but he reached the summit, dived over it, and scrambled into the broad road at the point whence, years before, his coupled wrist raised by the garotter’s pointing hand, he had had first sight of the prison’s turreted walls. 9009 stopped and looked.
It was near winter, but the drought of the lingering fall had left the land arid, and the rounded hill still rose tawny against the sky. The prison was changed. A consternation brooded in its battlemented façades; within, men were running to and fro, criss-crossing, aimlessly; and from the guards’ wall, near a turret, three trusties were lowering a limp, blue form. Behind and above, like a red eye crooked in its orbit, the dead sun looked. Throwing both hands up into the air and brandishing his rifle, John Collins let out a shrill whoop of defiance and hate; then, turning, plunged on down the hill.
To the south, gray beneath a gray sky, lay the bay, whipped up into sudden bursts of livid fury by cold squalls. Collins kept it to his left and made for the edge of the chaparral lining a
