"Did you answer any of them?" Easterton asked.
"Answer them? Why, of courseall of 'em. I didn't want to remain here in durance vile an hour longer than I could help, I can assure you. But naturally my answers werewell, 'inaccurate,' to say the least. I had to word them very carefully, though, or the fellow would have caught me out. He suspected that I might be misleading him, I think, for once or twice he put questions which might have unmasked me if I had not been on my guard when answering them. Really we pitted our brains and cunning against each other's all the time, and, if I may say so without boasting, I think my cunning won."
"Then why were you not released?" I said.
"I was to have been, to-nightso he said. Do you think, though, he would, whoever he was, have let me go after questioning me like that? He said not a word about my not giving information to the police, or warning the people he had questioned me about. Do you think he would have let me go? I don't.
"Every day food and drink were left by meset on a table within reach of me, while the room was in inky blackness, for the man who had touched me in the dark had also released my right arm and left it so. Several times I tried to free my other arm, and my feet, but I couldn't manage it. I have been lying here with both feet and one arm bound for four nights and three days, to my knowledge, without seeing anybody, and, of course, without shaving or washing. I can't tell you what these days and nights have been likethey have been like a long, awful nightmare; even the house has all the time been as still as death. My God, what a relief it was to hear the door bell ringing this afternoon, and the knocker going as though the place was on fire!
"And when the police did force an entrance it seems they found nobody but me!"
CHAPTER VIII MORE SUSPICIONS
Women are extraordinarya platitude, of course, for everybody who has mixed with women and who possesses a gleam of intelligence knows that they are extraordinary, just as he knows, or ought to know, that if they were not bizarre and mystifying, complex and erratic, they would be less insidiously captivating than they are.