Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/265

Rh this man,” and I handed him the photograph of Thompson.

He looked at it long and searchingly, seemingly for a time in doubt, but at last he shook his head.

“No, I don’t believe I can,” he said. “There’s something familiar about the face, but I can’t place it.”

“How long have you been connected with the prison, Mr. Jones?” I asked.

“I began thirty years ago as guard. But what made you think I could identify this fellow?”

“We’ve rather imagined,” I answered, “that his real name was Johnson and that he served a term here for robbery, beginning in 1885.”

He looked at the photograph again, with a sudden flush of excitement in his face.

“I believe you’re right,” he said. “Let’s look at Johnson’s photo.”

He consulted the index, then turned to one of the wall cases.

“Here he is,” he said, opening a compartment and pointing to a photograph. “It’s the same man, sure, only changed a lot. It would be easy to prove it. I suppose they took his Bertillon measurements at the morgue, and we’ve only to compare them with ours. They’d be the same, no matter how much he’d changed.”

And he had changed, indeed! The Johnson of the prison photograph was, of course, smooth-shaven; his face was alert, intelligent; there was no scar upon the temple, nor did the features show that subtle bloating of long-continued dissipation. But it was the same—