Here an hour later Crowder found her. She was glad to see him, and told him she was better, but the doctor would not let her get up yet. "And even if he would," she said, "I don't want to. I'm that weak, Charlie, you can't think. It's as if the thing that made me alive was gone, and I was just the same as dead." Crowder thought he understood his friend Pancha even as he did his friend Mark. That she could have complexities and reservations beyond his simple ken had never occurred to him. What he saw on the surface was what she was, and being so, the news he was bringing would be as a tonic to her broken spirit. "You'll not stay that way long, Panchita," he said. "You'll be on the job soon now. And what I've come to tell you will help on the good work. I've got a story for you that'll straighten out all the creases and bring you up on your feet better than a steam derrick would." "What is it?" She did not seem especially interested, her glance listless, her hand lying languid where he had dropped it. "It's about Mayer." He was rewarded by seeing her shift her head on the pillow that she might command him with a vivid, bird-bright eye. "What about him?" "Every thing, my dear. We've got him coming and going. We've got him dead to rights. He's a rogue and a thief." With her hands spread flat on either side of her she raised herself to a sitting posture. Her face, framed in its bush of hair, had a look of strained, almost wild, inquiry. "Thief!" she exclaimed. "Yes. It's a honeycooler of a story. Burst out all of a sudden like a night blooming cereus. But before I say a word you've got to promise on everything you hold sacred that you won't breathe a word of it." "I promise." "It's only for a little while. It'll be public property in a day or two--Thursday or Friday maybe." "I'm on. How is he a thief?" Crowder told her. The story was clear in his head by this time, and he told it well, with the journalist's sense of its drama. As he spoke she drew up her knees and clasping her hands round them sat rigid, now and then as she met his eyes, raised to hers to see if she had caught a point, nodding and breathing a low, "I see--Go on." When he had finished he looked at her with challenging triumph. "Well--isn't it all I said it was?" Already she showed the effect of it. There was color in her face, a dusky red on the high cheek bones. "Yes--more. I didn't think--" She stopped and swallowed, her throat dry. "Did you have the least idea, did he ever say a word to suggest he had anything as juicy as that in the background?" "No. I can't remember all in a minute. But he never said much about himself; he was always asking about me." She paused, fixedly staring; then her glance, razor-sharp, swerved to the young man. "Will he go to jail?"