We were getting to be rather scared now, for Carpenter's silence was forbidding. But again he said: “I wish to be alone.” We took him upstairs to a bed-room, and shut him in and left him—but taking the precaution to lock the door.
Downstairs, we stood and looked at each other, feeling like two school-boys who had been playing truant, and would soon have to face the teacher. “You stay here, Billy!” insisted the magnate. “You gotta see him in de mornin'! I von't!”
“I'll stay,” I said, and looked at my watch. It was after one o'clock. “Give me an alarm-clock,” I said, “because Carpenter wakes with the birds, and we don't want him escaping by the window.”
So it came about that at daybreak I tapped on Carpenter's door, softly, so as not to waken him if he were asleep. But he answered, “Come in;” and I entered, and found him sitting by the window, watching the dawn.
I stood timidly in the middle of the room, and began: “I realize, of course, Mr. Carpenter, that I have taken a very great liberty with you—”
“You have said it,” he replied; and his eyes were awful.
“But,” I persisted, “if you knew what danger you were in—”
Said he: “Do you think that I came to Mobland to look for a comfortable life?”
“But,” I pleaded, “if you only knew that particular gang! Do you realize that they had planted an infernal machine, a dynamite bomb, in that room? And all the world was to read in the newspapers this morning that you had been conspiring to blow up somebody!”
Said Carpenter: “Would it have been the first time that I have been lied about?”