Every morning, now, at cleaning time, as striped men with brooms and creaking buckets passed along the corridors or massed by the sinks, gibing cruelly or sliding lipless words from dead faces, four convicts would gather, heads close together, for a few moments. Each morning the same four, in the same apparently accidental manner, came together near the sinks and conferred for a few moments, saying little, and most of that with their lid-hidden eyes, swiftly.
9009 had marked these four men. One was Miller, the red-striped highwayman who was catching in the ball game the day that 9009 had been denied his pass. He was a big, gaunt man with a neck made crooked by a gunshot scar; he had made several attempts at escape in the past, and had a mania for giving away his clothes before each of such breaks. The second man was the ferret-eyed, wiry pickpocket who had played short-stop; the third was one of the bullet-headed burglars who had been boxing, and the fourth was Nichols, the stony-faced confidence-man who had umpired the game.
