9009 waited to be shot, staring dully at the rifle-muzzles, then at the other things about him. His jaw drooped so that his mouth was half open, and his eyes were wide. He panted. Details came to him slowly.
Six guards, immobile, aiming their rifles at him.
Between him and the guards, two striped huddles, like wound snakes upon the beaten earth of the earth. A limp hand drooping loosely from the nearest huddle, a white face upturned, very still, a flash of yellow teeth between drawn lips—this was Miller. The other—he could not tell who the other was.
Off to one side, three more guards; in front of each, a convict; the guards holding drawn revolvers, each muzzle against the belly of one of the convicts. In the centre of this group, breathing hard, a-snarl, the wiry little pickpocket.
Beyond, the gray high wall; and upon it, pacing slowly against a very blue sky, another guard, holding a rifle, loosely, like a hunter.
Six guards holding their rifles at him; three more holding drawn revolvers against three striped convicts; another guard on the wall—9009’s eyes suddenly narrowed to slits.
A resonant clash of steel upon steel broke the panting silence. The cell-house door had been closed. Again a metallic clang: the inner door had been shut. Then, muffled, a succession of dull slams, close one upon the other, that merged into a subdued roll as of thunder. The convicts within the cell-house were being locked up in their cells.
The six rifle-muzzles fell toward the ground; a footstep crunched behind; 9009 turned. It was Jennings.
The sallow face was heavy, expressionless; and the gray eyes were without light. One heavy hand, extending, grasped 9009’s shoulder; the other explored his garments one after the other. “All right,” said Jennings; “nothing on him.” He turned his eyes upon 9009. “Thought you’d lam out, eh?” he said with the slightest sneer.
But 9009 did not answer. He was stupefied. And when Jennings ordered him come, he followed at a shambling gait, dazed, to the dungeon.
He sat there for several hours, on the steel floor, in the blackness, his hands hanging loose between his drawn-up knees. Gradually, out of the whirl of his mind, two pictures emerged. He saw Nichols, the confidence-man, walking slowly backward toward the inner corridor; he saw him shoot the burglar and run to his cell; he did not understand that. Then he saw himself bounding out into the yard—and stopping before six rifles; he did not understand that. His brain, anyway, was making but dull efforts to understand. All it did was this: it presented to him the two pictures, mechanically, passionlessly, as for inspection—the stony-faced confidence-man shooting the burglar from behind; the guards waiting outside to catch him as he came. He looked at these two pictures, stupid; he could not understand them.
He emerged from the dungeon at noon and was taken, blinking, into the sunny yard. Here a theatrical scene had been carefully arranged.
At a point midway between the door of the dining-hall and the gates of the jute-mill lane, close to the stone-like track made by the thrice-daily march of the lock-step line, two deal tables had been placed side by side. And upon these tables, the three convicts killed in the break had been laid.
They had been dumped, not laid, dumped in their last attitudes, now frozen to rigidity. They sprawled in their stripes, ignoble with blood and earth, with limbs doubled under them or spread out, contorted, their faces, gray-white where they showed between bruise and clot, staring upward with glazed eyes upon which grains of dust lay without causing a blink. Miller leered, his long teeth showing yellow; the burglar’s heavy jaw had fallen loosely upon his heavy throat, without hiding a black spot which spread down to the waist, coagulating the stripes; the third man lay arms spread as if crucified; he was a mere boy, and his face was serene.
“Look, you fellows, look!”
The voice of the captain, growling, was answered by the movement of the guards, pushing 9009, the pickpocket, and the other two men of the break closer to the tables. 9009 looked upon the heap. Miller leered at him with his yellow teeth; the burglar stared stupidly, with dropped jaw; the boy gazed upward with calm eyes, his mouth curved almost in a smile. 9009 remembered him now; he was a mountain boy and of late had taken to talking to himself.
An undercurrent of sound, a sort of attenuated whir, a buzzing that was dull, arose continuously. 9009 bent over, close; then he turned sick.
“Line ’em up,” growled the captain.
To the right of the tables, 9009 was placed, erect; to the left of the tables, the other two. They formed a line, as for inspection. 9009 and the pickpocket, alive; then Miller, the burglar, and the boy, dead; then the other two convicts, alive. But the living men had dead faces.
They stood there, it seemed to them a long time. Above, the sky was very blue; the sun beat down upon their shaven heads; it poured perpendicularly upon the eyes of the dead men, which did not blink; and there was a still, warm silence, and underneath this still warm silence, a low steady buzzing. 9009 shuffled his feet. “Quiet!” growled the captain of the yard.
He stood before them, like a colonel before his spread regiment, looking at them with an inspecting frown; then a satisfaction smoothed his visage; “all right,” he said to Jennings.
Jennings shouted down the yard; at the signal the gates of the jute-mill lane swung inward, and through the turreted arch in the wall the lock-step line emerged.
It came smoothly, in a lithe continuous flow, as if it were to be endlessly, through the arch, into the yard, undulating like a snake, gray as a larva, mounted upon legs like a centipede. A new eagerness seemed in its thousand limbs, a vague tremor was in its folds, its slight side-to-side motion seemed accelerated of rhythm; it came along the way, beaten to stone, that it had made through so many days, crawling from mill to hall and back again; it came, gray and flaccid, creeping forward with rapidity.
Then suddenly its head, as if catching a scent, went off the path in a long sidewise rear—a movement as that of a snake which would rear like a horse. There was a moment of disorder; the body and tail, pressing forward, knotted, vertebras broke; the voices of the guards rose high and sharp—and then the head, with a gliding, submissive motion flattened out again, and came on, past the tables, the tables served with killed men that stared upward, flanked by live men with dead faces.
The line went by slowly. The guards, at the head, on the sides, delayed it with murmur and gesture, and the voice of the captain, growling, incessantly bade it look, look, look. It flowed by with its side-to-side swinging retarded of rhythm; one by one the white faces passed, glancing slantingly, deep-lined, heavy. Sometimes nostrils quivered slightly; sometimes prison pallor grayed. They passed in silence; in the warm still air there was no sound excepting the shuffling of feet, the low growl of the captain’s voice bidding look, and the buzzing undertone. They passed, slit-eyed, stone-faced, sullen, and silent—9009 saw them all. He saw his little cell-mate looking at him out of his inflamed eyes with that same shocked expression with which he had looked at him from his cell during the struggle in the corridor; he saw Hayes—and fantastically the shock-headed safe-cracker was still laughing the soundless sneering laugh he had laughed while looking out of his cell at 9009 during the break———
They passed, by the four living men with dead faces, by the three dead men gazing vitriously at the sky—and one by one they sank into the door of the dining-hall till the yard was desert again—except for the flanked tables, and the buzzing.
Then 9009 was taken back to the dungeon, and he was kept there for thirty days.
For thirty days he was in blackness and silence. At regular intervals, which were of twenty-four hours but seemed much longer, the wicket snapped open and a half loaf of bread with a pitcher of water was thrust in, entering with a gray pallor of daylight immediately shut off again. He slept much, in short periods, at any hour, irregularly; the rest of the time he squatted in the centre of his cube of darkness, and thought. He saw the confidence-man, stepping back a-tiptoe, raising his arm, shooting; the burglar falling. He saw himself bounding down the corridor, leaping over white faces gazing upward, emerging out into the sunlight—into the bristling circle of the guards’ ambush. And now another picture had joined these two: he saw the shock-headed safe-cracker peering out of his cell and laughing his soundless sneering laugh during the struggle in the corridor; he saw his cell-mate gazing at him with a shocked expression. And he did not understand.
At the end of thirty days he was taken before the Prison Board in the warden’s office. There he faced two corporation lawyers whose corporations were then undergoing prosecution, a pig-eyed grocer who adulterated, a wholesale liquor merchant, and a wormy ward politician, and these men took his copper away from him.
He went back to the dungeon and thought. He saw the two smug corporation lawyers who taught their corporations how to sap the law, the pig-eyed grocer who sold pickles preserved in sulphuric acid, the wholesale liquor merchant who helped finance a corrupt municipal party and thus forced his whiskey on all the city saloons, the ward politician who paid for votes with dollars. He knew of these men; he had read their record. He saw them, sitting in a solemn line behind their desks, with an expression of shocked severity taking from him his copper. And suddenly his laugh rang harsh and loud between the steel walls.
He stayed in the dungeon thirty days longer. At regular intervals, which were of twenty-four hours, but seemed much longer, the wicket snapped open and, together with a pallor of day, there entered a half loaf of bread and a pitcher of water. He ate; he slept much, in short frequent periods, irregularly, stretched upon the cold steel floor. But the larger part of the time he thought. He saw the confidence-man shoot the burglar, he saw himself leaping into the ring of the guards’ ambush, he saw the leer of the safe-cracker, the shocked expression of his cell-mate—and he did not understand.
On the twenty-fifth day the door opened and clanged shut again, and he was conscious of a presence there with him in the compressed darkness. He waited, silent, crouching; and after a while he heard a short, hard, dry cough.
“That you, pal?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s me,” answered the piping voice of his cell-mate.
They were silent in the darkness. “What made you come in?” at length asked 9009.
“Got five days for talking in the line,” said the invisible cell-mate.
“What for did you do it?” pursued 9009.
“Thought they’d put me in this hole,” admitted the thin voice. “I knowed you’d be feelin’ like hell about bein’ fooled.”
“Fooled?”—the voice of 9009 rose in a bellow.
“’Bout the framed-up break. Nichols, that bunco-man, he was the stool-pigeon that framed it for Jennings and the yard captain. Guess he’ll get a pardon now. And ‘Shorty’ Hayes, he’s laughing at ye; says you and he heard Jennings talk about the frame-up that time he and you was painting under the captain’s window———”
The little man’s voice died abruptly. 9009 had hurled himself upon the steel walls, and he was beating them with hands and feet, crushing his face against them in an effort to bite. He saw now. He saw himself, up on the painter’s platform with “Shorty” Hayes, hearing the words of Jennings floating out through the open window; he saw Nichols, the stony-faced confidence-man gradually preparing the break, and then, when it had come, killing the burglar; he saw the safe-cracker laughing at him from the door of his cell. He saw—and he beat madly with hands and feet and head. Like a maddened insect he whirled along the four walls of the dungeon, clawing, butting, rasping his teeth against the smooth impassive surface. Finally, exhausted, he stopped, crouching in the centre of the cell. And after a while he laughed, a harsh laugh that rebounded dully from the walls of steel.
Then a hand fell on his shoulder; he felt the little cell-mate squatting by his side. His right hand went across his body; a small, hard paw seized it—and for hours, there, in the darkness, the two crouched silently side by side, hand in hand, without saying a word. At times 9009 laughed harsh and loud, and then the grip upon his hand tightened.