He felt a vast sense of stoppage—stoppage, that was it. A sense one has on a steamer when suddenly the clanging engines cease with a sigh; that which comes when one is alone in a room with the ticking of a clock, and this ticking stops; the feeling that comes when one passes without warning from the tumult of a storm into a great calm.
There had come a distinct halt in his life; a period, a gigantic punctuation.
9009 was a bad man. He had come to this cell not through a miscarriage of justice. He had been bad; he had been lawless.
He had been lawless from childhood, from the time when, a mere boy, cutting away from a squalid home, he had forced his way to the leadership of a “gang” whose serious occupations were pilfering from the grocer, robbing boats and box-cars, and whose amusements were fierce fights with rival “gangs,” stonings of Chinamen, torturings of cats, and experiments in men-vices.
Always he had been at war. He had been at war with men, with society. And now, in this
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