I turned to my short-haired fellow traveller.
'You told me you were Wyoming Ed!'
He laughed uneasily.
'Well, in a manner of speaking, so I have been for the last five years, but I wasn't Wyoming Ed before that. Say, old man, are you acting for Colonel Jim Baxter?'
Sanderson, on whom a dozen years seemed to have fallen since we entered the room, appeared unable to speak, and merely shook his head in a hopeless sort of way.
'I say, boys,' ejaculated the ex-convict, with an uneasy laugh, half-comic, half-bewildered, 'this is a sort of mix-up, isn't it? I wish Colonel Jim was here to explain. I say, Boss,' he cried suddenly, turning sharp on me, 'this here misfit's not my fault. I didn't change the children in the cradle. You don't intend to send me back to that hell-hole, do you?'
'No,' I said, 'not if you tell the truth. Sit down.'
The late prisoner seated himself in a chair as close to the door as possible, hitching a little nearer as he sat down. His face had taken on a sharp, crafty aspect like that of a trapped rat.
'You are perfectly safe,' I assured him. 'Sit over here by the table. Even if you bolted through that door, you couldn't get out of this flat. Mr. Sanderson, take a chair.'
The old man sank despondently into the one nearest at hand. I pressed a button, and when my servant entered, I said to him:—