"It is you that I would be like," I answered him.
"Good-night," he said, and joined the others as they crossed the square.
As I stood for a moment, looking after their retreating forms, I saw again the detective I had seen shadowing Winters the day I had met him by White's house.
CHAPTER XIII
THE TRUTH AT LAST
It was nearly two weeks after my little dinner that I sat late one afternoon alone in my office. The rain without pattered dismally against the single window that looked into a deserted court and within the room was dimly lighted by the fading daylight and the fire that flickered on the hearth. The gloom of the close of a rainy winter's day was over everything and my thoughts and heart seemed full of the vague shadows that haunted the room. I was awaiting the coming of Miles, who that morning had sent me word that he had something to report. During the past fortnight he had been persistently engaged in working on his new theory of the case, but with what results I did not know, for he had told me nothing.
I also had at first made an effort to accomplish something along the same lines, for I had found inaction almost unbearable, but it proved to no purpose. The time had passed for analyses of conditions; what was now needed was expert detective work, and this I could not do, and so I had to give it up and in despair resign myself to idly waiting on Miles.
I might have sought the companionship of Van Bult and Davis, for they were about as usual, doing the same old things in the same old way, but I was not disposed to engage in their amusements and I doubt much if they were anxious for the society of a man in a condition of mind such as mine. From Littell I had only heard once since his departure and that letter recently received from Florida was but to tell me that he was about starting for home. He was coming back, he wrote, to again conduct the defence of Winters; if it were so, it would prove but a wasted errand, I feared, for there seemed little likelihood of Winters needing our services again. He was very ill, and no longer confined in a cell, but in the hospital ward of the prison to which he had been removed by the physician's orders after the trial. His strength was gone, and it did not need the professional eye to see that he was dying.
As soon as I had learned of his condition I had gone to him, not once but almost daily, and each time I had spent long hours at his bedside. No one was ever with him but his jailors and nurses; they were attentive, considerate, but to them he was only a criminal whom they had in charge and they performed their duties and no more. I was his only visitor, his only friend; even the hysterical women whose habit it is to shower their attentions and tears on hardened criminals found nothing heroic enough by the silent bedside of this dying man to call for their ministrations. His case, now become but a nine day's wonder, forgotten or neglected by the press and public, furnished no longer a gallery to be played to. Poor fellow! he must have spent many weary hours alone on that prison bed with only his wasted life and his wrong-doings and his wrongs to think of, but when I visited him he had always a smile and a pleasant word with which to greet me,—there was never a complaint. Sometimes he would talk of himself and of his early life when he and I had been at college together, and he would ask about his old friends and the outside world, and all in the manner of a man who had done with it, but he seldom referred to the charge against him or to the death of White. Once he asked me about Littell and Miles and when I assured him of their continued interest in his behalf he shook his head and bade me tell them to think no more of it—"they have been very kind," he said—and I knew he meant he would not live for a second trial, and I could not contradict him.