As, at cleaning time, he passed the cell from which had come the sound of sawing, he saw inside of it the trusty who was cell-tender. The man—a lean fellow with pale-blue eyes and red hair—was stooping over the lower bunk, his hand underneath the blankets.
And that night the cell was empty, and soon there went around the prison the news that the guards had taken from the bunks in this cell a revolver and provisions, and had found the bars sawed nearly through. A great light had come to 9009.
It was the trusties! They guarded the convicts. They, it was, and not the guards, who were the gaolers. And the guards need not watch them; they watched each other. They were informers. They obtained their jobs, with the privileges that went with them, by betrayal; and they held them just so long as they did Judas work. He understood now why they had rat eyes.
The whole system lay open before him. It was a system of vast espionage, of stalking, of
