guards pacing slow along walls or waiting in suspended cages with rifles loose in hand, like hunters. The red stripes meant this: that at the slightest disorder, the slightest tumult, the least suspicious movement or eddy in the mass of guarded criminals, it was he who was to receive the first bullets from the guards watching, rifles in hand, weary with monotonous vigil, and anxious to kill.
He worked in the foundry. Striped men made there stoves for thrifty housewives, and they were the desperate of the prison. The manufacture was simple. The convicts melted scrap in a furnace—a huge rusty-brown cylinder of iron, lined with fire-brick, which stood at one end of the moulding-room—then drew the molten metal and carried it in ladles to black-sand moulds, where it hardened. The glowing viscous metal poured into these moulds came forth rigid and black and shaped into parts, and the parts were put together into stoves. 9009 was a moulder.
They were a black-faced scowling crew of felons, dumb at their toil, hating one another.
