Page:9009 (1908).djvu/122

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9009

shooting the burglar from behind; the guards waiting outside to catch him as he came. He looked at these two pictures, stupid; he could not understand them.

He emerged from the dungeon at noon and was taken, blinking, into the sunny yard. Here a theatrical scene had been carefully arranged.

At a point midway between the door of the dining-hall and the gates of the jute-mill lane, close to the stone-like track made by the thrice-daily march of the lock-step line, two deal tables had been placed side by side. And upon these tables, the three convicts killed in the break had been laid.

They had been dumped, not laid, dumped in their last attitudes, now frozen to rigidity. They sprawled in their stripes, ignoble with blood and earth, with limbs doubled under them or spread out, contorted, their faces, gray-white where they showed between bruise and clot, staring upward with glazed eyes upon which grains of dust lay without causing a blink. Miller leered, his long teeth showing yellow; the burglar’s

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