"Excuse me, mein Herr, but I heard water splashing and I thought you were at breakfast."
Jim had adopted the fashion of talking derogatorily in English to Germans who, not understanding, usually agreed with his sentiments. This always amused him and satisfied his injured feelings.
"That's the way with you Germans. When you hear a noise, you think someone is eating."
"Ja wohl, ja wohl, mein Herr," assented the incomer with crude agreeableness, all the while grinning in shamefacedness. And floating in the water Jim received another order, from the retreating and apologizing minion of the law, to stand at attention at Headquarters. He was unfamiliar with courts of any sort and did not know he should ask for an interpreter. That the officials had not as yet used one showed apparently an attempt to let the accused, thus handicapped, stumble into an incriminating confession.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Jim Deming's Fate
THE scene was now transferred to a third chamber which looked somewhat like an august tribunal of state. It was an imposing room divided by a long high rostrum upon which sat a terrible looking individual of the utmost lordliness. The attendants were numerous, and if Deming had ever heard of the trial of Warren Hastings he would have thought this appeared an occasion of almost equal importance and gravity. When he arrived for his ordeal before the bench, he seemed a rather small and defenseless figure.
For he was now to be subjected to a sort of "third degree," with a court interpreter at hand. Every word that might be significant in his bedeviling invitation of February twenty-second was gone over with the minatory harshness of medieval inquisitors.