the eyes, vacant and magnetic, conveyed to Bofinger for the thousandth time the impression of an immense spider in the center of its web.
Physical deformity has an extreme effect on human nature. Either it produces an heroic and resigned optimism, or it forms, by divesting them of the passions which shackle men, characters of implacable selfishness, who are strong because they were born weak and know no pity because nature has shown them none.