“That car will be right here when you come out the way you left it,” the policeman said heartily. “No one is goin’to touch it. No, sir! I’ll look after that car myself!” he said, winking again at the others.
“All right, then,” said Robert. “That’s all I want to know.”
Then they marched all of them into the station-house.
The room they entered was a large one, and at first, because they had come into it out of the brightness of the sun, and the swimming confusion of drunkenness and arrest, it was so dark Eugene could not distinguish clearly any of its features. Then he saw that it was a square, rather high room with worn wooden floors, wainscoting of a dark varnished brown, and above that rude calcimined walls of white. In the wall along the street there were, besides the door, two barred windows which were very dirty and not very large, and did not give much light.
At one end of the room, as they came in, there was a row of dull green lockers, probably for the use of the police, and at the other end a high, square, somewhat majestical-looking desk, which was also of a dark maply-brown and which seemed to be built on an elevated rostrum or platform a few inches high. Over this desk a light with a green glass shade was burning, and behind it another large red-faced policeman was sitting. By his look of authority, and the military opulence of his slovenly uniform—for he had epaulets of thick gold braid upon his shoulders that would have glorified the uniform of a general in the Marine Corps—he seemed to be the superior in command.
As for the rest of the room, there was little decoration save for a row of worn and rickety-looking wooden chairs with rounded backs along the wall, and a liberal distribution of large brass spittoons which, to judge from the bare wooden boards around them, were used less frequently as receptacles than as targets, and obviously with uncertain success.
Finally, the whole place had the unforgettable look and smell that police-stations everywhere—and particularly those in little towns—have always had. Its stale dark air was impregnated with the odour of cheap cigars and tobacco-juice, of old worn varnished wood, of human sweat and urine and heavy wool, and with the strong tarry odour of a sanitary disinfectant. And somehow, in this stale, dark and weary odour, there was also a quality of terror, menace, and foreboding—as if the huge and dingy chronicle of human tragedy and error which this grim room had witnessed—all the brutal, shabby sinfulness of a little town—that swarming, hideous and tawdry fraternity of poverty, vice and
