The prisoner, still half man, growled:—
"Better. I got some sleep, but I'm still tired as thunder."
"I sent for you this morning," went on the prosecutor, "because of what you said last night. I am not sure that you meant all you said—indeed whether you remember it?"
This interrogation evidently struck Challoner as amusingly superfluous, for he laughed aloud; but the laughter had a note of aching bravado.
"Of course, I remember it," he said presently, and pointing with a steady forefinger to a weapon on the prosecutor's desk, "I shot him with that gun there."
Murgatroyd could not restrain a movement of surprise at Challoner's Sang Froid; neither could those trained witnesses, Mixley and McGrath, leaning well forward lest they should miss a word.
"Most decidedly, then," continued the prosecutor, "you do not recall that I told you that anything you might say would——"
"I heard all you said," the prisoner broke in, shrugging his shoulders, "but what's the use—it had to come—I knew it. I was getting tired of hiding in out-of-the-way places, and never having a wink of sleep. Besides, I knew that Pemmican—Cradlebaugh's man—saw the whole affair. There was no sense in trying to escape."
Murgatroyd's face adequately expressed his approval of the prisoner's point of view. His voice, however, was distinctly non-committal in tone when he observed easily:—
"Pemmican saw it all, then?"