The morning of the second day, though weakened in body and mind, he still maintained his stubbornness; that afternoon they had brought McFee with a fresh will to bear on him. By evening he told them he had stolen the revolver in Chicago. He did this in the hope of peace. It did gain him a respite, but not for long. The next morning they told him he had lied and he admitted it; then he gave them a dozen explanations of his possession of the revolver, all different and all false. Then, toward evening, Kouka suddenly fell upon him, knocked him from his chair with a blow, and then, as he lay on the floor, beat him with his enormous hairy fists. Quinn, the only other person in the room, stood by and looked on. Finally, Quinn grew alarmed and said: "Cheese it, Ike! Cheese it!" Kouka stopped and got up. Archie was weeping, his whole body trembling, his nerves gone. That night he lay moaning in his hammock, and the man in the cell under him and the man in the cell next him, cursed him. In the morning they took him again up to the detective’s office; this was the morning of the third day. Archie was in a daze, his mind was no longer clear, and he wondered vaguely, but with scarcely any interest, why it was that Kouka looked so smiling and pleasant. "Set down, Arch, old boy," Kouka said, "and let me tell you all about it." And then Kouka told him just where he had stolen the revolver, and when, and how--told him, indeed, more about the hardware store and the owners of it than Archie had ever known. And yet Archie did not seem surprised at this. He felt numbly that it was no longer worth while to deny it--he wondered why he ever had denied it in the first place. It did not matter; nothing mattered; there was no difference between things--they were all the same. But presently his mind became suddenly clear; he was conscious that there was one unanswered question in the world. "Say, Kouka," he said, "how did you tumble?" Kouka laughed. He was in fine humor that morning. "Oh, it’s no use, my boy," he said; "it’s no use; you can’t fool your Uncle Isaac. You’d better ’ave taken his advice long ago--and been a good boy." "That’s all right," said Archie, a strange calm having come to him because of the change in the world, "but who put you wise?" Kouka looked at Quinn and smiled, and then he said to Archie: "Oh, what you don’t know won’t hurt you." Then he had Archie taken back to the prison, but before they locked him up Kouka gave him a box of cigarettes he had taken from a prostitute whom he had arrested the night before, and he left Archie leaning against the door of the prison smoking one of the cigarettes. "What have they been doing to you?" asked a prisoner. "The third degree," said Archie laconically.