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9009

lins, picking up his jacket, looked at the number. He was 9009.

He slid on the garments silently; and as their coarseness rasped his skin, as their ugly bars gloomed in his eyes, there came to him a feeling which the stone walls, the hardness of the garotter, the rat eyes of the trusties, the harsh implacability of walls and men, had not yet given him. As he stepped from the chair of the prison barber, his face smooth-shaven, his hair cropped close, this feeling took on a character of finality. So it was with the other two. Into each face had come a heaviness, a blank hopelessness; lines had sprung that added years to age, that took away whatever flicker had remained of gentleness and youth. The pictures now taken were as of other men than those who posed before. Even the murderer had changed.

The summer sun had sunk behind the surrounding walls as, each with a roll of bedding upon his shoulder, they stepped out again into the court, after having been pawed lightly by the photographer, measuring them by the Ber-

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