long-handled ladle and waiting his turn to slip it under the sullen red stream which the furnace gave. On these pouring-off days, the sweating felons strained like black-faced demons among lurid glows, emerging from deep shadows into abrupt flares and dropping back into their depths. They looked like men long dead and damned for all time. But always, to 9009, a glimpse of his cell-mate, swaying on his high stool in a fiery rain, came as a subtle respite.
When one of the convicts was hurt, the others laughed. And one of the jests of the moulding-room was to spit into your neighbour’s filled ladle, causing an explosion that seared him. A felon did this to 9009 one day. 9009 leaped upon him, and when he was dragged off, he was trampling the prostrate form of the evil jester.
For this he went to the dungeon for ten days. When on the morning terminating his sentence he reëntered the foundry and looked up toward the emery wheel, Jimmy Carroll was not there. Another convict sat at his place, in the fiery shower.
