“He’s out here,” Devlin said and looked hard at Trent to see what effect the news would have.
“You forget I don’t know whom,” Trent reminded him. “What Austin?”
“You know,” Devlin snapped, “the Warren butler. I was on that case and he recognized me not a week ago and asked me who you were. He’s seen you, too. We put two and two together and it spells the pen for you. He was English and although he was over age the British are polite that way. If he said he was forty-one they said they guessed he was forty-one. I went to see him in a hospital before he ‘went west’ and he told me all about it.”
Anthony Trent could not restrain a sigh of relief. Austin was dead.
“That don’t help you any,” Devlin cried. “Don’t you wish you’d left me in the woods now? That was your opportunity. Why didn’t you take it?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Trent answered. “For one thing you dislike me too much to see anything but bad in what I do. That’s your weakness. That’s why you have always failed.”
“Well, I haven’t failed this time,” Devlin taunted him. “I’ve laid information against you where it’s going to do most good.”
He hoped to see the man he hated exhibit fear, plead for mercy or beg for a respite. He had rehearsed this expected scene during the night watches. Instead he saw the hawk-like face inscrutable as ever.
“I’ve told the adjutant what I know and what Austin said and he’s bound to make an investigation. That means you’ll be sent home for trial and I guess you know what that means. I’m going to be invalided home and I’ll put in my leave working up the case against you. They ought to give you a stretch of anything from fifteen to twenty years. I guess that’ll hold you, Mister Anthony Trent.”
The other man made no answer. He thought instead of what such a prison term would do for him. He had seen the gradual debasement of men of even a high type during the long years of internment. Men who had gone through prison gates with the same instincts of refinement as he possessed to come out coarsened, different, never again to be the men they were. He would sidle through the gaping doors a furtive thing with cunning crafty eyes whose very walk stamped him a convict. How could so long a term of years spent among professional criminals fail to besmirch him?