9009/Chapter 1
John Collins sat upon the lurching bench of the wagon, his right wrist linked to a garotter, his left wrist linked to a murderer; his eyes were straining for the first sight of the thing he feared. Before him, on the front seat, the sheriff gossiped lazily to the driver, who idly flicked the lash of his whip across the horses’ sweating flanks. Behind, upon the back seat, the two deputies watched with sawed-off shot-guns across their knees. The wagon rolled slowly, with sudden creaking pitchings, along a dust-heaped road which coiled its way to the summit of a tawny hill. To the east, far down, white flecks danced upon the bay’s green waters, and from the shore breaths of wind came gliding up through the dry wild oats in long silvery undulations.
The horses gained the level and broke into a trot; the carriage plunged forward and down—and a gray wall leaped up from the ground against the sky. The murderer sucked in a whistling breath. The wall rose as they approached; it hung over them, gray and ponderous, turreted as a mediæval battlement. The garotter laughed, a harsh braggart laugh, and pointed, raising with his arm Collins’s coupled wrist. But Collins leaned forward unheeding, staring silently.
The wagon, drawing a smooth ellipse, was coming up to a brick building which jutted out like a buttress from the centre of the wall; two steel-barred gates swung themselves open as of their own volition as the prisoners alighted. Flanked by the murderer and the garotter, the sheriff before him, the deputies behind, John Collins walked in. A voice spoke overhead; a blue-sleeved arm emerged from a window and drooped downward, dangling a large iron key at the end of its stumpy fingers; from a stone bench at the entrance a stripes-clad man rose, took the key, and locked the gate. Officers and felons now stood in an arched passageway which smelled damp, like a tunnel. They were within, but Collins hardly noted the fact; he had turned his head and was watching the stripes-clad man.
He was the first convict that John Collins had ever seen. He wore a two-piece garment, coarse shoes, and a visored cap. Jacket and trousers were circled by alternating bars of black and white; the cap was similarly barred from back to front. But it was not the garment that drew the attention of John Collins. It was the man’s face. There was something about it—it may have been in the bloodless cheeks—something arsenical and poisonous; something glittering, too—it may have been in the eyes—something glittering, furtive, and threatening. Collins could not fathom the look, but a vague discomfort slid coldly along his spine.
Walking beneath the concrete arch, between the garotter and the murderer, linked to them with steel, he passed from beneath the spanning building into a court. On the right were several doors; at the second one was a narrow bench upon which they sat, while the sheriff unlocked the cuffs from their wrists and then with his deputies entered the turnkey’s office. The murderer was breathing thickly, like a man asleep. The garotter was silent for a moment. Then he stretched forth his arms rubbing his wrists with his hands, and laughed harshly.
“Same old mill!” he cried; and then, in a jeering voice to Collins, “Yes, take yer gapins now, you rum; ye’ll see enough of it before ye’re done with it!”
John Collins was looking about him. His eyes fell upon a little garden in the centre of the court. A fountain was playing upon red flowers. But he was still pondering on the expression of the convict of the gate. He could not forget the look, and he could not explain it. It was a look bearing fear, and giving fear. It was the look of a rat. A rat! That was it. A look such as one gets from a rat in a dusky corner.
The murderer was staring dully, past the red flowers and the jetting water which he did not see, staring at the gray walls beyond which he would never pass again. Along the summit of the wall a blue-clad man was pacing slowly, sharply silhouetted; he held in his right hand a rifle, carrying it loosely, like a hunter. The garotter leaned and grinned into the murderer’s face.
“You’ll wish they’d handed you the book and you’d been hung,” he snarled; “you’ll wish that more’n once before ye’ve croaked in this mill!” But the other did not seem to hear. Collins, though there was little softness in his heart, felt an uneasiness at the creaking cruelty of the words. His eyes went up and away across the enclosure to a high stone building with top-floor windows heavily barred.
“Them’s the condemned cells up there on top,” went on the garotter, noting the direction of Collins’s glance—and then, to the murderer: “You’ll live there, pal.”
But the murderer still stared at the stretch of high stone wall, with its pacing guard holding his gun loosely, like a hunter.
A man was coming toward them, across the garden. He was squarely, brutally built, was clad in blue, wore a white felt hat, jauntily creased, and as he passed cut at a flower with his light rattan cane. As he drew close Collins saw his face, yellow-brown; and set in this yellow-brown face, two eyes, white-gray, opaque, without light; two eyes hard like metal. Furtively the garotter bent his head; he coughed behind his hand, which had risen to hide his face. The man stopped, glanced sharply down upon him, then seized the upraised hand, jerking it roughly from the face. His white-gray eyes set themselves stonily into those of the thug, which immediately escaped to the right, then to the left, then to the ground. The blue-clad man laughed silently.
“So you’re back, eh, Thurston?” he said. He spoke lightly, and his heavy sallow face showed no emotion; yet into it, bending downward on the bowed head of the other, there seemed to creep, somehow, a dull menace. “Back again,” he repeated musingly; “and you thought I wasn’t going to make you!” He chuckled with little sound. “I know a friend that’s here, a-waiting to see you; a good friend—ain’t you glad he’s still here, eh?” There was some deadly meaning to the words. Collins saw the garotter shrivel beneath them. Then the man was staring at him. John Collins stared back, as it was his habit to do. The eyes met; John Collins felt the gray ones, round, almost lidless, boring into him without emotion, without trace of human feeling; he struggled; in spite of himself he felt the defiant challenge flicker in his own, flicker, almost go out; he threw back his head—then the other had pivoted on his heels and, cutting the air in a whistling stroke of his rattan cane, had passed into the turnkey’s office.
The garotter muttered an oath and slowly raised his white face. “Who is that?” asked John Collins.
“Jennings—one of the jute-mill guards,” answered the thug; “look out fer him.” He spoke almost in a whisper and lapsed silent at once.
The sheriff and his deputies were leaving. The sheriff shook hands with the murderer and the garotter. “Good-bye, boys,” he said; “do the best you can for yourselves.” He turned to John Collins. “It’s your first time,” he said: “remember and keep to yourself. Keep to yourself and hang on to your good-time; hang on to your copper.” He hurried on after the others. John Collins’s eyes followed the three men into the dark vaulted way. Suddenly the tunnel was lit up as with a burst of golden light; at its extremity, roundly framed, appeared the outline of a hill, tawny against a blue sky.
There was a metallic clang; the tunnel darkened again. Collins’s eyes turned back to the gray walls. “Hang on to your copper,” he murmured vaguely.