Night came, with it three more tortillas and a bowl of carne seasoned with chili sufficient to burn the gullet of a bronze image. Then, several hours after the scant meal had been shoved in to him, the bandit jailer opened his cell door and motioned him to step into the corridor. Two men with rifles were waiting there; they stepped to his side and marched him off between them.
Down a flight of steps, through a courtyard heavy with shadows, then up tortuous stairs to a door beneath a dim electric globe. The door opened from within, and Grant found himself in a chamber which might have passed as a courtroom. At its far end on a raised dais was a long desk lighted from above, three men sitting behind it. A sort of wooden cage stood apart on a platform by itself. Six men with serapes over their shoulders and rifles hanging by straps across the blanket stripes were slouching before the judges’ dais. A black headed peon crouched timorously on a seat to the left and behind the guards.
Grant’s escort halted him before the judges. He kept silence, studying the faces of the three. Not pleasant faces. A hardness of eye and cat-like bristle of moustachios over thin line of lips was common to the trio.
“Grant ’Ickman?” challenged the man in the middle.
Grant nodded. His interrogator gave a sign to one of the rurales. The latter turned to the peon on the bench, dragged him to his feet and hustled him to the cage-like affair to the left of the dais, evidently a witness box. The little fellow’s head hardly showed above the top rail that fenced him in; his eyes were all whites.
The examining judge jerked a thumb toward Grant as he shaped a question in Spanish for the witness. The peon bobbed his head emphatically. Another question and, “Si,” chirped the witness. Then a lengthy flow of interrogation prompted by reference to some dossier in hand.
“Si! Si!” The witness hurried to oblige. Cat whiskers lifted in a smile as the judge turned back to Grant.
“You unnerstan’?”
“I don’t,” bluntly. More twitching of the spiked moustachios.