The machine did everything else. Started by the mill superintendent—an old Scotchman, the only man in the prison that wore no uniform—it whirred on hour after hour, holding his rigid attention, the clacking shuttle fleeing back and forth before his eyes in incessant flight, till the superintendent, pressing a button, brought it finally to rest and freed him from its exactions.
Across the aisle from 9009, at another loom, stood the red-striped convict whom he had seen in the line the day he had entered the prison; and it was the garotter, with whom he had come in, who had charge of keeping the baskets filled with threaded shuttles. When the garotter had been assigned to this work, a scene incomprehensible to 9009 had taken place. The garotter had pleaded against the order; little beads of sweat had welled up on his forehead; he had almost knelt to Jennings, standing there impassive, his light whip in hand. It had taken the latter’s threat of solitary confinement to break the man’s resistance.
