There was no immediate answer to that question.  The old man had turned his eyes again to the tall, trembling figure of Ben, trying to find further proof of his identity.  To Ezra Melville there could no longer be any shadow of doubt as to the truth:  even that he had found the young man working in a gang of convicts could not impugn the fact that the dark-gray vivid eyes, set in the vivid face under dark, beetling brows, were unquestionably those of the boy he had seen grow to manhood’s years, Ben Darby.

It was true that he had changed.  His face was more deeply lined, his eyes more bright and nervous; there was a long, dark scar just under the short hair at his temple that Melville had never seen before.  And the finality of despair seemed to settle over the droll features as he walked nearer and took Darby’s hand.

“Ben, Ben!” he said, evidently struggling with deep emotion.  “What are you doing here?”

The younger man gave him his hand, but continued to stare at him in growing bewilderment.  “Five years—­for burglary,” he answered simply.  “Guilty, too—­I don’t know anything more.  And I can’t remember—­who you are.”

“You don’t know me?” Some of Ben’s own bewilderment seemed to pass to him.  “You know Ezra Melville—­”

Sprigley, whose beliefs in regard to Ben had been strengthened by the little episode, stepped quickly to Melville’s side.  “He’s suffering loss of memory,” he explained swiftly.  “At least, he’s either lost his memory or he’s doing a powerful lot of faking.  This is the first time he ever recalled his own name.”

“I’m not faking,” Ben told them quietly.  “I honestly don’t remember you—­I feel that I ought to, but I don’t.  I honestly didn’t remember my name was Darby until a minute ago—­then just as soon as you spoke it, I knew the truth.  Nothing can surprise me, any more.  I suppose you’re kin of mine—?”

Melville gazed at him in incredulous astonishment, then turned to Sprigley.  “May I talk to you about this case?” he asked quietly.  “If not to you, who can I talk to?  There are a few points that might help to clear up—­”

Ordering his men to their work, Melville and Sprigley stood apart, and for nearly an hour engaged in the most earnest conversation.  The afternoon was shadow-flaked and paling when they had finished, and before Sprigley led his men back within the gray walls he had arranged for Melville to come to the prison after the dinner hour and confer with Mitchell, the warden.

Many and important were the developments arising from this latter conference.  One of the least of them was that Melville’s northward journey was postponed for some days, and that within a week this same white-haired, lean old man, dressed in the garb of the cinder trail, was pleading his case to no less a personage than the governor of the State of Washington in whom authority for dealing with Ben’s case was absolutely vested.  It came about, from the same cause, that a noted alienist, Forest, of Seattle, visited Ben Darby in his cell; and finally that the prisoner himself, under the strict guard of Sprigley, was taken to the capital at Olympia.