All that day, tamping black sand into wooden patterns, 9009 questioned about him, questioned with sharp glances from shifting eyes—but he got no answer.
That night he was all alone in his cell, and all night he pondered. In the morning, during cleaning-up time, he began again his questioning, furtive, lipless, but fiercer every moment; but again only shaken heads and shrugging shoulders met him.
For a week it was thus. He was alone in his cell at night; in the daytime a strange convict sat at the emery wheel—a long, lean man with a lead-hued face. And the toil was harder than it had been before—and his savage questioning, insistent and implacable, rebounded from the hard faces of his fellows as from blank stone walls.
Then, after a time, a rumour began to percolate slowly through the prison—in lipless words, from stone face to stone face, vague, incomplete at first, irritating as the tapping snatches of a telegraph receiver out of order, but little by lit-
