Page:The Post-Mortem Murder by Sinclair Lewis.djvu/18

18 "You 're daft, but you have grit. I know who you be. Edgerton telegraphed me you were coming. So you like Jason, eh?"

"I do."

"I tell you he was a thief, a drunkard—"

"And I tell you he was a genius!"

"You tell me! Huh!"

"See here, what reason has there been for your dogging Jason? It was n't just your boyish fighting and—how did you find out what became of him after he left Kennuit?"

The old man looked at me as though I were a bug. He answered slowly, with a drawl maddening to my impatience—impatience so whelming now that my spine was cold, my abdomen constricted.

"I know it because in his prison,—" he stopped, yawned, rubbed his jaw,— "in his cell I wrestled with the evil spirit in him."

"You won?"

"I did."

"But after that—when did he die?" I asked.

"He did n't."

"You mean Jason is alive now, sixty years after—"

"He's ninety-five years old. You see, I 'm—I was till I rechristened myself Williams—I 'm Jason Sanders," he replied.

Then for two thousand miles, by village street and way-train and limited, sitting unmoving in berths and silent in smoking-rooms, I fled to the cool solace of Quinta Gates.