.Jbt,
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Mrs. Ben B. Lindsey 
 
 i
 
 C ucl 
 
 
 tL 
 
 <-***- 
 
 h^j^y 
 
 /VwiAJ^
 
 9009
 
 9009 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES HOPPER 
 
 AND 
 
 FRED. R. BECHDOLT 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE McCLURE COMPANY 
 MCMVIII
 
 Copyright, 1908, by The McClure Company
 
 ps 
 
 TO 
 ONE WHO WEPT 
 
 1108169
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE impulse which moved us to write this 
 book was primarily indignation indignation at 
 facts. At facts learned slowly and gradually 
 by one of us through years of patient investi 
 gation, and then told, all in one mass, to the 
 other, who thus came to them with an abrupt 
 ness giving intense vision. A work written in 
 the fervor of indignation is apt to be violent, 
 unbalanced, and unjust. We were alive to this 
 danger; after some thought, we saw how we 
 could best avoid it. It was by using in the 
 story facts only. 9009 is a story made of facts 
 a Fact-Story. 
 
 By this we do not mean that 9009 is a biog 
 raphy. Convict 9009 John Collins exists only 
 in our imagination. But everything that hap 
 pens to 9009 within the prison is something 
 which has happened to some convict in some 
 
 [vii]
 
 PREFACE 
 
 prison (American prison) some time. And much 
 worse things could have happened to 9009. By 
 which we mean that much worse things have 
 happened to some convicts in some prisons some 
 times and we know of these things. 
 
 So that, besides sticking to truth in writing 
 the story of 9009, we have done more. We have 
 eliminated what was too terrible about this 
 truth, and in the expression of that which we 
 have divulged we have used repression. The 
 result, we think, is a simple, clear, compressed 
 story, all of action, which shows how Society 
 creates a Monster. How Society through sheer, 
 crass stupidity, creates a Monster, which then 
 it has to destroy (stupidly) at the cost of labor, 
 blood, and (which may concern it more) of much 
 gold. 
 
 [ viii ]
 
 9009
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 JOHN COLLINS sat upon the lurching bench of 
 the wagon, his right wrist linked to a garotter, 
 his left wrist linked to a murderer; his eyes were 
 straining for the first sight of the thing he 
 feared. Before him, on the front seat, the sheriff 
 gossiped lazily to the driver, who idly flicked the 
 lash of his whip across the horses sweating 
 flanks. Behind, upon the back seat, the two 
 deputies watched with sawed-off shot-guns 
 across their knees. The wagon rolled slowly, 
 with sudden creaking pitchings, along a dust- 
 heaped road which coiled its way to the summit 
 of a tawny hill. To the east, far down, white 
 flecks danced upon the bay s green waters, and 
 from the shore breaths of wind came gliding up 
 through the dry wild oats in long silvery undu 
 lations. 
 
 The horses gained the level and broke into a 
 [3]
 
 9009 
 
 trot; the carriage plunged forward and down 
 and a gray wall leaped up from the ground 
 against the sky. The murderer sucked in a 
 whistling breath. The wall rose as they ap 
 proached; it hung over them, gray and ponder 
 ous, turreted as a mediaeval battlement. The 
 garotter laughed, a harsh braggart laugh, and 
 pointed, raising with his arm Collins s coupled 
 wrist. But Collins leaned forward unheeding, 
 staring silently. 
 
 The wagon, drawing a smooth ellipse, was 
 coming up to a brick building which jutted out 
 like a buttress from the centre of the wall; two 
 steel-barred gates swung themselves open as of 
 their own volition as the prisoners alighted. 
 Flanked by the murderer and the garotter, the 
 sheriff before him, the deputies behind, John 
 Collins walked in. A voice spoke overhead; a 
 blue-sleeved arm emerged from a window and 
 drooped downward, dangling a large iron key at 
 the end of its stumpy fingers; from a stone bench 
 at the entrance a stripes-clad man rose, took the 
 key, and locked the gate. Officers and felons now 
 
 [4]
 
 9009 
 
 stood in an arched passageway which smelled 
 damp, like a tunnel. They were within, but 
 Collins hardly noted the fact; he had turned his 
 head and was watching the stripes-clad man. 
 
 He was the first convict that John Collins had 
 ever seen. He wore a two-piece garment, coarse 
 shoes, and a visored cap. Jacket and trousers 
 were circled by alternating bars of black and 
 white; the cap was similarly barred from back 
 to front. But it was not the garment that drew 
 the attention of John Collins. It was the man s 
 face. There was something about it it may 
 have been in the bloodless cheeks something 
 arsenical and poisonous; something glittering, 
 too it may have been in the eyes something 
 glittering, furtive, and threatening. Collins 
 could not fathom the look, but a vague discom 
 fort slid coldly along his spine. 
 
 Walking beneath the concrete arch, between 
 the garotter and the murderer, linked to them 
 with steel, he passed from beneath the spanning 
 building into a court. On the right were several 
 doors; at the second one was a narrow bench 
 
 [5]
 
 9009 
 
 upon which they sat, while the sheriff unlocked 
 the cuffs from their wrists and then with his 
 deputies entered the turnkey s office. The mur 
 derer was breathing thickly, like a man asleep. 
 The garotter was silent for a moment. Then he 
 stretched forth his arms rubbing his wrists with 
 his hands, and laughed harshly. 
 
 "Same old mill!" he cried; and then, in a 
 jeering voice to Collins, " Yes, take yer gapins 
 now, you rum; ye ll see enough of it before ye re 
 done with it! " 
 
 John Collins was looking about him. His eyes 
 fell upon a little garden in the centre of the 
 court. A fountain was playing upon red flowers. 
 But he was still pondering on the expression 
 of the convict of the gate. He could not forget 
 the look, and he could not explain it. It was 
 a look bearing fear, and giving fear. It was 
 the look of a rat. A rat! That was it. A look 
 such as one gets from a rat in a dusky corner. 
 
 The murderer was staring dully, past the red 
 flowers and the jetting water which he did not 
 see, staring at the gray walls beyond which he 
 
 [6]
 
 9009 
 
 would never pass again. Along the summit of 
 the wall a blue-clad man was pacing slowly, 
 sharply silhouetted; he held in his right hand 
 a rifle, carrying it loosely, like a hunter. The 
 garotter leaned and grinned into the murderer s 
 face. 
 
 " You ll wish they d handed you the book and 
 you d been hung," he snarled; "you ll wish that 
 more n once before ye ve croaked in this mill!" 
 But the other did not seem to hear. Collins, 
 though there was little softness in his heart, 
 felt an uneasiness at the creaking cruelty of the 
 words. His eyes went up and away across the 
 enclosure to a high stone building with top-floor 
 windows heavily barred. 
 
 " Them s the condemned cells up there on 
 top," went on the garotter, noting the direction 
 of Collins s glance and then, to the murderer: 
 " You ll live there, pal." 
 
 But the murderer still stared at the stretch of 
 high stone wall, with its pacing guard holding 
 his gun loosely, like a hunter. 
 
 A man was coming toward them, across the 
 
 [7]
 
 9009 
 
 garden. He was squarely, brutally built, was 
 clad in blue, wore a white felt hat, jauntily 
 creased, and as he passed cut at a flower with 
 his light rattan cane. As he drew close Collins 
 saw his face, yellow-brown; and set in this yel 
 low-brown face, two eyes, white-gray, opaque, 
 without light; two eyes hard like metal. Fur 
 tively the garotter bent his head; he coughed 
 behind his hand, which had risen to hide his face. 
 The man stopped, glanced sharply down upon 
 him, then seized the upraised hand, jerking it 
 roughly from the face. His white-gray eyes set 
 themselves stonily into those of the thug, which 
 immediately escaped to the right, then to the 
 left, then to the ground. The blue-clad man 
 laughed silently. 
 
 " So you re back, eh, Thurston?" he said. He 
 spoke lightly, and his heavy sallow face showed 
 no emotion; yet into it, bending downward on 
 the bowed head of the other, there seemed to 
 creep, somehow, a dull menace. " Back again," 
 he repeated musingly; " and you thought I 
 wasn t going to make you!" He chuckled with 
 
 [8]
 
 9009 
 
 little sound. " I know a friend that s here, 
 a-waiting to see you; a good friend ain t you 
 glad he s still here, eh?" There was some 
 deadly meaning to the words. Collins saw the 
 garotter shrivel beneath them. Then the man 
 was staring at him. John Collins stared back, 
 as it was his habit to do. The eyes met; John 
 Collins felt the gray ones, round, almost lidless, 
 boring into him without emotion, without trace 
 of human feeling; he struggled; in spite of him 
 self he felt the defiant challenge flicker in his 
 own, flicker, almost go out; he threw back his 
 head then the other had pivoted on his heels 
 and, cutting the air in a whistling stroke of his 
 rattan cane, had passed into the turnkey s office. 
 
 The garotter muttered an oath and slowly 
 raised his white face. "Who is that?" asked 
 John Collins. 
 
 "Jennings one of the jute-mill guards," an 
 swered the thug; " look out fer him." He spoke 
 almost in a whisper and lapsed silent at once. 
 
 The sheriff and his deputies were leaving. The 
 sheriff shook hands with the murderer and the 
 
 [9]
 
 9009 
 
 garotter. " Good-bye, boys," he said ; " do the 
 best you can for yourselves." He turned to John 
 Collins. "It s your first time," he said: "re 
 member and keep to yourself. Keep to yourself 
 and hang on to your good-time; hang on to your 
 copper." He hurried on after the others. John 
 Collins s eyes followed the three men into the 
 dark vaulted way. Suddenly the tunnel was lit 
 up as with a burst of golden light; at its ex 
 tremity, roundly framed, appeared the outline of 
 a hill, tawny against a blue sky. 
 
 There was a metallic clang; the tunnel dark 
 ened again. Collins s eyes turned back to the 
 gray walls. " Hang on to your copper," he mur 
 mured vaguely. 
 
 [10]
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
 FOR some time the three sat silent on the 
 bench before the garden, with its fountain play 
 ing upon the red flowers. The garotter s head, 
 now, was bent like the murderer s, and he was 
 muttering to himself. He straightened sud 
 denly, touching Collins s elbow with his hand. 
 
 " Listen, pal," he said hoarsely; " I ll wise you 
 to a thing or two." His thick lips trembled 
 loosely. " It s the cons; watch them. The cons " 
 he looked up into Collins s face almost appeal- 
 ingly, as though begging permission to rid him 
 self of a weight. " The guards they re bad 
 enough; God knows they re all bad in this hell 
 hole. But the cons they re devils." His grip 
 upon Collins s elbow tightened. " Every wan of 
 them s ready to give ye the worst of it some way, 
 to job ye if he can; every wan of them is stoolin 
 on the other " he gulped oddly, seemed to swal- 
 
 [11]
 
 9009 
 
 low three or four times with the motion of a 
 bird drinking " or lookin to kill ye because he 
 thinks ye ve stooled on him!" he finished with 
 sudden passion. 
 
 A stripes-clad man was coming out of the 
 turnkey s office. " The bath-trusty" whispered 
 the garotter, immediately resuming his cringing 
 posture; "he s come for us." The bath-trusty 
 was dressed as the man Collins had seen at the 
 gate, but his hair, instead of being cropped 
 close, like the other s, was of medium length. 
 He was scanning a slip of paper in his hand, 
 and in his sharp face, bent to read, Collins fan 
 cied he saw the shadow of what he had seen in 
 the face of the convict by the gate. As the man 
 looked up at him, the impression was confirmed. 
 The man had rat eyes. 
 
 He waved his hand to them authoritatively. 
 " Come on," he said, and turned his back. They 
 followed, the garotter first, and behind John 
 Collins, the murderer, still silent, as though 
 dazed. They went through a hallway and up an 
 iron flight of stairs to a room into which warm 
 
 [12]
 
 9009 
 
 rays of sun slanted through a skylight. Here 
 another convict received them pointing, without 
 giving them a glance, to a bench upon which 
 they sat while he turned to adjust the lens of 
 a large camera. He wore green eye-shades 
 instead of the visored cap; his black hair was 
 quite long and foppishly parted; a little mous 
 tache covered his upper lip; his striped jacket 
 was rounded at the bottom and had lapels; 
 his striped trousers were carefully creased, and 
 his buttoned shoes were of glistening patent 
 leather. Also he wore a white collar and a 
 four-in-hand tie. His forehead was low beneath 
 the shiny black bangs, and there was something 
 venomously alert about his slight body and 
 beady eyes. 
 
 By this man and the bath-trusty few words 
 were exchanged, and these obviously restricted 
 to the business at hand. Between them was a 
 barrier of caste: the photographer treated the 
 bath-trusty with the same authority of word and 
 manner which the latter used toward the three 
 prisoners. And yet, through this barrier, some- 
 
 [13]
 
 9009 
 
 thing was constantly passing sometimes in 
 half-averted head, and often in sharp sidelong 
 glance from narrowed eye something that 
 showed that the high standing of the one did 
 not put him beyond peril from the other; there 
 was not a moment when the two were not watch 
 ing each other furtively. They watched each 
 other like two hungry cats; it was as though 
 the photographer were a cat holding a bleeding 
 piece of meat and the other were waiting for 
 him to slacken his guard for just a moment. 
 One thing was plain: there was absolutely no 
 community of interest between the two convicts; 
 no need of guards to watch while the two were 
 together. All of which impressed Collins vague 
 ly, as he sat for his picture, first bare-headed, 
 then with his hat on. 
 
 After which the three followed the bath-trusty 
 to an inner room in which incandescent lights 
 glowed yellow between shelves and drawers that 
 lined the walls. At the order of another stripes- 
 clad man, the three stripped naked in the room. 
 Leaving their clothes there, they crossed the hall 
 
 [14]
 
 9009 
 
 and spent ten minutes in a large concrete tank, 
 scrubbing themselves with coarse brown soap 
 and warm water. They returned. The bath- 
 trusty consulted with the trusty of the clothes 
 room. Again Collins saw the sidelong looks 
 from narrowed eyes, the incessant watching, 
 and then the clothes-room trusty measured the 
 three loosely. He was a bent little man, hollow- 
 cheeked; his eyes roved, shifting from place to 
 place like the sun gleam from a mirror in a boy s 
 hand; but always they flitted back to the bath- 
 trusty. And the bath-trusty, in turn, watched 
 him far more closely than he watched his three 
 charges. 
 
 They were standing stark while the clothes- 
 room trusty rummaged about shelves and 
 drawers and made notes in an account book. 
 Finally, he placed before each a little pile of 
 clothing underwear, a striped suit, a barred 
 cap, and a pair of coarse lace shoes. On the 
 back of each jacket, at the collar, was a square 
 of white cloth, and on each square the bent little 
 convict stamped in purple ink a number. Col- 
 
 [15]
 
 9009 
 
 lins, picking up his jacket, looked at the number. 
 He was 9009. 
 
 He slid on the garments silently; and as their 
 coarseness rasped his skin, as their ugly bars 
 gloomed in his eyes, there came to him a feeling 
 which the stone walls, the hardness of the gar- 
 otter, the rat eyes of the trusties, the harsh im 
 placability of walls and men, had not yet given 
 him. As he stepped from the chair of the prison 
 barber, his face smooth-shaven, his hair cropped 
 close, this feeling took on a character of finality. 
 So it was with the other two. Into each face 
 had come a heaviness, a blank hopelessness; lines 
 had sprung that added years to age, that took 
 away whatever flicker had remained of gentle 
 ness and youth. The pictures now taken were 
 as of other men than those who posed before. 
 Even the murderer had changed. 
 
 The summer sun had sunk behind the sur 
 rounding walls as, each with a roll of bedding 
 upon his shoulder, they stepped out again into 
 the court, after having been pawed lightly by 
 the photographer, measuring them by the Ber- 
 
 [16]
 
 9009 
 
 tillon system. They left the murderer at the 
 heavily barred stone building to which the gar- 
 otter had prophetically pointed; and 9009 and 
 the garotter followed the bath-trusty till they 
 came to a large open space. This was flanked 
 by two cell houses, a number of smaller build 
 ings, and a stretch of high stone wall. The cell 
 houses, with their long rows of black-barred 
 windows, frowned down upon this space which, 
 although large, seemed crushingly close, and 
 the earth of which was beaten by feet into ce 
 ment-like hardness. Along the top of the wall 
 two blue-clad men were slowly walking, ap 
 proaching a corner which was capped by a box 
 like a tower. Each carried in his right hand a 
 rifle, loosely, like a hunter. In the wall, near 
 the cell house was a great steel-barred gate, 
 and over this was an open turret from which 
 protruded the vicious muzzle of a rapid-fire gun. 
 Here two more blue-clad guards stood with 
 rifles. 
 
 As 9009, the garotter, and the trusty reached 
 the centre of the yard, the gates in the wall sud- 
 
 [17]
 
 9009 
 
 denly swung inward with a clang, and through 
 the arched way, beneath the turret with its 
 rapid-fire gun, a line of convicts began to flow 
 inward, a line writhing like a snake, gray as a 
 larva, and mounted upon legs like a centipede. 
 It came, slowly, smoothly, across the yard, 
 toward 9009, the garotter, and the trusty, who 
 had halted; it crept by them; its head sank into 
 the door of one of the cell houses to the right; 
 and still the tail was oozing, as though it were 
 to be endlessly, out of the archway to the left. 
 9009 understood; it was the lockstep of which 
 he often had heard. The convicts marched in 
 single file, each with both hands on the shoul 
 ders of the man before him; from this came the 
 undulating unison of the long, striped thing. It 
 crawled by him; he scanned its links; one by 
 one the white faces flashed by. Each face was 
 set straight ahead, looking downward; each 
 face was white and held a dull hardness. And 
 from these men, each touching the other with 
 both hands on his shoulders, there came no 
 sound; the lips were motionless. They marched; 
 
 [18]
 
 9009 
 
 from head to tail the monster undulated smooth 
 ly. They marched, eyes to the ground, and 
 grimly silent. And the stripes of all were black 
 and gray, black and gray, black and gray until 
 a startling change in the ringed line s length 
 struck 9009 almost like a blow. It was a con 
 vict clad in stripes of black and red. 
 
 9009 heard, at his elbow, the sound of breath 
 sucked sharply in; the garotter, leaning for 
 ward with yellow face, was watching the red- 
 striped convict. 
 
 He came on, linked in front by his own arms, 
 linked behind by the arms of another, a red 
 blotch in the long gray line, till even with them. 
 He marched with head bowed and shoulders 
 bent. His face was dead-white with the prison 
 pallor, heavy-jawed, and a scowl like a corrosion 
 cleft his forehead; his eyes scanned the ground 
 at his feet. 
 
 The garotter swallowed hard, his knees bent 
 a bit and his shoulders rose a little; and then, 
 suddenly, as if drawn by this shrinking move 
 ment, the eyes of the red-striped man left the 
 
 [19]
 
 9009 
 
 ground and lit upon him. It was a flash, a 
 glance in passing, a flicker of the lids, and the 
 eyes went back to the beaten ground; but in 
 that instant there had leaped from the pallid 
 face, coarse-mouthed, a look so eloquent of hate, 
 so dire of promise, a look a-shout with such 
 ferocious joy, that 9009 himself went cold. The 
 garotter was livid, and drops of sweat stood 
 out upon his forehead. 
 
 " My God! " he said thickly. 
 
 The bath-trusty, looking straight ahead as 
 though he were not talking, said: " He cut Don- 
 nely just after you left and got another twenty. 
 He s just out of solitary; first day in the jute." 
 
 " I didn t stool," muttered the garotter and 
 his muttering, though low, had the inflection of 
 a wail. " I didn t stool." 
 
 The trusty marched them on; a minute later 
 9009 was in his cell. 
 
 [20]
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 THE next morning, 9009 was awakened by a 
 rude hand and taken to the yard captain s office 
 to be booked. A keen-eyed, iron-gray man met 
 him there and, after stripping him, scanned his 
 bare body inch by inch for scars. 
 
 He examined first the face of 9009, passing his 
 eyes slowly and mercilessly over each feature, 
 exploring every fold and pit of skin; then, with 
 the same passionless, peering scrutiny, like that 
 of an old woman examining a piece of meat at 
 the market, he searched the arms, the hands, the 
 naked torso, and finally the feet. At times he 
 stopped and marked down the result of his ob 
 servation into a little note-book. When he was 
 through, he had not spoken a word; he had not 
 seen the man. 
 
 Having slipped on his garments again, 9009 
 stood a moment awkwardly in the. centre of the 
 room, not knowing what was expected of him, 
 
 [21]
 
 9009 
 
 and unconsciously watching the clerk book his 
 commitment: "John Collins, Union County, July 
 19, 1897; Burglary and Assault to Commit Mur 
 der; five years and three years." 
 
 The clerk was young and slender, clad in blue; 
 his boyish lips curved in a vague smile. The 
 book was thick, heavy, its large page ruled 
 off by vertical lines of red and blue. The pen 
 scratched and sputtered. The clerk stopped and 
 replaced it with another, then went on writing, 
 smiling vaguely into the book. 
 
 " Five years and three years." 
 
 9009 dropped his eyes to the floor; it was con 
 crete, hard, like stone. He raised his eyes to the 
 window ; it was steel-barred. Through the squares 
 he saw a stretch of wall; on the top, cutting the 
 sky in silhouette, a guard paced slowly, carrying 
 his rifle in his hand, loosely, like a hunter. 
 
 " Five years and three years. Eight years," 
 .thought 9009. 
 
 A sudden report, sharp and loud as a pistol- 
 shot, made him jump. The clerk had slammed 
 the book shut. 
 
 [22]
 
 9009 
 
 The rat-eyed trusty was standing in the door 
 way, beckoning. 9009 followed him across the 
 yard into the cell-house, up two flights of iron 
 stairs, along a narrow steel platform, past a 
 long row of steel-barred doors, back to his cell. 
 Following the prison regulations he must pass 
 his first day in his cell. 
 
 The night before, he had thrown his bedding 
 upon the narrow bunk and, stretching upon it, 
 had immediately sunk into a brutish sleep. Now 
 he looked about him. 
 
 The place was steel-walled, steel-ceilinged, 
 steel-floored. Against the bottom wall was the 
 bunk upon which his bedding was heaped. As 
 he sat upon the iron rod forming the edge of this 
 bunk, he had to bend forward so as not to hit 
 with his head the second bunk, above. The up 
 per bunk was without tenant that day. The cell 
 was wide as the length of the bunks about seven 
 feet and of less depth. That is, between the 
 bunk and the door, there was just enough room 
 to allow a man to pace the two or three steps al 
 lowed by the width; two men could not do it. The 
 
 [23]
 
 9009 
 
 door was a steel-barred gate through which the 
 eyes of guards and trusties, watchful or merely 
 hostilely curious, could always peer. In one cor 
 ner was a three-legged stool; above it, on a trian 
 gular shelf, a Bible covered with dust; a placard 
 shone yellow on the wall to the left. That was all. 
 
 He sat on the edge of the bunk, his survey 
 made, holding his chin in his two hands, tor 
 mented by a strange sensation. It was an odor; 
 a taint was in the air; something elusive, but 
 which would not go. Curiously enough, in his 
 mind, it called up visions of circus menageries, 
 seen in childhood. After a while he worked out 
 the connection. The smell of a menagerie, it 
 came from caged animals. Here also, there were 
 things in cages. These were not animals; they 
 were men. The taint in the air, it came from 
 men, many men, caged. 
 
 The idea made him a little sick. But now, 
 something else was troubling him, something 
 still more vague, more elusive, more irritating 
 than that which he had just caught something 
 that he must solve. 
 
 [24]
 
 90O9 
 
 He felt a vast sense of stoppage stoppage, 
 that was it. A sense one has on a steamer when 
 suddenly the clanging engines cease with a sigh; 
 that which comes when one is alone in a room 
 with the ticking of a clock, and this ticking 
 stops; the feeling that comes when one passes 
 without warning from the tumult of a storm 
 into a great calm. 
 
 There had come a distinct halt in his life; a 
 period, a gigantic punctuation. 
 
 9009 was a bad man. He had come to this cell 
 not through a miscarriage of justice. He had 
 been bad; he had been lawless. 
 
 He had been lawless from childhood, from the 
 time when, a mere boy, cutting away from a 
 squalid home, he had forced his way to the lead 
 ership of a " gang " whose serious occupations 
 were pilfering from the grocer, robbing boats 
 and box-cars, and whose amusements were fierce 
 fights with rival " gangs," stonings of Chinamen, 
 torturings of cats, and experiments in men-vices. 
 
 Always he had been at war. He had been at 
 war with men, with society. And now, in this 
 
 [25]
 
 9009 
 
 abrupt cessation of the whirl of his life, there 
 had come to him a feeling, vague, indefinite, of 
 futility a discouragement. All of his fighting, 
 all of his defiance, his cunning had after all led 
 him only to this to a cell. For the last six years 
 he should have been expecting this. But really, 
 he had not expected it. It had come to him as a 
 distinct shock. And now came this feeling of 
 uselessness, of futility. 
 
 He had fought society and had been worsted. 
 And he felt that always he would be worsted. 
 He felt that he could not go on in this way. It 
 didn t pay, that was it. Always, he would get 
 the worst of it. It didn t pay. He couldn t fight 
 the world. He couldn t fight that. His life 
 it had been a failure. That was it: his life had 
 been a failure. 
 
 It had been a failure. And in him, now, ob 
 scure but strong, there was a longing for some 
 thing else, for some elusive thing that he could 
 not name, that he could not picture, and yet 
 which was indispensable to him. 
 
 Strangely enough, it was allied in some way 
 [26]
 
 9009 
 
 with the impression that he had carried away 
 from his visit to Tom Ryan. 
 
 A few weeks before his arrest, Ryan, meeting 
 him on the street, had taken him to his home for 
 dinner. Ryan was one of the companions of his 
 boyhood, and he had not seen him for years. 
 
 Ryan had become, he found, a common plod 
 ding workingman of the class at which he 
 sneered. He was a hod-carrier. He lived in a 
 wretched cottage on the outskirts of the city. 
 He arrived there every evening, his brogans red 
 with brick dust, his shoulders white with plas 
 ter, to squat at a table roughly laden by his 
 wife, and shovel food into his harassed body. 
 That evening Collins had eaten with him. 
 
 They sat at the table, Ryan with both elbows 
 upon it, gulping the food which Collins hardly 
 touched. Mrs. Ryan, a squarely built, red-faced 
 woman, stood between the stove and the table, 
 keeping the latter plenished. At intervals she 
 leaned over and directed a wandering spoon into 
 the gaping mouth of Myrtle, the little tow- 
 headed elder daughter, or leaned over a crib in 
 
 [27]
 
 9009 
 
 the corner of the kitchen, lifting a blanket to 
 quiet an acid wail. 
 
 After eating, Ryan had lit his pipe, had puffed 
 a while, and then had gone to sleep, there in his 
 chair. 
 
 This, to Collins, used to an alert, vigilant ex 
 istence; to the excitement of long-plotted and 
 carefully executed thefts and of their resultant 
 pursuits; to intervals of Tenderloin luxury, was 
 just the sort of life to be most despised. To 
 him, his lawlessness and cheap luxuries were 
 what elegance is to the rich, beauty to the artist. 
 Like the rich man, like the artist, he naturally 
 revolted at the commonplace of such an exis 
 tence as Ryan s. 
 
 And yet, that night, he had carried with him 
 a vague and inexplicable desire which was still 
 with him now, which in some way was allied 
 with the feeling that had come to him this morn 
 ing, here, in his cell; which had to do with the 
 discouragement, the sense of failure, the dis 
 gust, almost, that tormented him as he looked 
 back along the days that he had lived. 
 
 [28]
 
 9009 
 
 And as he sat here, his fists against his tem 
 ples, the two things suddenly leaped together, 
 coalesced. 
 
 What he desired was that which Ryan had. 
 
 What he, 9009, longed for, what his life had 
 failed to give him, what his life must now give 
 him, it was what Eyan had. 
 
 It was Security. 
 
 " He felt safe," he said to himself with heavy 
 finality. 
 
 Then: "Didn t have to look out for no 
 < bulls. " 
 
 " Didn t have to look out for stool-pigeons." 
 
 " Didn t carry no gun." 
 
 " He felt safe." 
 
 He knew now what he wanted, wanted more 
 than wine, money, women, cigars, more than the 
 joy of fight, the iron tang of revolt; he wanted 
 peace, he wanted security, he wanted what Ryan 
 had. 
 
 " No more of this," he muttered ; " no more. 
 I ll turn square." 
 
 " Square " not out of any ethical renovation, 
 [29]
 
 9009 
 
 but " square," very simply, because thus only 
 could he get what now he wanted, which was 
 peace. 
 
 By a freak of his mind there came now to him 
 the scratching pen of the clerk booking him. 
 The big book leaped before him; he saw the pen 
 travelling. " Five years and three years." 
 
 Eight years! Eight years before he could 
 even begin his new life. 
 
 And yet eight years; after all, it was not so 
 long, eight years! He gave a swift look behind. 
 The last eight years they had not been so long! 
 In eight years he would be thirty-seven. A man 
 had some years left at thirty-seven! 
 
 He had risen to his feet in his excitement and 
 was pacing to and fro along the narrow space 
 between bunk and door. At one of his turns his 
 eyes fell upon the placard stuck to the wall. He 
 stopped, his eyes glued themselves upon the 
 cardboard, a flush came to his heavy cheeks. 
 
 " My copper! " it was almost a shout " My 
 copper " he slapped his thigh " By God, I was 
 almost forgetting my copper! " 
 
 [30]
 
 9009 
 
 Before him, yellow on the blue-black wall, the 
 placard shone; its little black characters danced. 
 He read them carefully. 
 
 GOOD TIME 
 
 Under the Goodwin Act you have al 
 ready earned time which has been de 
 ducted from your sentence. This time 
 had been deducted as follows: 
 
 For the first year, two months; second 
 year, two months; third year, four 
 months; fourth year, four months; fifth 
 year, and every year thereafter, five 
 months. 
 
 This time had already been earned by 
 you. The law has given it to you, and 
 it belongs to you. Only bad behaviour 
 on your part will forfeit this time. It 
 is for you to determine whether or no 
 you will keep this time to your credit; 
 and for you alone. 
 
 About the margin of the printed rule he saw 
 pencilled figures, many of them, where former oc- 
 
 [31]
 
 9009 
 
 cupants had made calculations over and over 
 again. He fell to figuring. 
 
 "Thirty-two months two years and eight 
 months that was his copper. He tried it again; 
 a third time; the result was the same. He could 
 gain two years and eight months. 
 
 He subtracted now. Keeping his copper, 
 there would be left for him to serve only five 
 years and four months. 
 
 Five years and four months! That would not 
 be so long! He looked back along his life to 
 get a measure. Five years ago, he was turn 
 ing his first yegg trick. It wasn t so long, five 
 
 x 
 
 years. In five years he would be only thirty- 
 four. 
 
 He sat down to calm himself. " In five years 
 I wonder where Nell will be," he said. But 
 the thought did not remain with him long. Al 
 most immediately he returned to the more pal 
 pitant subject. He remained silent, bent over, 
 thinking, a long time. And then, solemnly, al 
 most with affection, " My copper," he said softly. 
 
 He would work for it, he would treasure it, 
 [32]
 
 9009 
 
 his " good time," his " copper." There were rules 
 in this place; he would keep them. There was 
 work; he would work. He remembered the 
 words of the garotter and of the sheriff; he 
 would keep to himself, he would obey, he would 
 do anything they told him. 
 
 " Oh, I ll be good," he said aloud, whimsically; 
 " I ll be good, all right." 
 
 A step sounded outside in the narrow corri 
 dor, the door opened with a rasp, and Jennings, 
 the sallow-faced guard, walked in. He laid his 
 hand roughly upon the shoulder of 9009 and 
 fixed his white-gray eyes upon him in a stony, 
 passionless stare. 9009 returned the gaze, de 
 fiantly, as had been always his habit, in a strug 
 gle of man and man. The guard scanned him 
 long, silently, with no expression in his stony 
 face, but a sort of invisible and heavy threat ris 
 ing like a dull blush into his cheeks. The look 
 chilled; 9009 met it. For a full minute neither 
 pair of eyes shifted, neither flickered. Then the 
 guard loosed his grip and pushed the shoulder 
 away from him. 
 
 [33]
 
 9009 
 
 " By God," he said evenly. " You are a bad 
 one." 
 
 He turned; the steel door shut; a bar fell heav 
 ily into a socket outside. 9009 remained seated 
 on the edge of his bunk, holding his chin in his 
 two hands. The exultation of his discovery, of 
 his resolve, had left him; instead, a vague sense 
 of danger was enwrapping him; he shivered 
 slightly. And to his nostrils again, an obsession, 
 there came the taint; the taint that came from 
 men, caged, like wild beasts. 
 
 [34]
 
 To hold his copper and to keep to himself 
 the sheriff knew what he was saying when he 
 had coupled these admonitions. 9009 learned 
 this through several months of silent observa 
 tion. 
 
 He learned, during that time, many things 
 about guards and convicts. First, he found that 
 there were two classes of convicts the ordinary 
 convict and the trusty. He wondered much at 
 the trusties. He saw them all over the prison. 
 A trusty had supervision of the cells in his tier. 
 A trusty superintended the waiters of the din- 
 ing-hall. The druggist to whom one morning 
 9009 went for quinine was striped. Convicts 
 kept the prison records. Convicts kept the keys 
 of the cell houses. A murderer serving life sen 
 tence had in his charge nearly all the keys in 
 side the wall. 
 
 [35]
 
 9009 
 
 That the prison officials should trust a felon 
 to the point of placing in his hands the power 
 to free all his fellows was a cause of wonder to 
 9009. He wondered when he found that an 
 other stripes-clad man was allowed to go on 
 errands to the neighbouring town unattended. 
 And he marvelled at the fewness of the guards. 
 Fifty of the fifteen hundred inmates could have 
 overpowered with ease all the blue-clad guards 
 within sight at one time, were fifty to act in 
 concert. 
 
 He watched and wondered, and these were 
 slow months. Without knowing it, he had be 
 gun to let his shoulders droop, and he shuffled 
 slightly now when he walked. Amid many of 
 his kind, he moved alone, silently watching. 
 Daily he saw blue-clad guards carrying loaded 
 rifles. He heard each evening heavy bolts fall 
 loudly into sockets. Each morning he woke to 
 the faint taint in the air. 
 
 He rose at six to the resounding clang of a 
 gong in the corridor. The rattle of released 
 locks and jerked bolts was followed by the grate 
 
 [36]
 
 9009 
 
 of opening doors, and the convicts, flowing out 
 into the corridors, spent fifteen minutes clean 
 ing them and cleaning their cells. For that 
 time, speaking was allowed; and 9009 noted how 
 some of the stripes-clad men slipped, in passing, 
 stealthy words from moveless lips; gathered 
 about the sinks, others gibed each other cruelly; 
 but some, their eyes on the floor always, mut 
 tered to themselves without cease. There was 
 fifteen minutes of this, then, at the gong s 
 stroke, the men, suddenly petrified into silence 
 the silence that was to last through the day 
 marched out to the dining-hall. From now on 
 no speech was allowed. Silently each man 
 stepped out of his cell, and placed his hands 
 upon the shoulders of the man ahead of him, 
 forming the lock-step line. The guard he was 
 a grizzled blue-eyed fellow who had lived most 
 of his life in prison unarmed as were all the 
 guards who worked within reach of the con 
 victs, waited till they were in formation, and 
 then unlocked the door at the bottom of the 
 corridor. With a hissing of feet upon the con- 
 
 [37]
 
 9009 
 
 crete, the line moved smoothly forward, through 
 this door, into a long outer corridor closed by 
 a steel-barred gate from the yard. The guard, 
 striding ahead, took position at this gate, then, 
 when the line had reached him and had halted 
 compressed and orderly before him, he opened 
 it, letting the linked men out into the yard, 
 under the shadow of the walls, with their pacing 
 guards. Usually, though, at this morning hour, 
 the guards were few. 
 
 In the dining-hall, the striped felon who had 
 charge of the waiters commanded the line by 
 signals, halting it at the door, then signing it to 
 advance until the convicts were at their places 
 at the tables, which extended the room s length. 
 At another signal, the striped men sat down and 
 began to eat silently. At each end of the hall, 
 overhead in a small barred gallery, a guard 
 stood, holding a rifle, watching the dumb eaters. 
 
 They rose from their places at a final signal 
 and, re-forming, crawled outside. 9009, now, 
 was a link, a vertebra, in the monstrous thing. 
 He touched two shoulders before him; he felt 
 
 [38]
 
 9009 
 
 two hands touching his shoulders behind. The 
 line crept through the upper yard, along a track 
 beaten as if into stone by its eternal passings, 
 to the gates beneath the turret with its long, 
 wicked muzzle of rapid-fire gun. The gates 
 opened, and it filed out into a lane, between 
 fences twenty feet high, made of barbed wire, 
 to the jute-mill. 
 
 They worked without speech in the jute-mill, 
 but 9009 saw some of the convicts, passing 
 among the looms on errands, steal words, slid 
 ing them through lips that remained motionless 
 in their down-turned faces. He stood before a 
 whirring loom. At the height of his eyes, be 
 hind the multitudinous perpendicular lines of 
 the warp, a clacking shuttle fled swiftly from 
 right to left, from left to right, in unceasing 
 flight. Whenever a thread of warp or whoof 
 broke he had to retie it quickly; whenever the 
 shuttle became bare, he dipped his hand into a 
 basket kept filled by another convict and drew 
 a new one, threading it into place. This is all 
 he had to do tie strings and change shuttles. 
 
 [39]
 
 9009 
 
 The machine did everything else. Started by 
 the mill superintendent an old Scotchman, the 
 only man in the prison that wore no uniform- 
 it whirred on hour after hour, holding his rigid 
 attention, the clacking shuttle fleeing back and 
 forth before his eyes in incessant flight, till the 
 superintendent, pressing a button, brought it 
 finally to rest and freed him from its exac 
 tions. 
 
 Across the aisle from 9009, at another loom, 
 stood the red-striped convict whom he had seen 
 in the line the day he had entered the prison; 
 and it was the garotter, with whom he had come 
 in, who had charge of keeping the baskets filled 
 with threaded shuttles. When the garotter had 
 been assigned to this work, a scene incompre 
 hensible to 9009 had taken place. The garotter 
 had pleaded against the order; little beads of 
 sweat had welled up on his forehead; he had al 
 most knelt to Jennings, standing there impas 
 sive, his light whip in hand. It had taken the 
 latter s threat of solitary confinement to break 
 the man s resistance. 
 
 [40]
 
 9009 
 
 At noon, the striped line crept to the dining- 
 hall and after the meal crept back to the jute- 
 mill. At five o clock it crept to supper, then to 
 the cell-house, and all the time it had been dumb. 
 Locked in their cells now, the convicts were 
 again allowed to speak. Cell-mate spoke to cell 
 mate, quietly; friends threw jocular remarks 
 through the bars; and sometimes enemy reviled 
 enemy in words crawling as with vermin. At 
 counting bell they stood up with faces against 
 the bars while a guard passed, scanning them. 
 At nine o clock the lights went out abruptly, all 
 save two in the corridor. Then whispered mur- 
 murings sounded vague through the shadows, 
 and the guard slipped silently along the tier- 
 walks. The sound of heavy breathing succeeded. 
 And 9009, lying on his back in his bunk, calcu 
 lated the days, added to the days that were gone, 
 subtracted from the days that were left, and 
 his arms, folding themselves in a weary gesture, 
 seemed to hug to his breast his copper. 
 
 The routine changed on Sundays. Twice a 
 month the tenants of the cell houses went out 
 
 [41]
 
 9009 
 
 into the yard for a few hours recess; and twice 
 a month, alternating, came chapel. 
 
 The chapel was a long bare room with white 
 washed walls and a low ceiling supported by 
 yellow posts. One of these posts, near the doors, 
 had stapled into it, a little more than man- 
 height from the ground, a single big iron ring. 
 Just above this ring, the yellow paint was soiled 
 with an oily smudge, spreading fan-wise, in 
 which showed vague imprints of fingers and 
 thumbs; and the floor immediately below was 
 white and smooth, as if from many scrubbings. 
 This post, on week days, was the prison s whip 
 ping-post. 
 
 The convicts might see visitors, on chapel- 
 days, in a space set apart for this, near the office 
 of the captain of the yard. But no one came to 
 see 9009. And he did not care. He was becom 
 ing more and more absorbed in the earning of 
 his copper, absorbed like a miser hoarding gold 
 piece by piece. At times he thought of Nell 
 but without expectation, in a detached manner. 
 His experience led him to expect nothing of her 
 
 [42]
 
 9009 
 
 kind. " Probably hooked up with some guy 
 long ago," was the mental remark with which 
 he usually dismissed thought of her. 
 
 Lying in his bunk one night, he was startled 
 by a new and disturbing note in the noise of the 
 sleeping prison, now so familiar to him. It was 
 a rasp, a faint scratching, a rubbing of metal 
 upon metal. He listened; after a while he made 
 sure of the sound. It was the purring rasp of a 
 saw rubbing metal, and it came from the cell 
 next to his. 
 
 He knew the two in this cell knew them from 
 watching them as he watched all the others; 
 they were ugly fellows, who always kept to them 
 selves savagely. And now they were sawing the 
 bars! He sat up on his elbow, listening, his heart 
 a-pound with a contagion of excitement. 
 
 A voice reached him, a low voice of warning; 
 there was a moving of bodies, a sly creaking of 
 bunks; then along the steel gang-way passed a 
 shadowy guard, his rubber shoes at each step 
 giving a little hiss. A silence followed, or, 
 rather, the noise of the sleeping prison, a heavy 
 
 [43]
 
 9009 
 
 animal breathing broken by gurglings and un 
 couth snorings, but conformant and familiar, 
 free from the startling new note. 
 
 But the next night, and for many succeeding 
 nights after, 9009 heard it again the furtive 
 purr of saw upon bar, then the low murmur of 
 warning, and, along the gang-way, the slight 
 hiss of the guard s rubber shoes. And one noon 
 he saw one of his hard-eyed neighbours snatch 
 a piece of meat from the dining-table and con 
 ceal it within his blouse; he saw him repeat this 
 on the following day. They must be ready for 
 the break, the break that would lead them to 
 freedom or to death. Listening to the saw that 
 night (its rasp was sharper that night, vibrant 
 with a new impatience) 9009 suddenly thought 
 of his copper. 
 
 He might be blamed for this; he might be pun 
 ished for having known; he might lose it, his 
 copper. 
 
 The idea of betrayal, however, did not even 
 cross his mind. And the next morning, he 
 learned all about the trusties. 
 
 [44]
 
 9009 
 
 As, at cleaning time, he passed the cell from 
 which had come the sound of sawing, he saw 
 inside of it the trusty who was cell-tender. The 
 man a lean fellow with pale-blue eyes and red 
 hair was stooping over the lower bunk, his 
 hand underneath the blankets. 
 
 And that night the cell was empty, and soon 
 there went around the prison the news that the 
 guards had taken from the bunks in this cell 
 a revolver and provisions, and had found the 
 bars sawed nearly through. A great light had 
 come to 9009. 
 
 It was the trusties! They guarded the con 
 victs. They, it was, and not the guards, who 
 were the gaolers. And the guards need not 
 watch them; they watched each other. They 
 were informers. They obtained their jobs, with 
 the privileges that went with them, by betrayal; 
 and they held them just so long as they did 
 Judas work. He understood now why they had 
 rat eyes. 
 
 The whole system lay open before him. It 
 was a system of vast espionage, of stalking, of 
 
 [45]
 
 9009 
 
 spying, of treachery, of betrayal. He himself 
 was being constantly watched, watched with 
 malevolent hope that he might stumble. Confi 
 dence in any one, of course, was impossible (he 
 laughed as he thought of his former wonder at 
 the absence of concerted breaks). He must stay 
 alone, trust no one, speak to no one, isolate him 
 self. The sheriff had spoken true; "good old 
 boy," he now thought, almost with tenderness. 
 
 This new knowledge dictated his conduct 
 when, a few days later, he was given a cell-mate 
 (up to this time he had been alone in his cell). 
 Returning from the dining-hall after the even 
 ing meal, he found a little bent striped man, with 
 spiky white hair, sitting on the edge of his bunk. 
 The little man sprang to his feet as 9009 entered. 
 " That s your bunk, ain t it," he said in a wheezy 
 voice; " mine s the up one, ain t it? " 
 
 9009 stared at him, scowling. The little man s 
 face was black with a mixture of dust and oil 
 that clogged the pores; his eyes were inflamed, 
 and the lower lids drooped, showing the red 
 linings. 
 
 [46]
 
 9009 
 
 "You re going to be in this cell?" at last 
 asked 9009. 
 
 " They put me here," answered the little man 
 humbly, " My old mate, he s shoe-trusty now." 
 
 9009 s defiance bristled at the word. Push 
 ing the little man aside, he threw himself on his 
 bunk, his face to the wall. After a time he 
 heard him climb carefully into the upper bunk 
 then a fit of hacking cough came to his ears. 
 
 Several times, during the night, 9009 found 
 himself awake, listening to this dry, hacking 
 sound, and each time he thought of the new 
 problem before him. When morning came, he 
 had his mind made up. 
 
 " You sweep, and I make up the bunk," he 
 said harshly to the new cell-mate. " Next week, 
 you make up the bunk and I sweep. And "his 
 voice rose " I don t talk to you, and you don t 
 talk to me understand? I don t want to talk, 
 and I don t want to listen, so don t you open your 
 trap understand? " 
 
 " All right," answered the little man, looking 
 scared, and nodding his head meekly. 
 
 [47]
 
 9009, standing before his loom, watching 
 through the threads the clacking shuttle speed 
 from side to side, felt a yellow patch of light, 
 which all day had been crawling slowly along 
 the cement floor, strike his rough brogans 
 at last. This told of the ending afternoon, and 
 immediately a number sprang in his mind. 
 1760! In a few more hours, he would have re 
 maining to serve only 1760 days. 1760 if he 
 held his copper. 
 
 He had held it for six months, or, more ex 
 actly, for 184 days. Each night he added one 
 day to the time that had gone; each night he 
 subtracted one day from the time yet to be 
 served. These calculations had become a mania 
 with him. He would reduce to days his original 
 sentence, then to days his copper, then his orig 
 inal sentence minus his copper, then his original 
 
 [48]
 
 9009 
 
 sentence minus his copper minus the days 
 served, and thus, by a laborious and circuitous 
 path, would arrive to his result the number of 
 days remaining to be served with a pleasant 
 sense of surprise. 
 
 He had kept rigidly to his line of conduct. 
 He had communicated with no man convict, 
 trusty, or guard. He had spoken only once, to 
 his cell-mate. 
 
 " What makes your face so black? " he had 
 asked in a sudden access of childish curiosity. 
 
 " I work at the emery wheel in the foundry," 
 the little striped man had answered. 
 
 " And what makes you cough that way, so dry 
 and hard like? " 9009 had continued. 
 
 " It s the emery dust a-cutting away me 
 lungs," said the little man. 
 
 " Umph that s what s the matter with your 
 eyes," said 9009, looking at the drooping lower 
 lids, showing red. Then, remembering, he had 
 returned to his determined silence. 
 
 The yellow patch of light detached itself from 
 the feet of 9009 and began to crawl toward the 
 
 [49]
 
 9009 
 
 wall to his left; he watched his shuttle speeding 
 with tireless movement from side to side. There 
 were a hundred looms in the room; they stood 
 in rows, with a scant four feet between the rows. 
 The shuttle of each, flashing along its groove 
 from side to side, snapped sharply into place at 
 the end of each oscillation. " Clack-clack-clack," 
 they went. The whir of the wheels and the 
 smooth slide of moving parts united in a silken 
 fabric of sound; above this, rang the clacking 
 chorus, multitudinous, incessant, like the gos 
 siping tongues of many women. 9009 hated it. 
 
 At either end of the long, high room, an iron- 
 barred cage hung from the ceiling. In each cage 
 stood a blue-clad guard, holding his rifle loosely, 
 as though waiting to use it. Two other guards 
 walked the floor of the room. 9009 feared these. 
 They went about quietly, armed only with small 
 canes. They reported infractions of rules and 
 misbehaviour; upon them depended the standing 
 of every convict. One of them was Jennings, 
 the sallow-faced guard with the white-gray eyes. 
 Occasionally, feeling a presence, 9009 glanced 
 
 [50]
 
 9009 
 
 behind him; at such a time it was always Jen 
 nings that he saw. The guard s face was heavy, 
 expressionless; in his eyes was no light. Lying 
 in his bunk at night, 9009 would often see these 
 eyes. 
 
 Among the machines, bearing a basket filled 
 with threaded shuttles the garotter moved in 
 cessantly. Whenever the garotter came near, 
 9009 would look unconsciously across the aisle 
 at the red-striped convict, who stood there at his 
 machine sullen and motionless, his arms folded, 
 his face turned down toward the lower roller 
 upon which slid the finished cloth. 
 
 For six months 9009 had seen the garotter 
 bear his basket of threaded shuttles, back bent, 
 walking silently. Prison pallor had smeared the 
 thug s face with its coat of gray. This had be 
 gun the first morning, when, in spite of his 
 pleadings, he had been assigned to this work. 
 9009 remembered the grayness and the sweat 
 that had come into the face then. These had 
 never left the face. Always when he came to 
 this part of the room, they were there a gray- 
 
 [51]
 
 9009 
 
 ness, as of death, and little drops of sweat, as 
 of fear. 
 
 The red-striped convict never looked up when 
 the garotter came to his loom, bearing the 
 basket of shuttles. He stood with folded arms, 
 his eyes upon the winding cylinder, almost at his 
 feet, and his face was like a mask. It was like 
 a mask of stone. And it expressed patience, a 
 patience stony because infinite, a patience count 
 ing upon the future with absolute assurance. 
 
 The garotter always approached the loom of 
 the red-striped convict from behind and from 
 the left though he must go out of his way to 
 do this. His bearing changed then. He tiptoed 
 on the balls of his feet, and his eyes never left 
 the red-striped convict, standing there arms 
 folded, head lowered, with an impenetrable and 
 slanting expression. It was strange, the way 
 the strangler held his eyes on the other. Even 
 when, having reached the loom, he dropped his 
 basket and transferred the shuttles to the empty 
 basket on top of the loom, he did not move his 
 eyes. His eyes remained motionless while his 
 
 [52]
 
 9009 
 
 face, his head, his whole body moved about 
 them. When he stooped to his own basket, his 
 face was turned up; when he reached above into 
 the red-striped man s basket, his face was 
 turned down; always, whatever might be the po 
 sition of his body, his eyes, fixed, were upon the 
 red-striped convict, standing there, motionless 
 and impenetrable. 
 
 Once the garotter, groping for the upper bas 
 ket, had dropped the shuttle into the loom, tear 
 ing the warp. The red-striped convict had 
 rushed toward one of the pillars, to press the 
 button signalling for the stopping of the ma 
 chinery; and to the brusque movement, the gar- 
 otter had shrunk back and cried aloud. Jen 
 nings had smiled. 
 
 The yellow square of sunshine had reached 
 the wall to 9009 s left, now, and was beginning 
 to climb it; in a few moments the Scotchman 
 would press the button which stopped the ma 
 chinery. Then 9009 would march back with his 
 fellows to the dining-hall, and he would have 
 passed his one-hundred-and-eighty-fifth day still 
 
 [53]
 
 9009 
 
 holding his copper. He saw the garotter ap 
 proaching with his basket of shuttles. He 
 looked toward the red-striped convict, standing 
 there with folded arms, his eyes downcast upon 
 the loom s lower rollers. Something new, sud 
 denly, had come into the man s face. 
 
 It was something impalpable, yet fairly 
 screaming with meaning. It lay behind the 
 mask, far back in the dull eyes. Something 
 couchant there for days had moved; it had 
 gathered itself and crouched, now, quivering. 
 And in the mask had come a new heaviness, 
 a heaviness that was a satisfaction, almost a 
 satiety. But the man still stood motionless, 
 his arms folded upon his breast, his face turned 
 down. 
 
 The garotter came toward him; and, as it al 
 ways did, his walk changed; he bent forward, 
 touching the floor with the balls of his feet only, 
 his eyes upon the red-striped convict. He 
 stopped and he did not see what was in the 
 other s downcast, averted eyes, the thing crouch 
 ing in ambush there. He laid down his bas- 
 
 [54]
 
 9009 
 
 ket; he grasped a handful of shuttles- and 
 his gray face was turned upward as he bent. 
 Then the red-striped convict turned upon the 
 garotter. 
 
 The strangler s eyes widened, and into them 
 came a great horror. Still bowed down, he 
 looked up into the eyes of the other; little drops 
 of sweat welled out upon his gray forehead; his 
 bent limbs strove to straighten 
 
 And then the red-striped convict sprang. And 
 as he sprang 9009 saw his right hand go up 
 from his waist-band and flash above his head 
 clutching a long heavy knife of gray-brown steel. 
 The garotter was still striving to rise, and as 
 he strove, the red-striped convict was upon him. 
 He was upon him like a boy playing leap-frog. 
 His two hands, with a crunching sound, sank 
 into the garotter s shoulders; his two legs twined 
 themselves about the garotter s thick neck. The 
 knife in the right hand rose, fell, rose again, fell, 
 rose again, fell; it moved up and down like a 
 swift piston; the heavy blade stabbed and 
 stabbed. And 9009 saw the red-striped con- 
 
 [55]
 
 9009 
 
 vict s face. The mask had dissolved; the dis 
 tended nostrils breathed and the eyes blazed joy 
 as the red-barred arm plunged up and down, ac 
 curately, as if working in a groove, and the red- 
 barred knees crushed the thick neck between 
 them. 
 
 The guards rifles bellowed from the cage over 
 head. They flashed; their crash filled the long, 
 high room. They crashed again the red-striped 
 convict and the garotter became a still huddle 
 in the midst of a widening pool on the gray con 
 crete floor. 
 
 The looms hummed and purred and the hun 
 dred shuttles beat their clacking measure. The 
 striped heap stirred, then was still again. The 
 red-striped convict lay on his back, his knees 
 still gripping the garotter s neck. His upturned 
 face now held no stony mask; its lines had 
 distended in an expression of peace, of great 
 satiety. 
 
 Beats of rapid footsteps sounded on the con 
 crete. The machinery came to a stop in a big 
 silence. Smoke wreaths were still hovering 
 
 [56]
 
 9009 
 
 overhead as from the lips of an idle smoker; the 
 tang of powder reached 9009 s nostrils. Sud 
 denly he realized; realized fully and completely 
 what had happened. A heavy hand fell on his 
 shoulder, grasping it like a vise, and whirled 
 him around where he stood. He faced the sal 
 low guard with the gray-white eyes; and the 
 guard was half-smiling 
 
 "You dog," said Jennings; "what do you 
 mean by letting a man kill another and saying 
 nothing!" His voice was thick, but his lips 
 showed a sort of satisfaction. 9009 felt anger 
 choke him; he threw back his head and looked 
 square into the lightless eyes; his lips parted in 
 a snarl. And then he thought of his copper, and 
 swallowed hard, keeping silent. 
 
 " You go to the head of the line to-night," 
 ended Jennings, and turned toward the bodies. 
 
 Two guards were tearing the legs of the red- 
 striped convict from the garotter s neck. It took 
 two to do it. Another picked up something 
 from the huddle of bodies. It dripped as he 
 raised it. 9009 looked at it keenly. It was long, 
 
 [57]
 
 9009 
 
 and heavy at the back. It was a file, a rasp file, 
 sharpened to an edge and a point. Files, then, 
 could be obtained and made into this. 
 
 The guard, holding it at arm s length, carried 
 the weapon away. 
 
 [58]
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 As the line emerged from the jute-mill, 9009, 
 who had placed himself at its head, was called 
 out by Jennings and taken to the office of the 
 captain of the yard. It was the same room in 
 the centre of which he had stood on his first day, 
 six months before, following the sputtering pen 
 of the smiling clerk as it wrote his history in 
 an entry of five spaces across the lined page of 
 the book. He now sat on a bench by the door, 
 watching and listening. 
 
 The four jute-mill guards were all there; three 
 of them talked in an undertone about the cap 
 tain s flat-topped desk, but Jennings, though in 
 the group, was silent, toying with the file-knife 
 which lay on the desk. 9009 scanned the weap 
 on; it held a fascination to him. He noted its 
 weight. One could hack or stab with it. It 
 would split a skull or sever a rib. And the red- 
 
 [59]
 
 9009 
 
 striped convict had been able to get a file and 
 manufacture this thing, and hide it till ready. 
 A man could do many things under the noses of 
 the guards. If he didn t have his copper to look 
 out for. 
 
 9009 drew his eyes away from the knife. In 
 a corner of the room, tilted back in his chair, sat 
 the trusty who, six months before, had taken his 
 picture, with that of the garotter, now dead, 
 and that of the murderer, whom he never saw. 
 The man had not changed. His striped gar 
 ments, tailored almost to dandiness, were care 
 fully pressed; his patent-leather shoes shone; his 
 linen collar was spotless; in his tie was a pearl 
 scarf-pin. And his shiny black hair was parted 
 foppishly in two bangs that descended upon the 
 low and livid forehead. 
 
 A door swung open, and the captain entered. 
 The trusty met him at the desk and began 
 speaking. 
 
 He spoke in an undertone, deferentially but 
 persuasively. As he bent his head, passing his 
 tongue between his thin lips, his hazel eyes 
 
 [60]
 
 9009 
 
 shifted, showing green light. He held a cigar 
 between his long white fingers; now and then he 
 flicked off the ashes nervously. 
 
 The blue-clad captain was shaking his head as 
 he listened, and a frown, cutting the narrow 
 space between his shaggy brows, told of worry. 
 He was built on square lines, and his jaw was 
 heavy, but he showed now no decision in his 
 manner. It was the thin-faced trusty who was 
 deciding through the persuasive hiss of his whis 
 pering. Fragments of sentences reached 9009. 
 They were discussing the punishment of some 
 convict, some convict other than himself. 
 
 " Dangerous man these two breaks, remem 
 ber not broken," in detached hissing bits from 
 the trusty, whose eyes flickered green. 
 
 Then the subdued but big growling voice of 
 the captain : " A long talk with him talked 
 right willing to be a good dog two years soli 
 tary broken now." 
 
 Again the detached hisses: " Yes, but remem 
 ber bad one more." 
 
 The whispering sunk still lower; an assur- 
 [61]
 
 9009 
 
 ance was coming into the trusty s manner. The 
 captain s head dropped in assent. He had evi 
 dently yielded. But the perplexed frown was 
 still on his forehead as now he turned to the 
 guards. The trusty followed him. His white 
 face was placid with satisfaction. A hot hate 
 rose through 9009. So that was the way they did 
 it; that was the way they sent a man to the soli 
 tary or to the whipping-post! Unconsciously, 
 his eyes roved back to the knife, lying there, 
 heavy, upon the desk. 
 
 One after the other, the jute-mill guards told 
 their stories of the murder and of the shooting 
 to the captain while he sat at his desk, listening 
 closely. The trusty sat near him, making notes 
 on a short hand pad, his sharp, white face thrust 
 avidly forward. The captain listened in silence, 
 drumming on the desk with his thick fingers. 
 Once he picked up the file-knife and examined 
 it. Occasionally a guard would halt at a sign 
 from the trusty and would repeat some part of 
 his statement. Each, as he finished, left the of 
 fice, and finally it was Jennings s turn to speak. 
 
 [62]
 
 9009 
 
 He bent his face close to the captain s and 
 talked a long time. 9009 could not catch a word 
 of what he said; but once he saw the captain 
 look up and glance sharply toward him. Then 
 Jennings straightened up. He had finished. He 
 looked into the captain s eyes. The captain 
 nodded silently, a triple nod that told under 
 standing, agreement, and promise. Jennings 
 turned and went out. The case of 9009 had been 
 decided. 
 
 Suddenly 9009 found himself on his feet, and 
 a hoarse voice that he hardly recognised as his 
 own was bellowing : " Say, don t I get any say 
 about this? don t I get any say?" 
 
 The trusty, who was near the door, turned and 
 threw back a glance half curious, half ironical, 
 then went on softly, on the balls of his feet, 
 into an inner office. The captain did not look 
 up; he sat drumming the desk with his thick 
 fingers. But the scowl had deepened between 
 his shaggy brows, and his eyes had become very 
 small. 9009 dropped back upon the bench; he 
 gripped the edge and waited. And again, irre- 
 
 [63]
 
 9009 
 
 sistibly, his eyes wandered to the file-knife, ly 
 ing heavy on the desk. 
 
 " Collins, come over here." The captain s 
 voice was quiet, but leaden. 9009 rose slowly 
 and came near, the desk between them. The 
 captain took the file-knife and locked it in a 
 drawer above his knees. Then he sat regarding 
 the convict in silence. As he looked into the 
 sombre eyes of the captain and at the scowl be 
 tween his shaggy brows, 9009 let his head go 
 back, stiffening his thick neck, and his under- 
 jaw thrust itself slightly forward. He could not 
 help it; the movement was a pure reflex, as un 
 conscious as the threat-grimace of a dog meet 
 ing the growl of another dog. The captain 
 watched the change, searching the hard face be 
 fore him. Then he spoke, slowly, uttering each 
 word with great distinctness. 
 
 " You watched Japanese Tommy kill Thurston 
 this afternoon, and you didn t call a guard nor 
 make a signal." He paused. A twitch of pro 
 test rose from 9009 s feet along his whole body. 
 But it had not time to find voice; the captain 
 
 [64]
 
 9009 
 
 was speaking again, with his heavy pounding in 
 flection: "And a month ago you heard Smith 
 and Boone saw their bars; you heard em for 
 weeks and you said nothing." 
 
 9009 sickened. He had the sensation as of a 
 great net which had fallen about him, over his 
 head, around his arms. They had known this all 
 the time! They had known it and had kept it 
 all this time waiting for their good chance. He 
 continued staring at the captain, eye to eye, 
 silently, but a little haze of sweat, like the film 
 on the window-pane of a heated room, was com 
 ing upon his forehead. 
 
 "Wilson!" the captain called out without 
 moving. 
 
 The trusty came from the inner office. His 
 tongue passed between his thin lips, catlike. 
 " Get me number eight key," said the captain. 
 
 " I know you like a book," the captain went 
 on, almost indifferently to 9009; "I ve handled 
 the likes of you for years, and " he paused 
 thoughtfully " I generally manage to break 
 you fellows." He glanced up sharply at 9009 
 
 [65]
 
 9009 
 
 and without looking took a heavy key from Wil 
 son who had come with it behind him; then went 
 on, pointing at the key with his index finger. 
 " You come here thinkin you were bigger than 
 the guards; and we ve known you from the start, 
 and watched you. You re the kind that gener 
 ally manage to lose your copper" 9009 went 
 yellow. The captain rose and stood still a mo 
 ment. " You ought to lose it for this affair," he 
 went on 9009 swallowed hard " but I m going 
 to give you one more chance; I ll give you a taste 
 of what we have for you bad men." He weighed 
 upon the last three words heavily, with ponder 
 ous sarcasm, but this was lost on 9009. He was 
 taking a big gulp of relief. " Come on," said the 
 captain. 
 
 They went, without a word, across the yard, 
 to one of the cell-houses, and down a flight of 
 stairs, to the basement. The captain stopped 
 before a heavy door of oak, studded with spikes, 
 and signed to a trusty who met him there. The 
 man swung open the outer door of oak, and then 
 an inner door of smooth steel. 9009 entered. 
 
 [66]
 
 9009 
 
 The door creaked shut behind him; the outer 
 door slammed; he heard a bolt fall. And there 
 was no longer sound or sight. 
 
 He stood on a steel floor, in darkness. This 
 darkness was absolute. It seemed to have 
 weight, to press down upon him. It smothered. 
 And there was no sound. It was as though he 
 were buried deeply with tons and tons of silent 
 earth upon him. He stood still a long moment, 
 while this feeling enwrapped him slowly; then 
 he stepped forward on tiptoe, reaching with 
 hands before him, till he touched a wall. It was 
 of steel, and he ran his fingers over rivets. Face 
 to this wall, he moved to the right, struck a cor 
 ner, then another wall; another corner, another 
 wall; another corner; another wall; a fourth cor 
 ner, and the wall from which he had started. 
 But missing his tale, he went about a fifth cor 
 ner, counting it as the fourth, felt a vague sense 
 of mistake, and then, suddenly, a dizziness made 
 him sway on his legs. He had lost his bearings; 
 it was as if, about a pivot upon which he stood, 
 the whole world had revolved several times. 
 
 [67]
 
 9009 
 
 Controlling the sickness within him, he went 
 around the cell several times, eyes shut, groping 
 carefully; and at last, like a blessing, there came 
 to his finger-tips the feel of the joining of the 
 door-edge; and the world, swinging, readjusted 
 itself; and again, in his head, like a reassurance, 
 he held the plan of the prison. Preserving this 
 carefully, he dropped to his hands and knees and 
 crawled over the floor. It stretched, smooth, 
 without a wrinkle, between the four smooth 
 walls; there was on it nothing, not a stool, not a 
 blanket nothing. 
 
 He stood up in the centre. There oozed to him 
 not a drop of light; above his head, cold eddies 
 of air passed like vague beings. A desire was 
 growing within him a desire to beat upon the 
 floor and walls, to hammer and to shout. 
 
 To resist it, he sat upon the floor; it was cold 
 and very hard. He tried to lie down and relax 
 himself to patience. He began to wonder how 
 long he had been here. He did not know if it 
 was an hour or a minute. 
 
 He tried talking to himself. A timidity, a dif- 
 [68]
 
 9009 
 
 fidence overwhelmed him as he heard this voice, 
 sounding strange to him. He closed his lips. 
 But in a little while he heard himself again 
 speaking aloud, and he was cursing. According 
 to the legends of prison life, this is a sign of 
 coming insanity; so, crouching in the centre of 
 the walled-in darkness, he occupied his mind by 
 counting his copper. 
 
 He reduced to days his sentence; then to days 
 his copper; then to days his sentence minus his 
 copper; then to days his sentence minus his cop 
 per minus the days already served. He did this 
 many times, by different processes. 
 
 But insensibly he passed from this, and a 
 vision came to him. As he crouched here in the 
 centre of this cubical compressed blackness, he 
 saw suddenly the captain s flat-topped desk, and 
 the knife upon it. He saw this sharply its 
 gray colour, spotted with brown stain, its heavy 
 back, with the file-rasp still upon it, the keen 
 blade, the needle-like point; he could feel its 
 weight, its well-balanced weight, that admitted 
 of cracking a skull or carving out a rib. 
 
 [69]
 
 9009 
 
 Then he saw the red-striped convict spring 
 upon the garotter leap-frog fashion and entwine 
 his legs about his neck while the knife went up 
 and down with a pumping movement. He saw 
 his nostrils, breathing joy as he stabbed, stabbed 
 again, stabbed, stabbed; his eyes blazing joy. 
 And he saw him lying on his back, his legs still 
 entwined, looking up with his white face, now 
 full of peace and of satiety 
 
 When, the next morning after breakfast, the 
 captain of the yard saw 9009 emerge from the 
 dungeon, he noted that the convict s eyes were 
 bloodshot, and that heavy lines had sprung, 
 overnight, from the ends of the nostrils to the 
 corners of the mouth. 
 
 [70]
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 "LISTEN!" A shock-headed, square-bodied 
 little safe-cracker, called " Shorty " Hayes, and 
 doing fifty years, admonished 9009 in the subtle 
 language of those who are watched. 
 
 The two sat on a board, suspended by ropes 
 from the roof, far above the ground, painting 
 the wall. They had been working all day and 
 had arrived to the space immediately below the 
 windows of the office of the captain of the yard. 
 
 " Shorty " did not speak aloud. He did not 
 use his tongue at all. He talked with his eyes 
 a single sharp shifting of the eyeballs and a 
 flash of light from them, both shift and light- 
 flash moving toward the window, slightly ajar 
 just above their heads. 
 
 It was Jennings who was talking within 
 the office. His voice, suddenly, had gone to a 
 lower key. " Things are moving," he said quietly. 
 
 [71]
 
 9009 
 
 There was the creak of an office-chair turning 
 in its socket; then the subdued but big growling 
 voice of the captain. 
 
 " Good. Will it come through? " 
 
 The voice of Jennings came back with metal 
 lic positiveness. 
 
 " Yes four of them are framing. Inside of a 
 month that fool Miller will be giving away his 
 clothes again and telling his friends he s going 
 to be paroled. There ll be a dozen of them in it 
 by that time " 
 
 " Can we handle it? " The captain s voice was 
 anxious. 
 
 " Leave that to me. One of the four is my 
 man. How s the warden? " 
 
 " The governor is just aching for a chance to 
 get at him. You work that, and he s done for. 
 And there ll be something for you and me " 
 
 Just then, the trusty in charge called 9009 and 
 the safe-cracker down for dinner, and 9009 heard 
 nothing more. He was not interested, anyway. 
 He was still keeping to himself with savage 
 determination and hugging his copper. In that 
 
 [72]
 
 9009 
 
 alone was he interested, in that and a subtle 
 combat which was going on between himself and 
 the whole prison. 
 
 He had become he saw this plainly the butt 
 of a series of petty persecutions which he as 
 cribed to Jennings. This painting was one of 
 them. The turpentine made him deathly sick, 
 yet he was kept at it for a straight three weeks. 
 He was often given the more loathsome prison 
 work. At meals, if a convict within ten places 
 from him broke the rule by talking, it was he, 
 9009, who was accused and punished by being 
 deprived of his next meal. At the jute-mill Jen 
 nings tormented him subtly. He would plant 
 himself behind 9009, boring into his back with 
 his hard eyes, while the convict fought, under 
 these conditions, to keep his attention rigid upon 
 the machine, with its ceaseless exactions. 
 
 What had happened was this. From the first 
 Jennings had decided that 9009 was a " bad 
 one." He had sowed this belief into the mind 
 of the captain of the yard. The captain had 
 passed it on to the other guards. And the 
 
 [73]
 
 9009 
 
 trusties had soon caught the hint. Jennings, 
 the captain, and the guards were engaged in 
 "breaking" 9009; the trusties, catching with 
 their infallible noses the desire of their protec 
 tors, were ceaselessly watching for 9009 s first 
 stumble, counting up already the Judas reward 
 that would come of it. But 9009 did not under 
 stand all this. He knew only, vaguely, that he 
 was being attacked, and that he must not strike 
 back. 
 
 Of these persecutions, depriving him of his 
 sunlight was the worst. 
 
 Every alternating Sunday, the inmates of one 
 of the cell-houses had two hours of recreation in 
 the yard while those of the second cell-house 
 were at chapel. 
 
 For two of these alternating Sundays it had 
 rained. When the third came, 9009 was fam 
 ished. It was sunny in the yard; a soft breeze, 
 laden with a scent of warm, wet earth and lush 
 grass was rolling languidly over the walls; it 
 passed the chapel and carried to the cell-house 
 the sound of women s voices, singing. But the 
 
 [74]
 
 9009 
 
 men in the cell-house did not listen. They 
 stood at lock-step in the corridor, their feet 
 shuffling on the concrete floor. The line was 
 moving very slowly toward the outer door; at 
 times a tremor as of impatience passed along its 
 gray links. 
 
 Jennings stood at the door of the cell-house. 
 As each man slid forward to him, he handed him 
 a slip of paper his pass. Without this pass, no 
 convict could stay in the yard. The sallow 
 guard glanced coldly at each felon; occasionally 
 his white-gray eyes roved back along the line. 
 Once, as they settled upon 9009, they glinted; 
 then the blurring film crept back over them. 
 
 Finally 9009, now the head of the diminished 
 line, was standing at the door, his eyes upon the 
 ground, his right hand held up for the pass, and 
 there was a weary hunger in his face. 
 
 " Well? " said Jennings sharply. 
 
 " My pass," said 9009, his eyes on the ground, 
 his hand still held out. 
 
 "Go on," said Jennings; "don t be stopping 
 the line." 
 
 [75]
 
 9009 
 
 "My pass," repeated 9009 doggedly; "you 
 didn t give me no pass." 
 
 " You lie," said Jennings evenly; " how many 
 passes do you want? " 
 
 9009 s hand dropped; then rose again in mute 
 begging gesture. 
 
 " Move on," Jennings ordered. 
 
 The striped line surged forward, and 9009, 
 forced through the door, passed out into the sun 
 lit yard. 
 
 It was warm; the sunshine was a golden 
 downpour; the breeze, rolling languidly over the 
 wall, fell into the yard heavy with the scent of 
 wet earth and lush grass; a bee, afloat upon it, 
 came buzzing from the outer world and thrice 
 circled 9009 with its murmur, like a consolatory 
 secret. And the earth, hard-beaten though it 
 was by thousands of clumsy brogans, was 
 springy under foot, elastic as steel and concrete 
 were not; and the dome above was high and 
 blue, and away up at its apex was a little white 
 cloud. When you looked up at the little white 
 cloud, it seemed to recede, farther and farther 
 
 [76]
 
 9009 
 
 up and away; but when, after deceiving it by 
 gazing at the ground for a time, you looked up 
 at it again, there it was, back in the same place. 
 Vaguely 9009 enjoyed all this; but all the time 
 he was moving from group to group, trying to 
 evade as long as possible the guard who had 
 begun already to collect the passes. 
 
 There was noise in the yard, the noise of men s 
 voices lifted unrestrained, like the voices of boys 
 in a school-yard. The convicts had thrown them 
 selves into play with violence. 
 
 Two sides were busy in a ball game. A ring 
 of stripes-clad spectators pressed close about 
 the home-plate where " Shorty," the shock- 
 headed, square-bodied little safe-cracker, was 
 standing, swinging his bat in circles, bringing 
 it down upon the plate resoundingly. He was 
 jeering the pitcher, a long pale-faced sneak-thief 
 who, winding himself up ostentatiously for his 
 delivery, looked in his stripes like a snake up 
 right on its tail. And behind this one and to 
 the right, a short wiry pickpocket bent his body 
 and straightened it nervously, and rubbed his 
 
 [77]
 
 9009 
 
 thin-fingered hands together, watching the bat 
 ter with ferret eyes. Behind the safe-cracker, a 
 tall, gaunt highwayman named Miller he had 
 been leader in several attempts to escape and 
 had a mania for giving away his clothes before 
 such breaks crouched in his red stripes, eyes 
 gleaming. Suddenly the pitcher s contorted body 
 unlocked with a snap; the ball sped, white in 
 the sunlight; the safe-cracker swung his bat 
 with terrific force, wildly; the ball thumped into 
 the broad mit of the red-striped highwayman. 
 " Strike one," yelled the umpire, a stony-faced 
 confidence-man. The crowd whooped. The safe- 
 cracker spat in his hands, taking his bat with a 
 new grip. The pickpocket threw a back hand 
 spring. 
 
 In a corner, near the stone building where 
 were the condemned and solitary cells, two bul 
 let-headed burglars were shoving their hands 
 into tattered boxing gloves; without premoni 
 tory fiddling, they began slamming blows thick 
 and fast into each other s faces. Near them, 
 men were pitching quoits, using horseshoes; 
 
 [78]
 
 9009 
 
 they capered wildly as the horseshoes rose high 
 into the air, and shouted after them as if to 
 direct their flights. 
 
 All these men played without repression, with 
 violence. And even those who merely walked, 
 singly or in pairs, threw out their legs like 
 horses just out of the stable. All save a few who 
 paced stiffly with bowed heads, hands folded be 
 hind them they were old-timers and one or 
 two who stood still or moved only to spasms of 
 impulse, talking aloud to themselves these had 
 tempted madness by counting their days too 
 often in the darkness of dungeon or drear of 
 " solitary." 
 
 " Where s your pass? " 
 
 9009 started. He had forgotten, watching the 
 others. 
 
 " I got none," he said sullenly to the guard at 
 his elbow. 
 
 " Go in, then." 
 
 The guard spoke without passion or resent 
 ment, almost wearily. He waved his hand tow 
 ard the cell-house. 9009 went back to his cell. 
 
 [79]
 
 9009 
 
 He went back to his cell and sat down on his 
 three-legged stool. After a while, still seated, 
 he began to slide the stool across the steel floor 
 in little jumps, his eyes, meanwhile, turned up 
 ward attentively. When thus, in small tentative 
 slides, he had covered the few square yards of 
 the cell s free area, he returned to a point near 
 the centre, moved a fraction of an inch forward, 
 then a still smaller fraction to the right, and 
 was still, his big clasped hands hanging loosely 
 between his knees, his face turned upward. The 
 posture emphasised the heaviness of his jaw, the 
 ugly lines from ends of nostrils to corners of 
 mouth; but even then, it was an attitude almost 
 of prayer. 
 
 He was gazing, past the bars, on and up 
 through a little window near the ceiling of the 
 cell-house, at a patch of sky. It was a little 
 patch, irregularly framed by the top and right 
 side of his cell-door and the sill and left side of 
 the window, and slashed angularly by the roof 
 of a near building; and exactly where he sat it 
 showed a bit larger than it did from any other 
 
 [80]
 
 9009 
 
 place in the cell. It was blue, a very tender blue; 
 when 9009 stared at it hard, the faint taint in 
 the air of the cell-house, with its added Sunday 
 reek of chloride of lime, left him, and he seemed 
 to breathe again that heavy, warm and sweet 
 air which was rolling over the wall, into the 
 prison yard. He sat on the stool, back bent 
 (with his head low he could see more of the blue), 
 his hands hanging between his knees, his face 
 turned upward; gradually his lips loosened, his 
 heavy jaw dropped, and in his eyes, looking up 
 in that attitude, almost of prayer, there came 
 slowly an expression of longing, of vague pa 
 tient longing, like a dog s. 
 
 It was very still in the cell-house. At times, 
 as if from far off, there came the attenuated tu 
 mult of the yard; in the air was the taint, and 
 the added Sunday reek of chloride of lime. But 
 9009 was unconscious of this. He looked. Bowed 
 on his seat, he looked up with loose lips and 
 troubled eyes at the little patch of blue sky. 
 After a while a film seemed to creep into it. 
 Gradually this deepened into a whitish opales- 
 
 [81]
 
 9009 
 
 cence. It was a cloud; 9009 fancied it was the 
 cloud that he had seen earlier in the day, when 
 in the yard. He cast his eyes down to play with 
 it again, to play the receding and approaching 
 game of hide-and-go-seek. When he looked up 
 again, the cloud was gone. It had been a very 
 little cloud. And the blue was again there, the 
 fresh tender blue. 
 
 A step sounded along the corridor; a shadow 
 cut off the light; 9009 dropped his eyes levelly 
 across the bars. Jennings was standing there, 
 looking at him. 
 
 He looked at 9009 curiously, a long moment, 
 then looked up at the window, far above. He 
 glanced back into the cell, then, turning his 
 back, shifted his position a foot. The patch of 
 blue disappeared. 
 
 9009 remained where he was; his lips were no 
 longer loose, his jaw did not droop, and the ex 
 pression in his eyes was not of longing. The 
 guard stood there, motionless; his back, square 
 and brutal, rose like a wall before the cell-door. 
 
 For a long time they were thus. Occasionally, 
 [82]
 
 9009 
 
 from the yard outside, there came whoops, cries 
 of animal enjoyment; and again in the air was 
 the taint, the taint from many cages near by. 
 The afternoon waned, dusk came, the convicts 
 returned; and then Jennings spoke. 
 
 " I m going to break you," he said; then turned 
 on his heel and strode off down the corridor. 
 
 On the next Sunday, 9009 was again denied 
 his pass, and the window, which had been white 
 washed during the week, was closed, cutting off 
 the patch of blue. After that, 9009 ceased to ask 
 for his pass; he spent his Sunday afternoons on 
 his back, staring up at the bunk above him. 
 
 Sometimes his cell-mate, the little black-faced, 
 spike-haired man, returning from the yard 
 turned upon him his inflamed eyes with a strange 
 look, almost of wistfulness, as though he wanted 
 to speak; but 9009 mastered a desire to break 
 their silence, and lay without a word, staring 
 upward sullenly. 
 
 [83]
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 9009 gripped two bars of his cell-door and 
 shook the steel till the rattle went resounding 
 down the corridor in harsh crescendo. 
 
 " Here you up there in 17, be quiet or I ll 
 throw you into the dungeon!" 
 
 The voice of the night guard came up through 
 the shadows; it had the tone of one who is irri 
 tated by a common annoyance. 9009 stepped 
 back quickly and threw himself on his bunk. 
 " What s got into me, anyhow? " he whispered 
 up to his cell-mate, in the bunk above him. 
 
 They had arrived by this time to a certain 
 degree of confidence. This had begun one day 
 when, as 9009 was returning, grim and sullen, 
 from his third short term in the dungeon, the 
 little black-faced, spike-haired man had drawn 
 from his blouse two pieces of bread that he had 
 stolen from the dining-room and had handed 
 them to him without a word. 
 
 [84]
 
 9009 
 
 " What s got into me," whispered 9009 ; " am 
 I going nuts? " 
 
 " I used to get that way," wheezed back the 
 little man from the darkness above; "lots does 
 it; it s spells conies on you." 
 
 9009 stretched himself out flatly and took hold 
 of the sides of his bunk. He was afraid. He had 
 caught himself at this sort of thing before; he 
 feared this new impulse which crouched within 
 him now always, hiding stealthily for days to 
 spring out without warning and contort his sin 
 ews to action. Two or three times it had roused 
 within him suddenly as, marching in the lock- 
 step line, he stole a look up at the guard on the 
 wall, pacing with his gun loose in hand, like a 
 hunter; it had bidden him rush for the wall. 
 Twice in the jute-mill, with Jennings behind him, 
 it had told him to turn upon the sallow guard 
 and so loudly, so commandingly had it ordered, 
 that he had almost obeyed before taking other 
 thought. And this time, when at the sound of 
 the guard s voice he had found himself with 
 hands knotted about his bars, he knew that 
 
 [85]
 
 9009 
 
 again the thing had taken possession of him, 
 convulsing his being. 
 
 It came always strongest after a period of 
 strange half-delicious insomnia, during which 
 his mind left him and wandered through the 
 world outside the walls. These periods came 
 often, and lasted sometimes as long as a week. 
 Every night, then, leaving his body tossing, hot, 
 on the narrow bunk in the steel cell, his mind, 
 leaping the walls, flitted from place to place in 
 the wide open world. Dawn saw him always 
 haggard after one of these nights of semi-free 
 dom, and within him the impulse would be 
 crouching, stealthy, waiting to trap him to ac 
 tion. He watched against it incessantly, but a 
 huge irritation vibrated along his nerves. 
 
 The whole atmosphere about him, anyhow, 
 now held a suppressed excitement. He had felt 
 it at first as an indefinable thing, a vague rest 
 lessness. Then he had become conscious of a 
 subtle change in the routine about him. After 
 several days of close observation, he had been 
 able to place this. 
 
 [86]
 
 9009 
 
 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 con 
 ferred for a few moments, saying little, and most 
 of that with their lid-hidden eyes, swiftly. 
 
 9009 had marked these four men. One was Mil 
 ler, the red-striped highwayman who was catch 
 ing 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. 
 
 [87]
 
 9009 
 
 When these four talked, their speech was dif 
 ferent from that of the others. It held purpose. 
 When no guard was near, it was tense and hur 
 ried; and when guard, trusty, or ordinary con 
 vict approached, it sprang up into spasms of ar 
 gument or rough laughter. The arguments were 
 too vibrant and the laughter was too loud. In 
 these stolen conferences Nichols, the stony-faced 
 confidence-man, seemed to be leader. 
 
 " Here, you up in 17; try that again and I 
 chuck you into the dungeon!" 
 
 The voice of the guard came up through the 
 shadow, and 9009 again found himself with 
 hands knotted about bars, while down the corri 
 dor came still the echo of rattling steel. 
 
 He threw himself back upon his bunk, and 
 stretched himself flat, taking hold of the rods 
 at the sides. " Pard," he whispered, " I am going 
 nuts." 
 
 " It s just spells," came back the pacifying 
 wheeze from above; "just spells; we all have 
 em." 
 
 9009 lay on his back, motionless, staring up 
 [88]
 
 9009 
 
 into the darkness. Above him, at regular inter 
 vals, drearily, there sounded a dry weary cough 
 ing. 
 
 " What makes ye cough so so hard and dry- 
 like," he asked at length. He had asked this 
 several times before, and knew; but now, sud 
 denly, he wanted to talk. 
 
 " Tis the emery dust a-cuttin away me lungs," 
 the answer returned from the darkness. 
 
 " It s worse every day," went on 9009. 
 
 There was a silence; then words floated down 
 again. " It keeps ye awake nights," said the in 
 visible cell-mate meekly. 
 
 " I guess yes " 9009 kicked at his blanket 
 viciously. 
 
 They were quiet for a time. A guard hissed 
 by in his rubber shoes along the gangway. 
 
 " You ought to kick," 9009 began again. " I d 
 roar till somebody heard." 
 
 Two words fell back through the darkness. 
 " No use." 
 
 " Why in hell don t you go to the hospital? " 
 
 " Can t." 
 
 [89]
 
 9009 
 
 They were silent for a long time. The dark 
 ness lay upon them like a heavy vapour, lay upon 
 the strong man in the lower bunk, tortured with 
 twitching nerves, upon the little man above, 
 nauseated with weakness; it lay upon them 
 heavy, tainted, without mercy, turned from the 
 sweet poppy-consoler to a hostile, sullen power 
 keeping them awake to their torments. And the 
 little man began to cough, a long dreary fit that 
 seemed to have no end. 
 
 When it did terminate, 9009 let out a big 
 breath; he found that he had held it all through 
 the time that his mate was coughing. He lay 
 silent a while longer, then, hesitatingly, "C n I 
 help you anyways? " he asked. 
 
 The response was slow in coming; then it 
 dropped down softly. " Ye re the first man as 
 ever asked me that in this hell-hole," said the 
 little cell-mate. 
 
 They were quiet again, long. 9009 had thrown 
 off his blanket and lay very still. But the 
 darkness now was less heavy upon him; be 
 tween the two bunks it seemed to have become 
 
 [90]
 
 9009 
 
 less opaque, to have parted a bit to let through 
 a softness. 
 
 " Ye can t help me," began the voice above 
 again; "ye can t; nobody can t. I m up against 
 the push. It s this way: 
 
 " I left this hell-hole once, left it on parole, 
 and I got throwed back. I got throwed back. 
 Fer why? Fer why did I get throwed back? 
 What do ye think? Fer stealin ? Fer killin ? 
 Fer snuffing a gofe? Fer cookin a bull? Guess 
 why. Fer why did I get throwed back? " 
 
 The voice had risen clear now, pitched thin 
 like a penny whistle; the questions dropped 
 upon 9009 fiercely insistent. He lay silent, wait 
 ing, and at length the questioner, whom he could 
 feel leaning out of his bunk above him, answered 
 himself: 
 
 " I got throwed back in this hell-hole," he said, 
 " fer marrying. Yes," he repeated drearily; " fer 
 marrying. 
 
 " Ye see, I was doing ten years " the words, 
 long repressed, now came flowing one upon the 
 other tumultuously " I was doing my ten spot 
 
 [91]
 
 9009 
 
 and had five done already; and I got hold of re 
 ligion. Oh, twas on the square all right. I 
 know now it s all rot, but I was on the square 
 then. I was psalm-singing, and they got me 
 paroled 
 
 " It s a fine thing, that parole business. If 
 ye ve got a bad friend in the world, he s got ye. 
 Every man has ye foul. Did you ever read the 
 rules for paroled cons? Ye can t breathe the 
 wrong way, or back ye go. Ye re a con just the 
 same. And the whole outside is yer prison. And 
 every citizen is a stool-pigeon a-watching to tell 
 on ye. 
 
 " Well, I d made bad friends in the pen. Wan 
 was yer friend Jennings (9009, in the darkness 
 below, exploded in an oath); t other was that 
 cat-faced trusty of the captain s office, Wilson 
 (9009 swore again and spit out of his bunk). The 
 two was just starting the dope ring selling 
 opium to the cons. I was a trusty, a-tending the 
 cells. They needed the cell-tenders to peddle the 
 dope to the cons, an they thought I was just the 
 man fer that because I was playing smooth in 
 
 [92]
 
 9009 
 
 the chapel. But I was on the square about that 
 chapel business. I wouldn t stand fer their 
 graft. And so they tried to job me, but my 
 friends on the outside who d got me religion, 
 they beat them to it and got me paroled. 
 
 "Well, I learned all about that parole snap 
 in short order. The first month I was in the city 
 I got pinched six times by the perlice fer jobs 
 I didn t know nothing about. Every time a bull 
 or detective passed me, he pinched me fer luck; 
 and between them and their stool-pigeons I was 
 ready to jump out of the State. But then I got 
 to the Whosoever Will Mission where they take 
 in ex-cons. They treated me good, and I lived 
 wit them. And then 
 
 " I met a girl there." 
 
 9009 thought of Nell, and swiftly, as usual, he 
 put the thought from him. 
 
 " I met a girl there. She d been on the town 
 and turned straight. Ye know that kind; if they 
 turn square, and it s on the square wit them, 
 they re so straight all hell couldn t touch them. 
 Well, that was her. A slip of a girl, and she was 
 
 [93]
 
 9009 
 
 nursing and working in the mission. They had 
 a sort of hospital for broken-down bums, and 
 she was taking care of them old whiskey-soaks. 
 Well, we got stuck, and we didn t give a cuss 
 for them parole rules, and the mission people, 
 they thought it d be all right, and we got mar 
 ried 
 
 " A con can t get married, and a con on parole 
 is a con. Jennings, he came down to the city on 
 his vacation and seen the marriage license in the 
 paper. We d been married wan day when they 
 pinched me. 
 
 " They throwed me back here and put me in 
 the foundry at the emery wheel, and the emery 
 wheel is a-cuttin away me lungs. Jennings, he 
 fixes the jobs; he s a-gettin back at me." 
 
 The voice in the darkness above stopped. A 
 long dreary fit of coughing followed. 9009, ly 
 ing on his back, straining his eyes upward, 
 thought of Nell, and put the thought out of his 
 mind. " What s become of her," he asked curi 
 ously; " of the girl you got stuck on and mar 
 ried?" 
 
 [94]
 
 9009 
 
 " Oh," came back the cell-mate s voice, and all 
 the shrill strength was out of it, and it fell down 
 heavy as lead; "oh, she s cut out religion gone 
 back to hell!" 
 
 They sank into a final silence; again the dark 
 ness drew about them, crushing, tainted, with 
 out mercy. Above, the little man coughed, 
 drearily, endlessly; below, the strong man 
 twitched to the torture of his nerves; and to 
 their ears, uncouth and fantastic, there came the 
 breathing of the prison. 
 
 And after a while, like a kindness, sleep en 
 wrapped the upper bunk. And in the lower, 
 9009 felt slowly his mind leave his tossing body 
 to wander over walls, in the free wide world. 
 He lay there, in semi-ecstatic insomnia; his 
 senses were drugged. Suddenly they awoke to a 
 tapping. 
 
 They awoke and were immediately alert. 
 From a cell down the corridor, there came a 
 tapping, a soft tapping, faint but insistent: 
 
 " Tap-tap (pause) ; tap-tap (long pause) ; tap- 
 tap-tap-tap-tap (pause); tap (long pause); tap- 
 
 [95]
 
 9009 
 
 tap-tap (pause); tap-tap-tap-tap (long pause); 
 tap-tap " it stopped. 
 
 And immediately, from another cell, alert, 
 tense and affirmative: "Tap-tap; tap-tap; tap- 
 tap." 
 
 Then, again from the first cell, very softly, but 
 with insistence, the first call : " tap-tap (pause) ; 
 tap-tap (long pause) ; tap-tap-tap-tap-tap (pause) ; 
 tap (long pause); tap-tap-tap (pause); tap-tap- 
 tap (long pause); tap-tap." 
 
 And from far down the corridor, a third cell 
 spoke; decisively, almost ragefully: "tap-tap; 
 tap-tap; tap-tap." 
 
 "Tap-tap," began the first cell again; "tap- 
 tap; tap-tap-tap-tap-tap" 
 
 It broke off short; to 9009 came again the 
 prison s uncouth breathing; then, shadowy, a 
 guard passed along the cells, hissing in his rub 
 ber shoes. 
 
 The tapping was not resumed. It was some 
 alphabetical communication, 9009 knew; he had 
 heard of such a thing. Lying on his back he 
 thought of the four men of Miller, the gaunt 
 
 [96]
 
 9009 
 
 highwayman, of the pickpocket, the bullet- 
 headed burglar, the stony-faced confidence-man 
 who met every morning by the sinks and 
 talked lipless words; and after a while he felt 
 himself sinking into a blessed somnolence. 
 " Here, you up there in 17; stop it, stop it! " 
 And again 9009 awoke to find himself up 
 against his cell-door, his hands knotted about 
 the vibrating bars; and from the depths of the 
 corridor there came to him the harsh echo of 
 rattling steel. 
 
 This time the little window near the roof was 
 pale with dawn. 
 
 [97]
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
 AT the crash of the morning gong, 9009, hag 
 gard with the night, stepped out of his cell, now 
 unlocked for him. One by one the other cells 
 were opening, and the convicts were pouring out 
 upon the gangway, holding brooms and creaking 
 buckets. As he stood by the sinks, 9009 watched 
 the convicts narrowly; but this morning, Miller, 
 the pickpocket, the burglar, and Nichols, the 
 confidence-man, did not meet as usual. They re 
 mained apart, each doing his work at a different 
 time. 
 
 But when, to the second clang of the gong, 
 9009 stood with his mate in front of his cell to 
 take his place in the line, now silently forming 
 for its march to the dining-hall, he felt suddenly 
 his heart leap up into his throat. A few places 
 ahead of him were Miller, the pickpocket, the 
 burglar, and the confidence-man. They did not 
 
 [98]
 
 9009 
 
 belong there, and they did not belong together. 
 Each convict was supposed to take his place in 
 line by standing in front of his own cell; their 
 proper places were somewhere near the middle 
 of the line, and apart from each other. But here 
 they now stood before 9009, close to the head of 
 the line, and together Miller, the pickpocket, 
 the burglar, and Nichols, in this order. And 
 their heads were bowed toward the floor in in 
 voluntary attitudes of deprecation; and from 
 their faces oozed a slanting expression that re 
 called to 9009 the red-striped convict of the jute- 
 mill waiting at his loom for the garotter. 
 
 The guard in charge a grizzled old blue-eyed 
 fellow who had lived most of his life in prison- 
 wearily saw the line formed, then shuffling on 
 his rheumatic legs to the door at the foot of the 
 corridor, he opened it, and the line began to 
 flow slowly through it into the outer corridor. 
 Leaning against the wall, he let it crawl by till 
 its head was halfway down the long, narrow 
 way, then walked on along its side, briskly, to 
 intercept it at the second door, a steel-barred 
 
 [99]
 
 9009 
 
 gate. There he would stand till the line was 
 well massed, and then, unlocking, would let it 
 crawl out into the yard, beneath the shadow of 
 the wall. 9009 watched him as he went along 
 the line with forced briskness, upon legs drag 
 ging a bit with the prison rheumatism. 
 
 But he never reached the door. Passing along 
 the line, he stopped suddenly with a swift look 
 of surprise; he had noted Miller, the pickpocket, 
 the burglar, and the confidence-man together 
 there near the head, out of their places. The 
 look of surprise flowed instantly into one of 
 suspicion then his blue eyes gleamed bravely 
 as he turned, at bay. Ked-striped Miller had 
 rushed upon him. 
 
 The lank highwayman s arms shot out, and 
 his fingers, working, clutched for the guard s 
 throat; but the old man, stepping back toward 
 the wall, struck as he came, full and fair upon 
 the snarling mouth. For a flash the guard was 
 clear; then the pickpocket glided out of the line. 
 
 The lithe little felon was half-doubled, his fer 
 ret face a-twitch with fierce excitement; he 
 
 [100]
 
 90O9 
 
 swerved to the left, past Miller, and around the 
 side of the guard as the latter struck out for 
 the second time. He threw out his right arm 
 and at the same time raised his right knee. The 
 arm whipped around the guard s neck like a 
 snake; the knee thumped against the small of 
 the guard s back. The gray head snapped back 
 ward, the eyes bulging; for the fraction of a 
 second the body arched itself, still up, then 
 broke and slapped the floor. 
 
 Two trusties were coming on the run; the 
 burglar, still in line, pivoted like a mad top on 
 one heel, his right leg held out horizontally; 
 there was a sickening thud, and the first trusty 
 crumpled with a gasping hiccough. The bur 
 glar s right hand went to his trouser band, then 
 flashed up and the second trusty threw him 
 self face down upon the floor. A gasp went 
 through the petrified line; the burglar held in 
 his right hand a heavy black revolver. Miller s 
 hand went to his waist band in a swift fumble; 
 it rose; it also held a heavy black revolver. Then 
 the line dissolved in a chaos of fleeing convicts. 
 
 [101]
 
 9009 
 
 They avalanched past 9009 with pounding feet, 
 as he stood, rooted, on the threshold of the door 
 between the two corridors; and glancing over 
 his shoulder he saw them pop into their cells 
 like rabbits into their holes. But three of the 
 convicts, besides Miller, the pickpocket, the bur 
 glar, and the confidence-man had stayed; and 
 now these three, like wild beasts, were hurling 
 themselves against the bars of the outer gate. 
 Miller sprang upon the guard, lying on the con 
 crete floor, still entwined by the pickpocket. He 
 raised his heavy revolver and he struck the gray 
 head once, twice, thrice and stupidly 9009 
 noted that the blows thudded not as the re 
 volver fell, but as it rose. A red patch, as 
 if oozing out of the pores, masked the guard s 
 face slowly. The pickpocket, twitching as a 
 fox-terrier above a squirrel hole, was fumbling 
 madly about the limp blue heap. Suddenly his 
 hand rose, triumphant, holding a great steel key. 
 He leaped to his feet and, bent low, slid like a 
 streak of fire to the outer door. Miller followed 
 him. The burglar remained over the two pros- 
 
 [102]
 
 9009 
 
 irate trusties, swinging his revolver from side 
 to side. The confidence-man, tiptoeing back 
 ward, was coming slowly toward 9009. 
 
 He was crouching in the doorway between the 
 two corridors, face forward, his sinews aching 
 with the contagion of action; but his big knotted 
 hands were pressed hard, white-knuckled, upon 
 the sides of the doorway, and "the copper, the 
 copper," he was murmuring. A shout came to 
 him from behind. He threw a glance over his 
 shoulder; he had a fleeting glimpse of his cell 
 mate s black face peering at him out of his cell 
 with a shocked expression; and, further down, 
 Shorty Hayes, the shock-headed little safe- 
 cracker, was also looking at him out of his cell, 
 his face all a-gape with a queer sneering laugh 
 ter. His eyes plunged ahead again, into the 
 outer corridor. Nichols was slowly nearing him, 
 still walking backward, on tiptoe. Suddenly his 
 hand rose; a shot cracked close; a hot spark of 
 powder stung 9009 s cheek; the burglar seemed 
 to sink out of sight and the confidence-man, 
 bending, passed beneath 9009 s outstretched 
 
 [103]
 
 9009 
 
 arms and ran into the inner corridor, holding 
 a weapon that smoked. Through the slight haze 
 9009 still peered forward. He could see the bur 
 glar again now, sprawled upon the floor, kick 
 ing his striped legs grotesquely. The three con 
 victs had ceased tearing at the gate; they were 
 crouching now at the foot of its bars, all a-twitch, 
 while Miller and the pickpocket bent at the lock, 
 muttering horrible curses. The red-striped high 
 wayman glanced over his shoulder; his lips 
 drawn back, showed a row of long, yellow teeth. 
 A clang of working lock resounded. The three 
 at the foot of the bars writhed in an agony of 
 impatience. 9009, without knowing it, was mov 
 ing down the corridor now, stalking, bent low, 
 slowly, step by step, and his outspread hands 
 slid along the walls at either side. 
 
 A hard little paw fell upon his left hand; a 
 voice sounded in his ear: "Come back; come 
 back," it said. He turned. It was his cell-mate; 
 he was looking up at him humbly, beseechingly, 
 out of his inflamed eyes, with their red-drooping 
 lower lids. The lock clanged again; 9009 turned 
 
 [104]
 
 9009 
 
 with a spasm to the corridor. At its end, the 
 door swung open; the five felons shot through 
 it; 9009 saw their galloping backs rise and fall 
 as those of jockeys at a race 
 
 Then he straightened to his full height, swung 
 his right arm across his cell-mate s face, and with 
 the roar of a bull, charged down the corridor. 
 
 Eight away he had to leap. He had to leap 
 the gray-haired guard, looking upward with his 
 scarlet-masked face; to leap the burglar, still 
 gesticulating jerkily with his long-striped legs; 
 a trusty, doubled up, coughing; another, para 
 lyzed with fear. He leaped like a lean grey 
 hound, he sped through the outer door, a ray of 
 sun struck him hot on the cheek, he whipped 
 around the corner into the wall-bound yard, he 
 took three great strides and stopped, facing 
 six black disks. 
 
 They were gazing at him, round, swinging 
 slowly from side to side, like the eyes of oxen, 
 forty feet away, in a half circle converged upon 
 him. After a while, behind the six black disks, 
 he saw six dull-gleaming rifle-barrels, then be- 
 
 [105]
 
 9009 
 
 hind the six dull-gleaming rifle-barrels, six 
 brown stocks, then besides each stock, pressed 
 close, a face, set, stone-like, and an eye, like a 
 slit. 
 
 He stood there, with drooping jaw, his arms 
 limp along his sides, while six blue-clad guards, 
 each silent as a carven thing, aimed carefully at 
 his breast, each with his index-finger upon his 
 rifle-trigger. 
 
 [106]
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
 9009 waited to be shot, staring dully at the 
 rifle-muzzles, then at the other things about him. 
 His jaw drooped so that his mouth was half 
 open, and his eyes were wide. He panted. De 
 tails came to him slowly. 
 
 Six guards, immobile, aiming their rifles at 
 him. 
 
 Between him and the guards, two striped hud 
 dles, like wound snakes upon the beaten earth 
 of the earth. A limp hand drooping loosely 
 from the nearest huddle, a white face upturned, 
 very still, a flash of yellow teeth between drawn 
 lips this was Miller. The other he could not 
 tell who the other was. 
 
 Off to one side, three more guards; in front of 
 each, a convict; the guards holding drawn re 
 volvers, each muzzle against the belly of one 
 of the convicts. In the centre of this group, 
 
 [107]
 
 9009 
 
 breathing hard, a-snarl, the wiry little pick 
 pocket. 
 
 Beyond, the gray high wall; and upon it, pac 
 ing slowly against a very blue sky, another 
 guard, holding a rifle, loosely, like a hunter. 
 
 Six guards holding their rifles at him; three 
 more holding drawn revolvers against three 
 striped convicts; another guard on the wall 
 9009 s eyes suddenly narrowed to slits. 
 
 A resonant clash of steel upon steel broke the 
 panting silence. The cell-house door had been 
 closed. Again a metallic clang: the inner door 
 had been shut. Then, muffled, a succession of 
 dull slams, close one upon the other, that merged 
 into a subdued roll as of thunder. The convicts 
 within the cell-house were being locked up in 
 their cells. 
 
 The six rifle-muzzles fell toward the ground; 
 a footstep crunched behind; 9009 turned. It was 
 Jennings. 
 
 The sallow face was heavy, expressionless; 
 and the gray eyes were without light. One 
 heavy hand, extending, grasped 9009 s shoulder; 
 
 [108]
 
 9009 
 
 the other explored his garments one after the 
 other. "All right," said Jennings; "nothing on 
 him." He turned his eyes upon 9009. " Thought 
 you d lam out, eh? " he said with the slightest 
 sneer. 
 
 But 9009 did not answer. He was stupefied. 
 And when Jennings ordered him come, he fol 
 lowed at a shambling gait, dazed, to the dun 
 geon. 
 
 He sat there for several hours, on the steel 
 floor, in the blackness, his hands hanging loose 
 between his drawn-up knees. Gradually, out of 
 the whirl of his mind, two pictures emerged. He 
 saw Nichols, the confidence-man, walking slowly 
 backward toward the inner corridor; he saw him 
 shoot the burglar and run to his cell; he did 
 not understand that. Then he saw himself 
 bounding out into the yard and stopping before 
 six rifles; he did not understand that. His brain, 
 anyway, was making but dull efforts to under 
 stand. All it did was this: it presented to him 
 the two pictures, mechanically, passionlessly, as 
 for inspection the stony-faced confidence-man 
 
 [109]
 
 9009 
 
 shooting the burglar from behind; the guards 
 waiting outside to catch him as he came. He 
 looked at these two pictures, stupid; he could 
 not understand them. 
 
 He emerged from the dungeon at noon and 
 was taken, blinking, into the sunny yard. Here 
 a theatrical scene had been carefully arranged. 
 
 At a point midway between the door of the 
 dining-hall and the gates of the jute-mill lane, 
 close to the stone-like track made by the thrice- 
 daily march of the lock-step line, two deal tables 
 had been placed side by side. And upon these 
 tables, the three convicts killed in the break had 
 been laid. 
 
 They had been dumped, not laid, dumped in 
 their last attitudes, now frozen to rigidity. They 
 sprawled in their stripes, ignoble with blood and 
 earth, with limbs doubled under them or spread 
 out, contorted, their faces, gray-white where 
 they showed between bruise and clot, staring up 
 ward with glazed eyes upon which grains of 
 dust lay without causing a blink. Miller leered, 
 his long teeth showing yellow; the burglar s 
 
 [110]
 
 9009 
 
 heavy jaw had fallen loosely upon his heavy 
 throat, without hiding a black spot which spread 
 down to the waist, coagulating the stripes; the 
 third man lay arms spread as if crucified; he 
 was a mere boy, and his face was serene. 
 
 "Look, you fellows, look!" 
 
 The voice of the captain, growling, was an 
 swered by the movement of the guards, pushing 
 9009, the pickpocket, and the other two men of 
 the break closer to the tables. 9009 looked upon 
 the heap. Miller leered at him with his yellow 
 teeth; the burglar stared stupidly, with dropped 
 jaw; the boy gazed upward with calm eyes, his 
 mouth curved almost in a smile. 9009 remem 
 bered him now; he was a mountain boy and of 
 late had taken to talking to himself. 
 
 An undercurrent of sound, a sort of attenu 
 ated whir, a buzzing that was dull, arose con 
 tinuously. 9009 bent over, close; then he turned 
 sick. 
 
 " Line em up," growled the captain. 
 
 To the right of the tables, 9009 was placed, 
 erect; to the left of the tables, the other two. 
 
 [Ill]
 
 9009 
 
 They formed a line, as for inspection. 9009 and 
 the pickpocket, alive; then Miller, the burglar, 
 and the boy, dead; then the other two convicts, 
 alive. But the living men had dead faces. 
 
 They stood there, it seemed to them a long 
 time. Above, the sky was very blue; the sun 
 beat down upon their shaven heads; it poured 
 perpendicularly upon the eyes of the dead men, 
 which did not blink; and there was a still, warm 
 silence, and underneath this still warm silence, 
 a low steady buzzing. 9009 shuffled his feet. 
 "Quiet!" growled the captain of the yard. 
 
 He stood before them, like a colonel before his 
 spread regiment, looking at them with an in 
 specting frown; then a satisfaction smoothed his 
 visage; "all right," he said to Jennings. 
 
 Jennings shouted down the yard; at the signal 
 the gates of the jute-mill lane swung inward, 
 and through the turreted arch in the wall the 
 lock-step line emerged. 
 
 It came smoothly, in a lithe continuous flow, 
 as if it were to be endlessly, through the arch, 
 into the yard, undulating like a snake, gray as 
 
 [112]
 
 9009 
 
 a larva, mounted upon legs like a centipede. A 
 new eagerness seemed in its thousand limbs, a 
 vague tremor was in its folds, its slight side- 
 to-side motion seemed accelerated of rhythm; it 
 came along the way, beaten to stone, that it had 
 made through so many days, crawling from mill 
 to hall and back again; it came, gray and flaccid, 
 creeping forward with rapidity. 
 
 Then suddenly its head, as if catching a scent, 
 went off the path in a long sidewise rear a 
 movement as that of a snake which would rear 
 like a horse. There was a moment of disorder; 
 the body and tail, pressing forward, knotted, 
 vertebras broke; the voices of the guards rose 
 high and sharp and then the head, with a glid 
 ing, submissive motion flattened out again, and 
 came on, past the tables, the tables served with 
 killed men that stared upward, flanked by live 
 men with dead faces. 
 
 The line went by slowly. The guards, at the 
 head, on the sides, delayed it with murmur and 
 gesture, and the voice of the captain, growling, 
 incessantly bade it look, look, look. It flowed 
 
 [113]
 
 9009 
 
 by with its side-to-side swinging retarded of 
 rhythm; one by one the white faces passed, glan 
 cing slantingly, deep-lined, heavy. Sometimes 
 nostrils quivered slightly; sometimes prison pal 
 lor grayed. They passed in silence; in the warm 
 still air there was no sound excepting the shuf 
 fling of feet, the low growl of the captain s voice 
 bidding look, and the buzzing undertone. They 
 passed, slit-eyed, stone-faced, sullen, and silent 
 9009 saw them all. He saw his little cell-mate 
 looking at him out of his inflamed eyes with that 
 same shocked expression with which he had 
 looked at him from his cell during the struggle 
 in the corridor; he saw Hayes and fantastical 
 ly the shock-headed safe-cracker was still laugh 
 ing the soundless sneering laugh he had laughed 
 while looking out of his cell at 9009 during the 
 
 break 
 
 They passed, by the four living men with dead 
 faces, by the three dead men gazing vitriously at 
 the sky and one by one they sank into the door 
 of the dining-hall till the yard was desert again 
 except for the flanked tables, and the buzzing. 
 
 [114]
 
 9009 
 
 Then 9009 was taken back to the dungeon, and 
 he was kept there for thirty days. 
 
 For thirty days he was in blackness and si 
 lence. At regular intervals, which were of 
 twenty-four hours but seemed much longer, the 
 wicket snapped open and a half loaf of bread 
 with a pitcher of water was thrust in, entering 
 with a gray pallor of daylight immediately shut 
 off again. He slept much, in short periods, at 
 any hour, irregularly; the rest of the time he 
 squatted in the centre of his cube of darkness, 
 and thought. He saw the confidence-man, step 
 ping back a-tiptoe, raising his arm, shooting; 
 the burglar falling. He saw himself bounding 
 down the corridor, leaping over white faces gaz 
 ing upward, emerging out into the sunlight 
 into the bristling circle of the guards ambush. 
 And now another picture had joined these two: 
 he saw the shock-headed safe-cracker peering 
 out of his cell and laughing his soundless sneer 
 ing laugh during the struggle in the corridor; he 
 saw his cell-mate gazing at him with a shocked 
 expression. And he did not understand. 
 
 [115]
 
 9009 
 
 At the end of thirty days he was taken before 
 the Prison Board in the warden s office. There 
 he faced two corporation lawyers whose cor 
 porations were then undergoing prosecution, a 
 pig-eyed grocer who adulterated, a wholesale 
 liquor merchant, and a wormy ward politician, 
 and these men took his copper away from him. 
 
 He went back to the dungeon and thought. 
 He saw the two smug corporation lawyers who 
 taught their corporations how to sap the law, 
 the pig-eyed grocer who sold pickles preserved 
 in sulphuric acid, the wholesale liquor merchant 
 who helped finance a corrupt municipal party 
 and thus forced his whiskey on all the city sa 
 loons, the ward politician who paid for votes 
 with dollars. He knew of these men; he had 
 read their record. He saw them, sitting in a 
 solemn line behind their desks, with an expres 
 sion of shocked severity taking from him his 
 copper. And suddenly his laugh rang harsh and 
 loud between the steel walls. 
 
 He stayed in the dungeon thirty days longer. 
 At regular intervals, which were of twenty-four 
 
 [116]
 
 9009 
 
 hours, but seemed much longer, the wicket 
 snapped open and, together with a pallor of 
 day, there entered a half loaf of bread and a 
 pitcher of water. He ate; he slept much, in 
 short frequent periods, irregularly, stretched 
 upon the cold steel floor. But the larger part 
 of the time he thought. He saw the confidence- 
 man shoot the burglar, he saw himself leaping 
 into the ring of the guards ambush, he saw the 
 leer of the safe-cracker, the shocked expression 
 of his cell-mate and he did not understand. 
 
 On the twenty-fifth day the door opened and 
 clanged shut again, and he was conscious of a 
 presence there with him in the compressed dark 
 ness. He waited, silent, crouching; and after a 
 while he heard a short, hard, dry cough. 
 
 " That you, pal? " he asked. 
 
 " Yes, it s me," answered the piping voice of 
 his cell-mate. 
 
 They were silent in the darkness. " What 
 made you come in?" at length asked 9009. 
 
 " Got five days for talking in the line," said 
 the invisible cell-mate. 
 
 [117]
 
 9009 
 
 "What for did you do it?" pursued 9009. 
 
 " Thought they d put me in this hole," ad 
 mitted the thin voice. " I knowed you d be feel- 
 in like hell about bein fooled." 
 
 " Fooled? " the voice of 9009 rose in a bellow. 
 
 " Bout the framed-up break. Nichols, that 
 bunco-man, he was the stool-pigeon that framed 
 it for Jennings and the yard captain. Guess 
 he ll get a pardon now. And Shorty Hayes, 
 he s laughing at ye; says you and he heard Jen 
 nings talk about the frame-up that time he and 
 you was painting under the captain s win 
 dow " 
 
 The little man s voice died abruptly. 9009 had 
 hurled himself upon the steel walls, and he was 
 beating them with hands and feet, crushing his 
 face against them in an effort to bite. He saw 
 now. He saw himself, up on the painter s plat 
 form with " Shorty " Hayes, hearing the words 
 of Jennings floating out through the open win 
 dow; he saw Nichols, the stony- faced confidence- 
 man gradually preparing the break, and then, 
 when it had come, killing the burglar; he saw 
 
 [118]
 
 9009 
 
 the safe-cracker laughing at him from the door 
 of his cell. He saw and he beat madly with 
 hands and feet and head. Like a maddened in 
 sect he whirled along the four walls of the dun 
 geon, clawing, butting, rasping his teeth against 
 the smooth impassive surface. Finally, ex 
 hausted, he stopped, crouching in the centre of 
 the cell. And after a while he laughed, a harsh 
 laugh that rebounded dully from the walls of 
 steel. 
 
 Then a hand fell on his shoulder; he felt the 
 little cell-mate squatting by his side. His right 
 hand went across his body; a small, hard paw 
 seized it and for hours, there, in the darkness, 
 the two crouched silently side by side, hand in 
 hand, without saying a word. At times 9009 
 laughed harsh and loud, and then the grip upon 
 his hand tightened. 
 
 [119]
 
 CHAPTER ELEVEN 
 
 9009 had turned. 
 
 He had changed faces as he had changed 
 stripes. Among his kind he now moved a being 
 apart, hard-eyed, cruel-mouthed, a line of sullen 
 craft between his brows, a sneer at the end of 
 his ugly lips. And he was feared. He was dif 
 ferent, now, from the others; a developed brute 
 more dangerous than they. Processes meant to 
 break him had merely warped him; they had 
 made of him the grimmest thing that walks a 
 convict without hope. 
 
 He wore red stripes, as the convict who had 
 killed the garotter had done, as Miller the high 
 wayman had done. These red stripes singled 
 him out from the others. They displayed him as 
 a red blotch in the long gray lock-step line; they 
 flashed him out, a red target amid the gray 
 groups in yard or cell-house or dining-hall, to the 
 
 [120]
 
 9009 
 
 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 anx 
 ious to kill. 
 
 He worked in the foundry. Striped men made 
 there stoves for thrifty housewives, and they 
 were the desperate of the prison. The manufac 
 ture 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 fel 
 ons, dumb at their toil, hating one another. 
 
 [121]
 
 9009 
 
 Their striped suits, red-blotched with iron 
 rust, were tattered; their heavy brogans gaped 
 where molten drippings had burned away the 
 leather. Some limped from burns, and some 
 bore on hands and faces ugly sores the marks 
 of spattered liquid iron. They were savagely 
 reckless at their work, and the guards had to 
 watch them closely lest they maim themselves. 
 They sweated in torment and strange wordless 
 feuds existed among them; stealthy blows were 
 struck without cause. 
 
 The moulding room was long and low, earth- 
 floored, dusky with shadows at noonday. On the 
 earth floor, in rows flanking path-wide intervals, 
 lay the moulds wooden frames about which 
 was tamped black sand. Walls and roof were 
 of corrugated iron. The naked rafters overhead 
 were crusted with dirt; black dirt lay in thin 
 layers on the window-panes and hung in cob- 
 webbed festoons from the bars. At one end of 
 the room, looming tall into the shadows until 
 it became itself a shadow among them, stood 
 the cylindrical furnace, gloomy when dead, and 
 
 [122]
 
 9009 
 
 on pouring-off days a menacing monster which 
 at sudden intervals vomited red-hot metal. In 
 the centre of the room, up among the dust-cov 
 ered rafters, was a suspended steel-barred cage; 
 and in it a guard stood, fingering his rifle. At 
 the other end of the room, in the midst of a fiery 
 spark shower, his black face catching weird high 
 lights from the glowing rain about him, Jimmy 
 Carroll, the little cell-mate, sat on a high stool 
 at the emery wheel. Often 9009 glanced over 
 there, especially toward night, when the little 
 man swayed sickly on his perch. 
 
 Four days a week 9009 tamped black sand 
 about the mould-patterns. He worked, pound 
 ing, pounding, pounding, with loose shoulders, 
 the cold smell of earth, charcoal, and fresh iron 
 dust in his nostrils; sombre-lined faces and 
 striped forms flitted about him; at times his 
 eyes, unconsciously rising, gave him a glimpse 
 of the cage overhead, with the guard vague 
 within, or of his cell-mate, swaying on his high 
 stool in a Sodom-like rain. Two days a week he 
 stood in line with the other moulders, holding his 
 
 [123]
 
 9009 
 
 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 tram 
 pling 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 reentered the foundry and looked up toward 
 the emery wheel, Jimmy Carroll was not there. 
 Another convict sat at his place, in the fiery 
 shower. 
 
 [124]
 
 9009 
 
 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 question 
 ing, 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 ques 
 tioning, insistent and implacable, rebounded 
 from the hard faces of his fellows as from blank 
 stone walls. 
 
 Then, after a time, a rumour began to perco 
 late 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- 
 
 [125]
 
 9009 
 
 tie, in that mysterious way rumour has, growing 
 more detailed, surer, more complete. 
 
 Jimmy Carroll the little cell-mate was dead. 
 He had been shot. 
 
 This was all for a time; then by glance, by 
 shrug, by swiftly stolen word, 9009 was directed 
 to " Shorty " Hayes, the shock-headed safe- 
 cracker who had laughed at him as he had joined 
 the break. And one Sunday he cornered him in 
 the yard and drew the whole story from him. 
 
 This convict was under a fifty years sentence. 
 He had lost his copper long since. Now he was 
 to get it back from the Governor of the State. 
 In some subtle subterranean way he had got 
 hold of the facts of Jimmy Carroll s death, and 
 the knowledge was worth to him his copper. 
 
 He crowed harshly over this, long, before he 
 told 9009 anything. And while telling, every 
 sentence or two he broke from the telling and 
 croaked again his triumph. " They re a-goin to 
 get me me copper back from the Governor," he 
 would croak; "thirteen years copper they re 
 a-goin to give me back fer what I know. Fer 
 
 [126]
 
 9009 
 
 what I know," he repeated, chuckling raspingly. 
 " Ho-ho-ho, me copper fer what I know! " 
 
 What he knew, what he had gained in some 
 mysterious way, was this: 
 
 Two mornings after 9009 s fight, and while he 
 was in the dungeon, Jimmy Carroll suddenly had 
 refused to work. 
 
 He had been taken to the office of the captain 
 of the yard. And there, quietly, stubbornly, he 
 had again refused to work. 
 
 They had taken him, then, to the whipping 
 post in the chapel. 
 
 " Put your hands up to the ring," said the cap 
 tain, pointing to the ring, stapled into the post 
 a little more than man-height, to which the 
 hands of the victim were manacled during the 
 flogging. 
 
 "I won t," said the little black-faced man; 
 " I m sick; I won t work; and I won t be flogged." 
 
 " Put up your hands," said the captain. 
 
 " I won t; I m sick and I won t be flogged." 
 
 " Put up your hands," said the captain, pick 
 ing up the cat. 
 
 [127]
 
 0009 
 
 " I won t," said the little black-faced man, 
 folding his arms upon his caved-in chest. 
 
 The captain s face went very white. " Jen 
 nings," he said to the guard standing by; "Jen 
 nings, you get your rifle." 
 
 Jennings had disappeared, then had returned 
 with the rifle. 
 
 " Put your hands up to this ring," began the 
 captain again when Jennings, rifle in hand, 
 again stood in the chapel. 
 
 " I won t," said the little man. He stopped to 
 cough, looking up at the captain out of his in 
 flamed eyes, with their red-drooping lower lids. 
 "You c n kill me; I won t be flogged." 
 
 " Carroll, I m man of my word," said the cap 
 tain, very white. " And so help me God, if you 
 don t put up your hands to this ring, you ll be 
 shot." 
 
 " Shoot," said Jimmy Carroll. 
 
 " Jennings, get ready," said the captain. 
 
 Jennings stared at him, stared at Carroll, 
 raised his rifle, and aimed it at the little black- 
 faced man. 
 
 [128]
 
 9009 
 
 " Now, put up your hands," said the captain, 
 his face suddenly going black as the little man s. 
 
 " I won t," said the little man. 
 
 " Shoot," said the captain. 
 
 And Jennings had shot. And Jimmy Carroll 
 had gone over backward in a thin little sprawl, 
 a bullet in his heart. 
 
 " And now," said the safe-cracker, his face, 
 suddenly very sinister, bent close to 9009 s; 
 " now Buddy, remember, I ll cut off your head 
 if ye open yer mouth! " 
 
 But 9009 did not answer. He sat there, his 
 eyes upon the ground, long. And the next day, 
 from the machine-shop of the foundry, he stole 
 a big heavy file, just such a file as, months be 
 fore, he had seen the red-striped convict of the 
 jute-mill plunge into the shoulders of the gar- 
 otter. And that night, through the long sleep 
 less hours, he stretched deliciously to the rasp 
 of it against his flesh, there beneath his red- 
 striped jacket, upon his heart. 
 
 [129]
 
 CHAPTER TWELVE 
 
 ABOUT the rasp-file 9009 s life now enwrapped 
 itself. The thing was the symbol of his purpose, 
 his engrossing purpose, the one fixed light left 
 in his blackened soul. For many days he car 
 ried it with him just as it was, beneath his gar 
 ments; at night he stretched deliciously to its 
 rasp, there against his skin, upon his heart. A 
 somnolent apathy had come over him; that mere 
 contact gave him a profound satisfaction, al 
 most a satiety: it was with an effort that he 
 roused himself to the next step. But at length 
 he stole from the machine-shop another file, a 
 small one, of diamond steel, and with it he began 
 to sharpen the big one, of softer steel, into a 
 knife. 
 
 He worked at night, surreptitiously, with in 
 finite precaution, under the muflle of his blanket, 
 his ears taut to the hissing feet of the guard; 
 
 [130]
 
 9009 
 
 and progress was slow, but exquisite from its 
 very slowness. He was greatly delayed by the 
 necessity of parting for long periods with the 
 object of his tenderness. 
 
 He had found, in the stone wall of the laundry, 
 which stood a bare two feet from the stone wall 
 of the cook-house, a niche hollowed for a water- 
 pipe; and whenever he feared discovery, or his 
 instinct announced to him the coming of a 
 search, he dropped his file in the niche behind the 
 water-pipe. Then for days he would be separated 
 from it, tortured with sudden accesses of fear in 
 spite of his confidence in the security of his hid 
 ing-place. But he had become wonderfully pa 
 tient, and he stood the test well. His purpose 
 burned within him always, without a sputter, 
 fixed, unalterable. He remembered how the mur 
 derer of the garotter had waited, days, weeks, 
 months, never letting the desire of his heart 
 light up his eyes, while the garotter passed and 
 repassed him, and on his breast the knife lay, 
 not quite ready. A patience such as this was 
 now with him always, a patience he felt inex- 
 
 [131]
 
 9009 
 
 haustible within him, and in which he took a 
 grim and sullen pride. 
 
 And so, night after night, with intervals of 
 long separations, he fondled the file, and be 
 neath his caressing and firm sculpturing gradu 
 ally it grew into the shape he loved pointed, 
 razor-edged, well-poised. The feel of its well- 
 balanced weight in his hand was a constant joy. 
 It could split a skull or carve out a rib. It was 
 just like the knife he had watched on the desk 
 of the captain of the yard, the day of the jute- 
 mill murder, a trifle bigger, stronger, better 
 shaped if anything. It cut him often as it lay 
 against his skin, upon his heart and he ac 
 cepted these wounds voluptuously, as a mother 
 accepts the scratches of the babe she loves; at 
 night he stretched ecstatically to the rasping 
 of it, as a religious fanatic stretches to the tor 
 ture of his hair shirt. Visions came to him then. 
 He saw the red-striped convict of the jute-mill 
 spring, leap-frog fashion, upon the garotter; he 
 saw his right hand sink into the bent back with 
 a crunch, then rise, fall, rise, fall. And by a 
 
 132]
 
 9009 
 
 swift transformation, it was he that sprang, 
 leap-frog fashion; his hand that pumped, up and 
 down, up and down; his knees that grasped a 
 thick gurgling neck and the neck was not that 
 of the garotter. 
 
 He waited, grimly patient, day after day, 
 week after week. At times, without much con 
 viction, he tried to coax on the favourable mo 
 ment; and this resulted in what the prison offi 
 cials took for attempts at escaping attempts 
 incredibly stupid. 
 
 On one Sunday, for instance, he wandered into 
 the office of the captain of the yard under the 
 excuse of drawing a new suit of underwear. He 
 could hear the voice of Jennings in the inner 
 office, and he was very long in picking his gar 
 ment, rejecting suit after suit under flimsy pre 
 texts; then after finally he had had to choose, 
 loitered in the outer corridor, aimlessly, till Wil 
 son, with the unerring instinct of the informer, 
 becoming suspicious, ordered him out. He 
 cursed Wilson; and for this he was given a week 
 in the dungeon. 
 
 [133]
 
 9009 
 
 On another day, he broke up the lock-step line 
 in its morning march from cell-house to dining- 
 hall. Jennings commanded the line that day. 
 He stood near the wall, fifty feet from the line 
 as it passed. With a furtive movement, 9009 
 threw from him a piece of plug tobacco which he 
 had traded from another convict for a pair of 
 hoarded shoe-laces. It lit on the ground, twenty 
 feet from Jennings, unseen of all. Then, very 
 calmly, 9009 stepped out of the line and walked 
 toward Jennings. Immediately voices rose; 
 from the wall a rifle cracked; a bullet struck the 
 ground at 9009 s feet. Disdainfully he stooped, 
 picked up the tobacco, placed it between his 
 teeth, and shuffled back to the line. He had 
 been unable to get nearer than the twenty feet 
 from Jennings. 
 
 For this he was given the water-cure. Fet 
 tered to a ring stapled in the stone wall of the 
 corridor leading to the dungeon, he stood before 
 the captain of the yard, who played upon his face 
 the powerful stream of a hose till he was half- 
 drowned and chilled to the marrow. 
 
 [134]
 
 9009 
 
 Some time after he made another attempt, a 
 more serious one, but just as stupid from the 
 point of view of the prison officers. Slipping 
 out of the line as it left the foundry (it was the 
 dusk of a winter s day) he crawled to the cook 
 house and slipped into the narrow space be 
 tween that and the laundry, near the niche 
 where he used to hide his knife at times of dan 
 ger from search. By the mouth of this narrow 
 gut, Jennings had to pass four times a day on his 
 way to the jute-mill and back. 
 
 But Jennings did not appear. He was out at 
 the head of a posse which, deceived, pursued an 
 unwitting tramp over the hills. For three days 
 9009 crouched foodless and shelterless in his re 
 treat while man-hunters roamed the hills for 
 him on the outside; then Wilson, heading a 
 search within the walls, found him. For his 
 pains he was throttled almost to death before 
 the guards could part 9009 s iron fingers. 
 
 For this 9009 was formally tried in the court 
 of the district under the charge of assault to 
 commit murder. The trial was short. 9009 did 
 
 [135]
 
 9009 
 
 not open his mouth once. And he moved not a 
 muscle when the judge sentenced him to ten ad 
 ditional years in the penitentiary. 
 
 He was placed, now, in solitary confinement. 
 
 The solitary cells were on the top floor of the 
 building to which the garotter had pointed, for 
 the information of the murderer, on 9009 s first 
 day. This building was known about the prison 
 as the " Stone Building," probably from the mas- 
 siveness of its walls. The solitary cells were in 
 a corridor by themselves. The light was dim 
 there; it came from a single small window high 
 up in the wall. 
 
 They watched him, in his cage up there, in the 
 shadowy corridor; a guard stood all day before 
 his steel-barred door. By night he was left 
 alone. The cell was steel-walled, steel-floored, 
 steel-barred in front. It was six feet long and 
 five wide. The bunk took two and a half feet 
 of the width; so there was left a space six 
 feet long and two and a half feet wide in which 
 9009 could walk. Once each two weeks his 
 guard took him into the corridor and let him 
 
 [136]
 
 9009 
 
 exercise there. His eyes dilated with the dim 
 light. His hair had grown long, for they sel 
 dom sent the prison barber to him, and the lines 
 on his face had deepened to crevasses. 
 
 He slept, fitfully, as an animal sleeps in a 
 cage, by short snatches; he walked to and fro in 
 the confined space; he mended his clothes. And 
 he planned. 
 
 To merely wait for his chance, now, was not 
 sufficient. To fulfil his purpose, he must get out 
 of the solitary cell. His knife lay in the niche 
 behind the water-pipe; he had dropped it there 
 when discovered by Wilson. For the fulfilment 
 
 ; 
 
 of his purpose, he must have the knife; and to 
 have the knife he must get out of his cell. The 
 rest would be comparatively easy, for the build 
 ing was not locked. It would take care and 
 stealth, a careful avoidance of guard and trusty. 
 He felt no hurry. The years of his new sen 
 tence lay ahead of him; he took pleasure in a 
 contemplation of them, stretching long before 
 him; it was as if eternity, suddenly, had been 
 placed at the service of his purpose. Once only 
 
 [137]
 
 9009 
 
 did he sicken with impatience and worry; this 
 was when lipless prison rumour told him that 
 Jennings lay ill in the hospital. Two weeks 
 later, though, he heard that the guard was 
 back at his duty in the jute-mill, and his bars 
 roared out his relief in a rattle that reverberated 
 long in the dusky corridor. But this had been a 
 lesson; he saw the danger of procrastination, 
 and concentrated his mind on the problem of 
 leaving his cell. And finally the solution came. 
 
 He began to ask for needles often as often 
 as he dared, making the while a great show of 
 repairing his garments. In this way, in a year 
 he collected ten needles. 
 
 He took these ten needles and fitted them into 
 the wooden stem of a brier pipe. He fitted them 
 close together, like the teeth of a comb; they 
 were hard; they made a diminutive saw; and 
 they bit steel. With these needles he began to 
 saw his bars. 
 
 He sawed for a year, and had three bars nearly 
 through; and then his cell was changed. 
 
 His patience, now, had become something fun- 
 [138]
 
 9009 
 
 damental within him, as granite is fundamental 
 of the earth. He sat down and waited. They 
 changed him again to another cell. And then 
 to another. He spent nearly three years in dif 
 ferent cells, and then, one morning, he found 
 himself again in the cell where he had sawed. 
 That night he tested the bars. They were as he 
 had left them, three years before. Three of them 
 were severed but for a thread of steel; the 
 guards had discovered nothing. He began purr 
 ing at the fourth bar. 
 
 He worked craftily, with stealth, at night, 
 very slowly; for before him lay years, the eter 
 nity of time placed, by a trick of Fate, at the 
 disposal of his purpose; and it was silly to take 
 chances. He worked in the shadows, crouched, 
 rubbing evenly, quietly, but firmly, cutting bars 
 of steel with needles. When he had done each 
 night, he scattered with deep breaths of his 
 lungs the almost imperceptible little heap of 
 steel dust resulting, and smudged over the thin 
 wound in the bar with a bit of moistened bread 
 and lamp-black. So he lived, eating but little, 
 
 [139]
 
 9009 
 
 sleeping fitfully, like a caged animal, lying on 
 his back staring up into the shadows with eyes 
 dilated with long penetration of gloom, lived 
 with his purpose. But at times an agony of 
 cold sweat poured out upon his skin as he 
 thought that perhaps his knife, his precious file- 
 knife, needle-pointed, razor-edged, so well bal 
 anced, toward which he was cutting his way 
 through bars of steel with needles, that his knife 
 might not be there, in the niche behind the 
 water-pipe, where he had left it. 
 
 And then, suddenly, one day an astounding 
 thing happened; he received a letter. 
 
 Two convicts, two new trusties whom 9009 
 had never seen, were cleaning the corridor. The 
 arm of one snapped abruptly, and between the 
 bars something that looked like a white butter 
 fly fluttered in and lit upon the steel floor near 
 9009. He placed his foot upon it, and several 
 minutes later picked it up. 
 
 It was a letter, and it was from Nell. It was 
 from Nell! From Nell, the woman he had kept 
 from his thoughts, the woman from whom, stub- 
 
 [140]
 
 9009 
 
 bornly, knowing life and her kind, he had re 
 fused to expect anything; and it was an extraor 
 dinary letter. 
 
 For three years she had been working from 
 the outside to help him. And now she had ac 
 complished her purpose. 
 
 In the passageway between the bakery and 
 the laundry, the letter said, in an old drain-pipe, 
 a rifle, a revolver, and a rope lay cached for him. 
 
 That night 9009 sawed with his needles 
 through the last fibres of the four bars. 
 
 [141]
 
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN 
 
 IT was the dark hour before the dawn, black 
 and still and cold, when 9009, slipping the last 
 severed bar from its place and laying it noise 
 lessly down, wiggled out of his cell like a red- 
 barred snake. A moment later he was outside the 
 building, shrinking, a shadow among shadows. 
 
 He was in the upper yard. To his right was 
 the " Stone Building " from which he had just 
 emerged; to his left, across the yard, lay his old 
 cell-house. Before him, a hundred feet away, 
 opened the alley-way leading to the lower yard 
 with its little garden, where were the warden s 
 office and the sleeping quarters of the guards. 
 The left side of this alley was made by the sec 
 ond cell-house and the dining-hall; the right side 
 by the line of outhouses. These consisted of the 
 laundry, the cook-house, and bakery. Between 
 them were narrow spaces, mere guts two feet 
 
 [142]
 
 9009 
 
 wide. It was in the nearer of these that he had 
 once hidden for three days; in the same one was 
 the niche where his knife lay; and the farther 
 one was now his goal. Between this and the 
 point where now he stood was a stretch of the 
 yard, a hundred feet of it, bluely aglare with 
 the lights of the electric mast. 
 
 Everything was very still where he stood, and 
 very sombre. Behind him was a stretch of wall 
 and on it a muffled guard walked slowly, car 
 rying his gun loosely in his right arm, like a 
 hunter. In the centre of the yard, high on a slim 
 mast, a cluster of arc-lights threw frozen blue 
 rays wide into the sea of darkness below. They 
 revealed harshly everything they touched: the 
 beaten path in the yard, the stones of the high 
 granite wall, the guard, his rifle-barrel gleam 
 ing cold, the " Stone Building," hard and high, 
 the cell-house, black-patched with barred win 
 dows, the cluster of outhouses before him, and 
 especially, with a frigid intensity, an uncom 
 promising malevolence, the stretch of beaten 
 ground between him and his goal. 
 
 1 143 ]
 
 900,9 
 
 He stood in the narrow gutter of shadow 
 along the base of the fagade of the " Stone Build 
 ing," and he stared at the guard on the wall with 
 dilated eyes used to searching darkness. The 
 man was coming from the far extremity of his 
 beat, toward 9009, pacing slowly, his rifle loose 
 in hand; he paused to readjust the muffler 
 around his neck, and then, abruptly, his head 
 snapped forward and his rifle rose in his hand. 
 
 It may have been the pillar of shade, the 
 blacker shadow in the black shadows which had 
 not been there before for peering straight tow 
 ard the place, the guard became very tense; 
 in the glare 9009 could see his features tighten, 
 his left arm crook. The rifle was still going up; 
 it stopped halfway between hip and shoulder; 
 the two men stood still as graven images the 
 guard, a sharp figure in the blue-white light, 
 bent, taut, watching; the barred convict in the 
 shadow, crouching, motionless, his eyes peering 
 without lid movement, like the pitiless eyes of 
 a snake. 
 
 And then the guard relaxed; he dropped back 
 [144]
 
 9009 
 
 his rifle to the old loose carriage and resumed 
 his walk. 9009, immobile, unblinking, watched 
 him approach the end of his beat and then, pivot 
 ing, start for the other end, his back turned; in 
 stantly he slid out into the luminous space. 
 
 He ran, swiftly and silently, on the balls of 
 his feet, his arms half doubled, his chin thrown 
 upon his humped right shoulder, looking back 
 ward all the time at the guard upon the wall, 
 who paced along with his back still turned. He 
 covered forty feet and the guard still walked; 
 fifty, sixty the guard was slowing up; seventy 
 feet the guard paused. There in the middle 
 of the walk something, perhaps some cold pre 
 monition, had arrested him. His gun flashed; 
 he was turning. Throwing his eyes forward, 
 9009 leaped in great bounds; the shadow of the 
 dining-hall, sharp as the tape at the end of a 
 race, cut the ground ten feet ahead. He gave 
 a last look backward; the guard whipped 
 around; 9009 plunged head-first, like a frog, and 
 sprawled upon his belly within the darkness 
 which immediately closed about him like water. 
 
 [145]
 
 9009 
 
 He lay as he had fallen, awaiting the shock 
 of bullet, the roar of the guard s rifle. But he 
 did not move. He could not believe that he had 
 not been seen. A moment passed. A desire to 
 draw up his legs possessed him; he knew that 
 they must be out, distinct, in the light. But he 
 did not move. He lay like a stone. His face 
 was in the earth; he could taste mud upon his 
 lips; his feet felt cold as though he were be 
 neath a blanket and they were sticking out; he 
 imagined them enormously visible. But he did 
 not move. 
 
 A minute passed, a century. But there was 
 no shock of bullet, no roar of rifle. Finally, he 
 turned his head. 
 
 He turned it slowly, smoothly, until he could 
 look at right angles to his body, then with infi 
 nite precautions, in imperceptible progressions, 
 he bent it till the line of vision had passed his 
 shoulder. But still he could see nothing. Some 
 thing opaque and enormous barred his way; 
 an immense pillar. It was barred. It was his 
 arm. 
 
 [146]
 
 9009 
 
 He moved the arm in toward his side with the 
 same smooth stealthiness and he could see 
 across the lit earth of the yard, clear to the wall. 
 But he could not see the top of the wall. Again 
 he began an infinitely cautious movement. He 
 raised his head, from the neck, with no body 
 change, as though he were a contortionist; the 
 muscle of his throat cracked with the effort. 
 
 And then he saw. The guard was pacing back 
 along the beat his gun loose in hand, his back 
 turned. 
 
 9009 now crawled, on his belly like a red-ringed 
 snake, into the alley-way. 
 
 He crawled by the narrow gut where his knife 
 had lain hidden for more than three years, and 
 went on, writhing, to the second, between the 
 cook-house and bakery. Crouching at the en 
 trance of this, he looked back. He could not 
 see the guard; and he must be invisible to the 
 guard. He rose and went in between the two 
 buildings, squeezing edgewise, his right hand 
 ahead, feeling the wall, until it came against the 
 broken drain-pipe. He dropped his hand into 
 
 [147]
 
 9009 
 
 the pipe and the cold muzzle of a rifle, there 
 between his fingers, thrilled him to the marrow. 
 
 He stood there, his hand in the pipe, his fin 
 gers about the cold muzzle, long; then with a 
 jerk drew up the rifle. It fell across his out 
 stretched arms, and he held it thus a moment, 
 as a mother holds her child, his eyes examining 
 it swiftly, passing with satisfaction over the 
 thin, short barrel, the massive breech-lock, the 
 stock, heavy with stored death. The magazine 
 was full, a cartridge was in the breech he knew 
 that those who had climbed the wall and hidden 
 it had been negligent of no such details. He 
 took up the weapon in his hands now, right hand 
 about small of stock, left hand a sliding crotch 
 about the barrel and suddenly he snapped up 
 to his full height. 
 
 A terrific feeling of power had risen through 
 him. Once, in this prison, he had been a man 
 intent on obedience; months had changed him 
 to a sullen suspicious convict; years had made 
 of him a crouching, stalking beast; and now, at 
 the touch of this rifle, he sprang up a monster. 
 
 [148]
 
 9009 
 
 His muscles were of steel, his nerves were of 
 iron; he was sure of himself, absolutely sure. 
 He felt that he could kill, that no one, not God 
 Himself, could keep him from killing. He could 
 kill when he pleased. He could not miss, of that 
 he was incredibly sure; in his arms, already, in 
 his arms, in his eye, in his trigger-finger, he had 
 the feel of the coming kills. 
 
 He groped again into the pipe; his hands 
 found three things: first, a rope, coiled, at one 
 end of which dangled a grappling hook; then a 
 revolver, then a box of ammunition. He coiled 
 the rope about his waist. The revolver was a 
 long heavy single-action six-shooter, of the pat 
 tern he had always liked. He tucked it beneath 
 his waist-band. The cartridges he dropped, 
 loose, into one of his pockets. Then he stood, 
 erect, in the alley, close to the wall of the cook 
 house. 
 
 Dawn was coming in the east, a sullen dawn. 
 It coloured lightly the scale-tips of a mackerel 
 sky, and then, with weird swiftness, painted per 
 pendicularly three great red bars across the 
 
 [149]
 
 9009 
 
 murky horizon. 9009, standing in the shadowy 
 alley, saw the three red bars; he knew that in 
 half an hour the day guards would be up, that 
 in half an hour the whole prison would be rising 
 and a sudden temptation convulsed him. 
 
 He saw the guard, alone, upon the wall ; an im 
 pulse told him to shoot, rush to the wall, climb, 
 jump, rush to freedom, now, on the instant, 
 using the moment s opportunity. His heart 
 stabbed him with a palpitation, his blood leaped 
 through his veins and the stock of his rifle 
 sprang to his shoulder. 
 
 He stood thus, a long minute, the stock 
 smooth against his cheek, peering, through the 
 crotch of the back-sight, at the white bead held 
 immobile against the dark loom of the guard s 
 breast, his finger, twitching, crooked about the 
 trigger, while he fought the fight. Finally, with 
 a release of pent-up breath, he lowered the gun. 
 The temptation was gone; his purpose had won; 
 again it was with him, grim, inflexible, uncon 
 querable. 
 
 He crept into the narrow gut between the 
 [150]
 
 9009 
 
 laundry and the cook-house, and in the niche be 
 hind the water-pipe found his file-knife where he 
 had laid it, three years before. The blade was 
 rusty now, dulled with cakes of rust; the point 
 was gone and was like a knob; but the thing still 
 was hard and thick and heavy; its well-balanced 
 weight was still a joy in the hand. He slipped 
 it under his waist-band, by the revolver and 
 immediately, like a memory of old times, almost 
 sweet, he felt the rasp of it upon his skin, the 
 rasp that once had been a promise, the promise 
 now so near of fulfillment. He crept back far 
 ther into the narrow passage, and waited there, 
 patient, alone with his purpose. 
 
 The whole heavens were red now, deep red, 
 like congealing blood. A cold light spread along 
 the ground, sweeping, swift, silent. In the 
 blackness of the gut, 9009 listened. He caught 
 the vague stir of awakening men in the cell- 
 house. The stir grew, became detached and dis 
 tinct noises. Doors rang, a tread of feet sound 
 ed, footsteps came down the alley; two trusties 
 passed, paused in front of the cook-house, cough- 
 
 [151]
 
 9009 
 
 ing shiveringly, then entered. He heard the rasp 
 of a match, a clang of stove-lids, and then voices, 
 muffled, within. In a few minutes the day 
 guards would be dressed. The mackerel sky 
 above settled to a cold drab; 9009 stepped out 
 silently into the alley-way. 
 
 He stood there a moment, erect and motion 
 less; then his rifle leaped to his shoulder, bel 
 lowed, and the blue-clad guard upon the wall 
 toppled over, hung on the edge an instant, and 
 slid along the perpendicular stones to a huddle 
 in the yard. 
 
 And 9009 stepped out full into the yard, red- 
 striped, gaunt, and terrible. He walked slowly, 
 on the balls of his feet, his body inclined for 
 ward from the waist, his chin, pivoting upon his 
 neck, thrusting itself out to the right, to the left, 
 as he strode; and in his right hand his rifle, held 
 loosely, like a hunter s. 
 
 The reverberation of the shot was still bound 
 ing from building to building, mingled with the 
 echo of a shout which had followed. A shrill 
 whistling now rose, strident, into the air. A 
 
 [152]
 
 9009 
 
 white-faced trusty ran out of the cook-house; 
 another. 9009 kept on, going down the middle 
 of the yard, slowly, looking to right and to left. 
 A trusty showed his head at the door of the cell- 
 house. 9009 shot him, wantonly, gleefully, full 
 in the face a long shot, but he could not miss, 
 he felt he could not miss, never miss. A flick of 
 dust sprang from the ground at his feet, over 
 his head a brief snarl passed, almost simultane 
 ously the cracks of two rifles rang heavy be 
 tween the walls; he grinned and pumped a new 
 cartridge into the breech of his gun. 
 
 And then he began to run; going low, he made 
 for the " Stone Building." The rifles cracked 
 again; bullets struck to his right and to his 
 left. He reached the end of the " Stone Build 
 ing," halted, gave a swift look, then sprang for 
 ward toward the wall with a great self-announ 
 cing yell. He reached the wall, shot along it like 
 a rabbit, then, when he was out of sight of the 
 men above, quietly slipped back into the shadow 
 of the " Stone Building." A laugh cleft his face 
 as he saw the guards upon the wall, back toward 
 
 [153]
 
 9009 
 
 him, peering still in the direction from which he 
 had doubled. Then, in successive furtive rushes, 
 he slid back to the alley and crouched in the nar 
 row gut between cook-house and bakery, waiting. 
 
 He had accomplished three things by these 
 movements. By shooting the guard upon the 
 wall, he had aroused the whole prison, includ 
 ing all the other guards; by his feigned rush to 
 the wall, he had determined just to what point 
 these awakened guards should throw them 
 selves in the first impulse of the alarm; by his 
 circuitous doubling back, he now stood where 
 they must all pass. 
 
 In spite of his running, he was breathing 
 steadily; his muscles were like steel; and he was 
 absolutely sure of himself, of his power to kill. 
 He laid down his rifle and drew his revolver. 
 He waited there, all alone with his purpose, 
 peering out of the black gut. The whole prison, 
 now, was buzzing about him like a beehive. 
 Shouts sounded, gruff, like orders. A guard 
 passed by on the run, his face very red; two 
 more, putting on their coats as they ran; a whole 
 
 [154]
 
 9009 
 
 group of five. He still waited. There was an 
 interval of silence; again the drum of approach 
 ing feet. He peered and then he glided out 
 into the centre of the alley and faced Jennings. 
 
 The guard stopped in the middle of a step; 
 and the two men stood there alone in the desert 
 alley, in the wan light of morning, facing each 
 other, looking into each other s eyes. 
 
 The guard was half-dressed, his shirt open on 
 his hairy chest, his suspenders hanging behind. 
 His eyes narrowed, then widened; a flicker of 
 light for an instant sprang into them, then died 
 at once, leaving them as of old, lidless, opaque, 
 white-gray; and his sallow face showed no emo 
 tion, though slowly, like an invisible blush, a 
 dull threat rose in it. 9009 red-barred, stood 
 with coarse-shod feet close together, bending 
 slightly forward from the waist, his revolver at 
 the end of his arm, held with crooked elbow 
 close to his ribs; and in his face, gray with the 
 prison pallor, his two eyes glowed like fires at 
 the bottom of two caves. 
 
 They stood thus, it seemed long, motionless. 
 [155]
 
 9009 
 
 Then the guard straightened his shoulders, and 
 he half smiled. Immediately he was very seri 
 ous again; and then he spoke. 
 
 " Put down that gun," he said, calmly, evenly. 
 
 The upper lip of 9009 raised like a theatre- 
 curtain and showed his teeth. It remained 
 raised. 
 
 " Drop that gun," said Jennings again, his 
 voice like furbished steel; and a film came over 
 his eyes. 
 
 But 9009 was not listening; he was absorbed 
 in another problem. He was trying to decide 
 how he would kill Jennings. His first impulse 
 had been to shoot him through the heart. Then 
 he had wanted to put out with bullets the white- 
 gray eyes. Then he had almost made up his 
 mind to shoot him low in the body, so that he 
 would die slowly and in great pain. But as 
 he stood there, frigid, gun in hand, a profound 
 dissatisfaction of these methods had filled his 
 being. Somehow, none fitted; they were dis 
 cordant, all of them, with a dream he had 
 dreamed. 
 
 [156]
 
 9009 
 
 " Put down that gun," said Jennings for the 
 third time. 
 
 And then 9009 knew. 
 
 He stooped, laid down the gun upon the 
 ground, and snatched at his waist-band. He 
 rose to a crouch, to full height, and his right 
 arm, unfolding, continued the upward move 
 ment. He stood thus a moment, motionless, 
 straight, shoulders back, head back, right hand 
 high in air. Then Jennings, bending, rushed 
 forward, and 9009 sprang upon him. 
 
 He sprang high, leap-frog fashion; his left 
 hand snapped down Jennings s lowered head 
 with a jerk, and now the other hand, still high in 
 air, whistled down. It sank into the guard s back 
 with a crunch. It rose, fell, rose, fell, rose and 
 fell, rose and fell, rose and fell in a rapid cres 
 cendo of pumping movement, crunching into the 
 heap beneath long after it had become limp. 
 
 Then 9009, springing lithely to his feet, flung 
 the file-knife from him in a wide gesture, and 
 picking up his rifle, strode for the wall. 
 
 [157]
 
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN 
 
 9009 picked up his rifle and made for the wall. 
 There were two guards upon it at the point 
 which he chose, holding their rifles in both 
 hands, like hunters waiting for a flock of quail 
 to rise, and they fell to the double crack of his 
 rifle ere they could pull a trigger. One dropped 
 inside the yard, the other hung, quivering, on 
 the edge of the wall. Unwinding the rope 
 around his waist, 9009 threw the grappling iron 
 across the rail of the guards walk, and hurling 
 his rifle ahead of him, climbed swiftly up like an 
 ape. He paused for the flicker of an instant, 
 there on the top, the inside of the prison like a 
 diagram beneath him, the guard, now still, at 
 his feet; then, disdainful of the rope, sprang 
 down. He lit, huddled, by his rifle, seized it, and 
 then, hunch-backed, ran for the hill. Shots 
 sounded as he climbed, bullets whined by him, 
 
 [158]
 
 9009 
 
 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 lin 
 gering fall had left the land arid, and the round 
 ed hill still rose tawny against the sky. The 
 prison was changed. A consternation brooded 
 in its battlemented fagades; 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. Be 
 hind and above, like a red eye crooked in its or 
 bit, 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 
 
 1 159 ]
 
 9009 
 
 patch of forest to the west. If he could gain 
 this, the immediate pursuit would end, and there 
 would be an interval of rest before the system 
 atic man-hunt would begin. He ran across the 
 hills, crackling dry with the drought, a strange, 
 red-striped animal whose eyes flashed, who bent 
 and ducked and crouched and sought hollows. 
 Once only did he stop; this to the drumming ap 
 proach of a guard, who had been able to obtain 
 a horse. From the top of a knoll where he lay 
 flat, Collins shot down the guard, then went on, 
 leaving the well-trained horse standing with 
 long bridle dropped to the ground by his rider s 
 reclining form. The halt had given him a 
 glimpse of other blue-clad guards scattered over 
 the land to the rear; he threw himself on with 
 fresh impetus, and it was gasping, with veins 
 swollen, that he reached the fringe of the chap 
 arral just as the sun, definitively breaking 
 through the veil of morning vapours, began to 
 pour its yellow heat pitilessly upon the yellow 
 land. 
 
 He went on straight till among the pines, then 
 [160]
 
 9000 
 
 turned to the right toward the north. The city, 
 which was his goal, lay to the south; yet till 
 noon, for ten miles, he travelled straight north. 
 During that time he showed himself only three 
 times. 
 
 The first time was at a farm-house a small, 
 weather-beaten house in the centre of a clearing, 
 to which he came just after the breakfast hour. 
 A clatter of dishes, the song of a woman s voice, 
 met him as he approached. He stood in the 
 doorway, red-barred, sullen-jawed, the rifle in 
 hand; and the song died in a high quaver. 
 
 "Gimme food," he growled; "quick!" 
 
 The woman stared at him, white-faced, the 
 dish that she had been wiping held tight against 
 her breast. He scowled; the dish fell to the 
 floor in twenty fragments. 
 
 " Quick! " 
 
 Without a word, she turned to the pantry. 
 
 "An don t squeak," he went on; "if ye do, 
 I H cut your head off." 
 
 She placed the food before him on the table 
 bread, meat, potatoes, milk, a pot of luke- 
 
 [161]
 
 9009 
 
 warm coffee. He gulped it down like a dog, 
 watching all the time the woman through nar 
 rowed lids. Once, at some noise in the yard, he 
 took up his rifle and glided a-tiptoe to the win 
 dow. He stood there a moment, peering out; 
 meanwhile, the woman took hold of the table 
 with both hands, leaning forward heavily, her 
 eyes closed; but as he turned and went back to 
 the food, she stood up again, very stiff. 
 
 When he had done eating, he crammed under 
 his jacket the meat and bread that remained, 
 strode out, and vanished in the woods. 
 
 An hour later he heard the sound of an axe. 
 He crept toward it through the undergrowth 
 and saw a wood-chopper working over a fallen 
 log. The man s shirt was open on his chest; his 
 face was red and shiny, and at each stroke he 
 uttered a sound between a grunt and a shout. 
 " Huh-huh-huh," he said as he chopped. Collins 
 rose before him as the axe rose and the wood- 
 chopper became a statue poised with axe high 
 in air. 
 
 " Put down that axe," Collins growled. 
 [162]
 
 9009 
 
 The chopper dropped the axe. 
 
 " Now, take off your clothes," said Collins. 
 The chopper began to strip. But when he had 
 pulled off his shirt, an abrupt change came over 
 him. " Say, what s the matter with you, eh? 
 What s the matter with you?" he shouted. 
 
 His face was aflame, his eyes glistened; he 
 doubled up his fists. Instantly the fists loosened 
 and sprang high over his head as with a smart 
 tap the muzzle of Collins s rifle settled against 
 his stomach. " Oh, all right, all right," he said in 
 subdued tone; " all right, all right, don t shoot." 
 Then slowly, as if in an aside directed to the 
 trees: "For God s sake!" 
 
 A moment later Collins crashed out through 
 the brush clad in the garments of a workingman, 
 leaving the wood-chopper in the clearing, naked 
 before a striped huddle at which he gazed with 
 indecision and disgust. 
 
 These short apparitions, Collins found, had 
 been sufficient to his plan. The chase was press 
 ing up northward. Once, throwing himself into 
 the ditch beside the county road, he let pass 
 
 [163]
 
 9009 
 
 two blue-clad guards on horseback, going swift 
 ly, bent forward in their saddles. Later, from 
 a knoll he saw a whole sheriff s posse trot by, 
 shining with newly distributed badges, clatter 
 ing with weapons sawed-off shot-guns, repeat 
 ing rifles, six-shooters. The bead of his gun was 
 upon the little band, playfully springing from 
 one to the other, but he did not shoot. 
 
 He came upon them again at noon, in a little 
 town consisting of a general merchandise store, 
 a saloon, a post-office, and a huddle of cottages. 
 They were gathered in a picturesque group on 
 the high wooden sidewalk in front of the saloon, 
 tilted back on rawhide chairs, or standing about 
 with clanging spurs, their rifles against the wall, 
 their horses tied to the rack in the street, a cir 
 cle of admiring urchins about them. The leader, 
 a big, jovial man, was speaking vociferously 
 amid a popping of small boastful interruptions, 
 when Collins, gun in hand, chin thrust forward, 
 walked in down the middle of the main street. 
 A small boy, with a shout, raised his arm, point 
 ing; the men sprang to their feet. 
 
 [164]
 
 9009 
 
 And then, right from the hip, Collins s rifle 
 cracked; the big, jovial man pitched forward on 
 his face. The rifle leaped to Collins s shoulder, 
 and with his right arm suddenly limp, another 
 man of the group staggered into the saloon. Be 
 hind him the rest of the posse jammed, fighting 
 to get in. Only one made for the rifles, stacked 
 against the wall, and Collins toppled him over 
 just as his hand was upon the nearest. Run 
 ning low, Collins made for the horses. He un 
 tied them, scattered them, all but one, with a 
 fusillade from his revolver, sprang upon the one 
 he held, and galloped out of the town still go 
 ing north. Two miles away, he led the horse 
 down the bed of a brook into a ravine, tied him 
 to a tree, and then, afoot, doubled back toward 
 the south, toward the city, his goal, at last. 
 
 He travelled the rest of the day as few men 
 have ever travelled running, leaping, walking 
 swiftly, always silent, always flitting forward 
 without rest. Only twice did he stop, to watch 
 from some hiding-place, along the barrel of his 
 rifle, posses going by; one was led by the sheriff 
 
 [165]
 
 9009 
 
 who six years before had taken him to the 
 prison, a grizzly fellow with a long moustache, 
 and wearing a sombrero; both times the posses 
 were going northward, so that he had to master 
 his desire to kill. Dusk came, and he pressed 
 on, reeking with sweat, but unweary, the mon 
 strous glare-dome of the city ahead. Finally, the 
 glow resolved itself into details, and he trotted 
 in between two rows of street-lamps. 
 
 Almost immediately he came upon a police 
 man. The man, a big, burly hulk, was walking 
 slowly, twirling his stick, his helmet slightly 
 tilted back. Collins dropped into a blind alley. 
 
 " Here, come out of there, you," growled the 
 policeman, half jocosely; " come out, come on, 
 I want to see you!" 
 
 Collins stepped out and without raising his 
 arm shot him. The policeman sat down with an 
 astonished expression, coughed, and lay back 
 on the sidewalk. Collins went on at a rapid si 
 lent walk to the next street, and, turning, ran. 
 To his ear came the shrill affrighted cry of a 
 police whistle. From the right another came; 
 
 [166]
 
 9009 
 
 from the left. He ran, smoothly and carefully, 
 his ears taut to the rasping whistles, his eyes 
 piercing the shadows ahead. 
 
 A milk-wagon rattled across his way as he 
 came to a corner. He sprang toward it; the 
 muzzle of his rifle touched the driver. The man 
 drew in, and Collins leaped up by his side. They 
 rattled noisily down the deserted streets wanly 
 lit up by rare gas-lamps. The whistlings dwin 
 dled, ceased. Several times they passed police 
 men, frozen figures upon their beats. Collins s 
 rifle lay beneath the seat, but the muzzle of his 
 revolver, all the time, was against the ribs of 
 the driver, who handled the reins to Collins s 
 fierce whispers. They went a tortuous way 
 through a district of fine residences where the 
 close lights gleamed upon broad asphalt ave 
 nues; then the houses on both sides began to di 
 minish in size and wealth. He left the wagon 
 and went on at a walk. 
 
 The houses became smaller and humbler; he 
 went by the shadowy walls of a gas tank, 
 crossed a network of railway tracks, entered a 
 
 [167]
 
 9009 
 
 narrow street lined with dingy cottages, and 
 turned a corner. It was years since he had come 
 this way, and then he had had a guide; but he 
 had not forgotten a detail of the street. He 
 went on without hesitation and knocked at the 
 door of a small cottage, newly painted red. 
 There was a long silence, then a stir, and the 
 door opened. Tom Ryan faced him, Tom Ryan, 
 the friend of his boyhood, with whom he had 
 eaten shortly before his last arrest, the hod-car 
 rier whose security, then, he had envied. 
 
 Tom Ryan s face was very white, and his face 
 was no welcome. He stood at the door and 
 stared with eyes that showed fear, at the man 
 he had known in boyhood. Suddenly a gulp 
 came in his throat. " Good God," he said, 
 " you re not John Collins, John, are you? You re 
 not John Collins, are you, John? Oh, my God!" 
 
 Collins caught the look, the fear, the shocked 
 surprise. " Yes, it s me," he said, anger flaming 
 through him. " What sort of a hand-out is this 
 you re giving me? Do I get in? " 
 
 And roughly he pushed within. The door 
 [168]
 
 9009 
 
 closed behind them; they were in the narrow 
 hallway, which smelled of must and cookery. 
 "Good God," muttered Ryan; "I didn t think 
 you d look like this; not like this!" Through 
 the jar of the door at the bottom of the hall, 
 with the stifling odour of a room at once kitchen 
 and nursery, came a streak of yellow lamp-light. 
 In the faint glow the two men looked at each 
 other, the hod-carrier with shoulders white with 
 plaster and face white with emotion, the mur 
 derer with bloodshot eyes and corroded brow, 
 his mouth like a straight blue scar. Ryan was 
 trembling. " Man," he said, " what have you 
 been doing! I never looked for anything like 
 that when I told Nell I d help ye! " 
 
 John Collins was silent for a moment; with a 
 certain astonishment he saw the horror in the 
 other s face. A scowl deepened his brows. 
 
 "Done!" he muttered. "Done that s noth 
 ing to what I ll be doin to ye if ye don t shut up 
 that jaw of yours. Is that all ye ve to say to 
 me " his voice rose " is that all, eh? And 
 Nell, Where s Nell?" 
 
 [169]
 
 9009 
 
 A stir came from the room at the bottom of 
 the hallway, then the thin wail of a baby. Ryan 
 raised his hand. 
 
 " Sh-sh-sh," he hissed, and made a warning 
 gesture. " Sh-sh-sh; the old woman, she don t 
 know. I done it fer you was willing you meet 
 here. But I didn t know you d do that, not that. 
 And the papers full of it I don t know God 
 help me," he ended with a groan. 
 
 "Where s Nell?" said Collins, and he shook 
 Eyan by the shoulders; " where s Nell; quick; 
 Where s Nell?" 
 
 " She was to be here let go, man, let go my 
 shoulder she s not come. Wish to God she 
 had I never knew twould come to this be 
 still for God s sake don t go in there, not in 
 there!" 
 
 But Collins, brushing him aside, had strode 
 into the kitchen. 
 
 Mrs. Ryan was bending over the cradle the 
 same cradle where she had bent years before, 
 and it was in the same corner, and from it came 
 the acid cry of her last born. Side by side, by 
 
 [170]
 
 90O9 
 
 the cradle, were three cots; upon the pillows of 
 two were the grimy blond heads of two older 
 children; but one child, the eldest, a girl, had 
 fallen asleep in her chair; her head, pillowed on 
 her arms, lay amid the unwashed dishes of the 
 table, half-hidden by the large leaves of a news 
 paper sprawled loosely across. 
 
 " Sh-sh-sh, the babe, the babe," Mrs. Ryan was 
 murmuring, holding up with her left hand a 
 corner of a little blanket; and then, looking be 
 neath her arm at the sound of entering feet, she 
 caught sight of the sinister figure behind her. 
 She whirled around, in one bound placed herself 
 before the beds, her face lit up with a white 
 ferocity; and she shot both clenched hands for 
 ward in a movement half sign of aversion, half 
 blow. Collins shrank from the gesture. 
 
 " Go away," she cried, " from this room. Get 
 out of sight of these children, you " her breast 
 swelled, then the words came slowly, drawn 
 deep from her thick chest " you murrdhering 
 monster! " 
 
 Collins clenched his fist and scowled at Ryan, 
 [171]
 
 9009 
 
 now come within the room. " Shut up that 
 woman," he said. 
 
 Ryan went to his wife and placed his hand on 
 her shoulder; but she stared straight ahead over 
 his, at Collins, her breast heaving. 
 
 And on the table Collins saw the newspaper, 
 an evening edition marked " Extra " in black af 
 frighted letters, and across the page in great 
 red letters was his name, and in a frame, the 
 names of the men he had killed five and 
 those he had wounded three more. 
 
 "Ye murrdhering monster," panted Mrs. Ryan, 
 following the movement of his eyes. 
 
 From the porch outside there came a faint 
 shuffling of feet. Collins crouched, his hand 
 went to his waist-band, the heavy black revolver 
 flew out. " One more sound," he said and his 
 voice became low with steady menace " and 
 I ll blow out the heads of every wan of you." 
 
 One of the children raised up in her cot; she 
 gazed round-eyed at the strange man above her, 
 and began to cry. Without changing her posi 
 tion, Mrs. Ryan dropped her hand and twined 
 
 [172]
 
 9009 
 
 a curl about her finger in soothing caress. The 
 child was stilled. 
 
 Collins scowled at them at the mother, 
 standing there, one hand soothing, her whole 
 body tense before her children, a defense, a bar 
 rier; at the man, red-faced, perplexed, horror- 
 stricken yet pitying; at the child up in its cot, at 
 the child sleeping with its head among the dishes 
 on the table. Then, warning them once more in 
 terrible and grotesque pantomime with his re 
 volver, he stepped backward through the door, 
 which immediately slammed shut upon the group, 
 petrified in bronze attitudes. 
 
 Out in the hallway, he wheeled and covered the 
 outer door, which was opening. It shut again. 
 A woman had come in. " Nell," he whispered. 
 
 She was by his side, in the darkness, putting 
 something in his hand. " Quick! " she said. 
 
 He opened the box and dropped the rifle car 
 tridges loose into his pocket. She gave him an 
 other one. 
 
 "Quick!" she said again; "the place s going 
 to be shadowed." 
 
 [173]
 
 9009 
 
 He grasped the thing that she gave him. 
 
 " All I could get," she whispered; " all I could 
 get; two years 7 stealin s." 
 
 It was a bundle of bank-notes. To the touch 
 an old forgotten feeling swept hot through him. 
 " Who s keepin you? Who re you hanging up 
 with? " he growled, his iron fingers sinking into 
 her shoulder. 
 
 She was against him; in the semi-obscurity he 
 could see her face, worn now; it was turned up 
 to him wide-eyed. 
 
 " I couldn t do it alone, John," she said, in a 
 wondering tone; "/ couldn t climb walls and 
 plant guns; I couldn t do that, John." 
 
 He thrust her aside and started for the door. 
 Her two hands half went out after him in an 
 unvoluntary detaining gesture, but " Quick," she 
 whispered, fiercely; "quick, for the hills!" 
 
 The door swept open; he plunged down the 
 steps as if into a black sea; his feet did not 
 sound; there was immediate silence. 
 
 " He s gone," she said, there alone, in the still 
 dark hallway. 
 
 [174]
 
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN 
 
 THREE weeks later, limping along a road a 
 hundred and fifty miles south of the city, John 
 Collins stopped, listened intently with frowning 
 brows, and then, climbing up a bank, crawled 
 into the chaparral and instantly fell asleep. 
 
 In three weeks he had gone a hundred and 
 fifty miles in a straight line, but he had travelled 
 probably a thousand running, trotting, doub 
 ling, dodging, ambushing, killing. His goal had 
 been to the east; time and time again he had 
 made a desperate dash for the Sierra, snow 
 capped in the distance, the Sierra, with its pro 
 fundity of forest, its intimacy of valleys, its 
 secrecy of meadows, with its running water, its 
 game, its sheep-herders, half-mad with solitude; 
 and each time he had been headed off and slid 
 on farther down the coast. But this morning 
 he had seen before him a hill-range coming high- 
 
 [175]
 
 9009 
 
 peaked to the sea; this was now his goal. From 
 the place where he slept, the land fell off to the 
 south in a broad valley golden-hazed at the bot 
 tom with unleafed willows, then rose again in 
 long elastic jumps to a first crest, tumbled 
 abruptly into a black canon, and leaped up per 
 pendicularly to a final summit dark with pines 
 and promising of impenetrable recesses. 
 
 And behind him, to the north, men were hunt 
 ing. For three weeks he had been pursued as a 
 wild animal, with growing savagery of purpose, 
 with increase of cunning, by greater numbers. 
 The whole State, aroused, was buzzing about 
 him like a beehive. Hundreds of men, armed as 
 he was, clamoured on his trail. Some had seen 
 him; it was a sudden vision, instantaneous and 
 flitting as the revelation of a photographer s 
 flashlight a grinning mask, a savage eye glint 
 ing along a rifle-barrel and then men died, men 
 with fingers upon triggers, before they could 
 pull a trigger. The farmers in the fields 
 worked with rifles in their hands, with pistols, 
 with pitchforks; children armed with shot-guns 
 
 [176]
 
 9009 
 
 watched in the kitchens while their mothers 
 cooked; the officers of five counties at the head 
 of posses tracked him indefatigably; and lead 
 ing them all was the best man-hunter of the 
 State the grizzled, keen-eyed sheriff who, years 
 before, had taken John Collins to prison. 
 Twice, close-pressed Collins had seen him, with 
 his broad sombrero, his black moustache, 
 streaked with gray; but neither time had he had 
 the chance to kill him. 
 
 The elements, also, had conspired against the 
 fleeing convict. 
 
 For the first week, the drought had perse 
 vered. He had travelled through a parched and 
 arid land. The sun poured like molten lead 
 upon his bare head; dust lay about him like a 
 suffocation; it piled on the roads, sifted through 
 the holes in his shoes, burning his feet; it caked 
 his dry lips; it inflamed his eyes; he had suf 
 fered thirst. 
 
 Then the long-delayed rains had come. The 
 leaden vault of the sky had burst, letting down 
 upon him the upper reservoirs. For a week he 
 
 [177]
 
 9009 
 
 had been wet, persistently, all of the time; he 
 had travelled in ooze; his clothes had clung cold 
 about his limbs, paralysing them; he had slept 
 in puddles; and always, like a persecution with 
 him, went the necessity of caring for his gun 
 of seeing that it be not wet, that it rust not, 
 that it stay smoothly working, well-oiled, swiftly 
 ready to kill. 
 
 He had borne these things with alacrity. A 
 feeling of phenomenal endurance had exalted 
 him. All the time, in want, in hunger, in thirst, 
 in heat or cold, in pursuit or short respite, kill 
 ing or hiding, he had felt that he could go on 
 thus forever; that his nerves were steel, his mus 
 cles iron, that nobody, nothing, God Himself, 
 now could ever bring him down. When he shot, 
 it was by reflex, with utmost surety, his game 
 looming large as a mountain against the bead of 
 his rifle. 
 
 But the last few days, something insidious 
 had attacked him something that he felt but 
 vaguely, that he could not name, but which he 
 distrusted profoundly. 
 
 - [ 178 ]
 
 9009 
 
 A few days before, the rains had ceased, and 
 the sun had shone again. 
 
 It shone through an air that was as old-gold 
 dust, upon a wet land along the surface of which 
 trailed silver hazes; upon a warm, moist land 
 which panted to its touch, exhaling sighs humid 
 and soft and fragrant as the breath of kine. 
 Overnight a giant painter seemed to work with 
 broad sure brush. The landscape, yellow and 
 smooth as if gold-lacquered at sunset, at sunrise 
 was tinted in lavenders; the next morning it was 
 light green; the next morning it was dark green; 
 and in the fields, on the roads by the side of the 
 ruts, at first a mere verdant mustiness, the 
 grass was springing, numerous, strong and ser 
 ried, as to the commanding stamp of some fan 
 tastic foot. Here and there, on some rounded 
 hill, a ploughman showed, a poster ploughman 
 behind four poster horses; he rolled up in his 
 share, as though it were ribbon, long strips of 
 emerald sward, turning up to the sun the deeper 
 land, tinged with red, with the red of its prof 
 fered generous blood. A heaviness was in the 
 
 [179]
 
 9009 
 
 air; at the slightest movement, sweat poured out 
 upon Collins s body; a listlessness was in his 
 limbs, a listlessness that was not unpleasant, but 
 which worried him; his veins, swollen as were 
 the streams, as were the budding twigs, ran 
 with a torpor, a peace almost, which he fought; 
 at times a softness came to him, a vague mourn- 
 fulness, which was not bitter, which was almost 
 sweet, which relaxed his sinews, his nerves, his 
 vigilance his hate almost. It was something 
 subtle and inexplicable, something at which he 
 growled, but that he could not resist, something 
 which he distrusted, but could not conquer. 
 
 And now it was with him as he slept, there in 
 the chaparral, by the roadway. This it was 
 which caused him to lie loosely asprawl on his 
 back, his rifle almost beyond reach, his right arm 
 across his eyes; it made him breathe deep; it lay 
 about him like a warm soothing bath. 
 
 On the last day of the rain, by a cunning re 
 doubled doubling, he had gained half a day on 
 the leading posse, led by the sheriff. Since that, 
 torpid with the new influence, he had been con- 
 
 [180]
 
 9009 
 
 tent to plod straight ahead, holding the gained 
 advantage. This morning he had decided to 
 give up two hours of it to sleep. He had lain 
 down with the intention of sleeping two hours, 
 fitfully, on the watch, like a dog, as was his 
 way. 
 
 But now he was sleeping profoundly, on his 
 back, his arm across his eyes, his rifle carelessly 
 rolled ten feet away. An hour passed; he still 
 slept. Another, and he still slept. A mile be 
 hind, a group of horsemen came along the road 
 slowly. 
 
 Their eyes were bloodshot, the mud lay caked 
 in the stubble of their unshaven faces, and they 
 shifted uneasily in their deep saddles. Ahead, 
 like a vidette, scanning the way, rode a keen- 
 eyed man, with dark moustache grayly streaked, 
 a sombrero upon his grizzled head. He bent low, 
 along the flank of his horse, stopped the animal, 
 bent lower, looking into tHe drying mud of the 
 road, then spoke a few muttered words to the 
 men who now were about him. Immediately 
 they tensed; weariness fled them. And John 
 
 [181]
 
 9009 
 
 Collins, in the brush a mile ahead, became fitful 
 in his sleep. 
 
 The horses raised their heads to the reins and 
 began to trot. The riders, rising in their saddles, 
 looked ahead, their rifles in their right hands 
 ready for use. An animal stumbled in the rear; 
 the rider cursed, and the sheriff silenced him 
 with a potent look. They were within half a 
 mile of the sleeper now; he awoke suddenly. 
 
 He awoke, listened, then crept through the 
 brush to the summit of a little knoll and 
 looked. 
 
 He saw them the sheriff and his posse com 
 ing down the road. He looked toward the east, 
 up the valley; from this direction another group 
 of horsemen was approaching. The two posses 
 were drawing an angle of which he was the apex. 
 And three miles away to the south lay the moun 
 tains, black with pines, impenetrable to search; 
 he had slept at their very feet while the hunters 
 came upon him. He cursed but even as he 
 cursed a subtle indifference, a carelessness, was 
 within him. 
 
 [182]
 
 9009 
 
 A short distance ahead of the point where he 
 now stood, between it and the posse coming 
 slowly down the valley, a fainter road crossed 
 toward the hills he sought. At a bend, in a lit 
 tle hollow shaded by a live-oak, a mossy water 
 ing-trough dripped, and toward the trough a boy 
 was riding at a walk, on a young horse, bare 
 back. Bending low, Collins glided through the 
 brush, down the hillside, and gained a patch of 
 woods that, paralleling the main road along 
 which the two posses were converging, extended 
 to the trough. He stepped out of the fringe of 
 willows just as the boy brought his horse to a 
 stop beneath the live-oak. Men s voices came to 
 him from the junction of the roads, one hundred 
 yards away; the posse from up the valley was 
 passing it. 
 
 The boy, startled, threw his eyes toward the 
 crackling twigs and looked into the muzzle of 
 the rifle. " Get off that horse," Collins said, and 
 took a step toward the trough. 
 
 The boy slid to the ground along the horse s 
 gleaming flank; the man, watching him narrow- 
 
 [183]
 
 9009 
 
 ly, his rifle at the hip, lowered his head and 
 drank. 
 
 A shout came from the road. The two posses 
 had met. Voices mingled in surprise; then in 
 loud discussion. Collins took a step backward 
 into the willows. 
 
 " Where s water in them hills? " he asked the 
 boy, jerking his thumb toward the mountains 
 across the valley, to the south. 
 
 The boy pointed to a rounded summit, crowned 
 with black pines, across the valley, to the south. 
 
 Collins raised his rifle, clubbed. He knew that 
 he must kill the boy; all through his flight this 
 had been his rigid line of conduct: to kill those 
 from whom he obtained information according 
 to which he must act. 
 
 But now, at this moment of peril, with the 
 voices of the posses floating clear to him on the 
 quiet air, the feeling that had been with him 
 since the cessation of the rain enwrapped him 
 subtly an indifference it was, a weariness, a 
 laziness he didn t know what it was; but it 
 made him say: 
 
 [184]
 
 9009 
 
 "If I don t kill you, will you keep still?" 
 
 The boy nodded mutely. 
 
 A grimace suddenly distended the fugitive s 
 cracked face, a strange grimace, like the de 
 crepit contortion of what might once have been 
 a smile; and his eyes lit up, lit up with some 
 thing that might have been the shadow of a 
 softness. "Cross your heart and die?" he 
 asked. 
 
 The boy crossed his heart, his staring face 
 very serious. 
 
 Collins leaped upon the horse and was off. 
 
 He did not ride toward the mountain to which 
 the boy had pointed. He turned his back to it, 
 made for the main road down which had passed 
 the second posse, swung into it, and went up the 
 valley, at right angles to the course that would 
 take him to his goal. As he turned into the main 
 road, a yell hacl sounded. Another rose now; a 
 rifle cracked. He had been seen by some mem 
 ber of the posses. He rounded a sharp double- 
 turn beneath the branches of a sycamore which 
 scraped him as he passed, and a long ribbon of 
 [ 185 ]
 
 9009 
 
 road stretched level before him. The horse was 
 young and fresh; Collins bent forward, his face 
 almost between its ears, and to his mutter 
 it leaped in great bounds. Behind, the yells 
 ceased; they were superseded by a drumming of 
 hoofs, steady, constant like a buzzing; at times 
 bullets cried wild overhead. The planking of a 
 bridge reverberated hollow beneath him; he 
 rounded another turn. This time, when he had 
 gone three hundred yards beyond it, he brought 
 his horse up in three short cow-pony jumps, 
 wheeled it around at a stand, raised his rifle, 
 and waited for the first man to make the turn. 
 
 It was as he had expected. The first horse 
 man was the sheriff; riding strongly but calmly, 
 the rim of his sombrero blowing back, his face 
 very grim. Collins held the bead of his rifle 
 against him longer than was necessary (all 
 through his flight he had fired from all angles, 
 in all positions, with absolute accuracy); he 
 chuckled as he pulled the trigger; then, without 
 waiting to look, whirled his horse under him and 
 sprang forward again. 
 
 [186]
 
 9009 
 
 After a while, looking beneath his arm-pit, he 
 saw vaguely a man riding after him, a man with 
 a sombrero. He turned and looked fair. It was , 
 the sheriff, riding strongly but calmly, his som 
 brero rim flapping, his face very grim; he had 
 missed the sheriff. 
 
 It was the first time since he had the rifle that 
 he had missed. Heretofore the gun had leaped 
 to his hip, to his shoulder, by reflex and had 
 blazed death always. It had been impossible to 
 miss; in his eyes the game had loomed up like a 
 mountain. And now he had missed. A fear 
 came upon him; a fear as of the supernatural; 
 clubbing his horse with the butt of the faithless 
 weapon he urged it forward at greater speed; 
 it was beginning to pant now. 
 
 The road was rising with the floor of the val 
 ley. Ahead on either side lay half-ploughed 
 fields; he saw men bent over their ploughs be 
 hind four-horse teams. One of the teams stopped 
 abruptly; the ploughman ran to his horses, fum 
 bled at the traces. Another man, to the left, 
 was doing the same thing. And then, from each 
 
 [187]
 
 9009 
 
 arrested plough with its drooping-headed ani 
 mals, a horse detached itself, traces dragging 
 loose behind, the ploughman on its back, and 
 loped with lumbering steps toward the road. 
 And Collins caught a glint of shot-gun barrels. 
 A shout came from behind; Collins turned his 
 head; three more ponderous beasts, mounted by 
 farmers lustful for the hunt, were coming across 
 the fields, traces flying behind, spurning with 
 their broad hoofs shining clods. Again he struck 
 his horse with the butt of his rifle and the 
 breath began to whistle in its throat. A bullet 
 snarled by, close to his head; from the upper 
 window of a farm-house a shot-gun bellowed. He 
 passed a school-house; he saw the children, re 
 leased for recess, swarm out of the doors like 
 bees; he glimpsed their white faces; their shrill 
 cries came to him in one brief note as he swept 
 by, and then he swerved to the left into a road 
 that went through a pasture and then on toward 
 the mouth of a canon. He had to open a gate; he 
 fought at it long, it seemed, but when remount 
 ing, he cast a look backward, he saw the winded 
 
 [188]
 
 9009 
 
 plough horses still toiling up the hill, and behind 
 them, strung out, the two posses. Behind, there 
 were more horsemen; and to the right and the 
 left, horsemen; the whole world seemed aroused, 
 converging upon him. He picked up his sagging 
 beast between his knees, and galloped into the 
 dusk of the canon. 
 
 It led away from the hill he had for goal. He 
 went on half a mile, left his horse in the brush, 
 went on afoot another half mile, leaving a fairly 
 visible but diminishing trail, then, crawling 
 through the underbrush, doubled back along the 
 walls of the canon, toward the south. 
 
 Crawling, springing from stone to stone, al 
 ways in the brush, covering his rare tracks care 
 fully, he climbed diagonally up across the face 
 of the hills for several hours; and the afternoon 
 sun struck him in a warm wave as at last he 
 came out upon a round plateau, crowned with 
 a circle of black pines; running to the centre, he 
 thrust his face into the cool tufts of water-cress 
 and drank, in long sucking gulps, like a horse. 
 The boy had told him right. 
 
 [189]
 
 9009 
 
 When he had quenched his thirst to some de 
 gree, he stood up and listened, intent. A quiet 
 was about him, a great golden quiet; a little 
 bird went by his head with a squeak and a whir, 
 and the silence came flowing back in long rip 
 ples, like a sea. It was the silence of altitudes, 
 vibrant, supersensitive, through which a sound 
 passed aquiver like a pain; along its crystal, a 
 whisper, a mutter, the crackling of a twig, would 
 come for a mile. Collins listened: there was no 
 crackling of twig, no shout, no cry, not a breath, 
 not a sigh. 
 
 He walked to the edge of the plateau and 
 looked down the slopes to the valley beneath. 
 Along the ribbon of road, small like mice, and 
 gliding without rise and fall as upon wheels, he 
 saw specks of horses mounted by dots of men; 
 they were going up and down the road in sud 
 den swift flights, as if bewildered. He had out 
 witted them. 
 
 He returned, dragging his rifle, a little aim 
 lessly to the centre of the plateau. He knew 
 what he should do plunge on into the depths 
 
 [190]
 
 9009 
 
 of the mountains rising and falling ahead to the 
 south, dark with pines. But a laziness, almost 
 an indifference, possessed him the strange in 
 fluence that had been with him since the ceas 
 ing of the rain. It had left him in the excite 
 ment of the chase; now it was with him again, 
 a vague weariness, an indolence. He looked 
 about him. The plateau, ringed with a circle 
 of pines, fell off toward the centre in a gentle 
 depression. In the depression was the spring, 
 bubbling up silvery among the cress. The little 
 stream wound lazily for a few feet, then tum 
 bled abruptly over a mossy log in miniature 
 cataract. About it the grass was lush and high, 
 and in the grass flowers peeped pink flowers, 
 like small roses, and blue ones, like eyes. The 
 grass looked very thick and very soft. He sat 
 down. 
 
 And then immediately, sudden as a blow, 
 there came to him the realisation that he was 
 outside. He was out in the open. 
 
 He had been out for three weeks; three weeks 
 before he had passed forever outside of the 
 
 [191]
 
 9009 
 
 prison s gray walls. During that time he had 
 travelled, he had fought; he had slept in the 
 rain, he had slept under the stars; the sun had 
 poured upon him, the wind had slashed him; 
 not once had he been under a roof. And now, 
 for the first time, he realised that he was out 
 side. 
 
 He realised the golden stream of sunlight 
 slanting to him across the hills, the smell of 
 fresh earth, of lush grass; he breathed deep and 
 felt within his lungs the clean clear air of out 
 of doors; he saw the sky above him. 
 
 It was blue, the sky, a fresh tender blue. And 
 right at its highest point, overhead, was a lit 
 tle white cloud. He let himself fall back, and 
 lay there, eyes up. The little white cloud re 
 ceded, receded, seemed about to withdraw with 
 in a secret door, up there in the blue dome. He 
 shut his eyes; when he reopened them, the little 
 cloud was again in its place. 
 
 A bee buzzed by an hour passed. A golden 
 spider weaved a fragile net from one blade of 
 grass to another. 
 
 [192]
 
 9009 
 
 A soft drum of hoofs on the sward threw him 
 sitting up, his hand on his rifle. At the edge 
 of the meadow a colt stood regarding him ob 
 liquely, half-scared, its long knobbed forelegs 
 far apart. "Phoo!" said Collins. With a de 
 fiant flip of hind-heels, the colt vanished down 
 the slope. 
 
 Collins remained thus, seated, rifle in hand, a 
 moment. His movement at the approach of the 
 colt had been slow; now a languor was in him 
 in his limbs, in his veins, a heavy languor, rather 
 pleasant. He lay down again and gazed up at 
 the little white cloud. It retreated within the 
 depths of the heavens. He shut his eyes. It 
 sprang forth again, playfully. 
 
 And meanwhile a posse was laboriously climb 
 ing toward the rounded hill crowned with pines. 
 It filed up slowly, in long zigzags. At its head 
 was the sheriff, patient and grim; he was guided 
 by the boy whom Collins had met at the water 
 ing-trough. 
 
 The posse debouched upon the plateau, and 
 quietly, following the gestured commands of the 
 
 [193]
 
 9009 
 
 prison s gray walls. During that time he had 
 travelled, he had fought; he had slept in the 
 rain, he had slept under the stars; the sun had 
 poured upon him, the wind had slashed him; 
 not once had he been under a roof. And now, 
 for the first time, he realised that he was out 
 side. 
 
 He realised the golden stream of sunlight 
 slanting to him across the hills, the smell of 
 fresh earth, of lush grass; he breathed deep and 
 felt within his lungs the clean clear air of out 
 of doors; he saw r the sky above him. 
 
 It was blue, the sky, a fresh tender blue. And 
 right at its highest point, overhead, was a lit 
 tle white cloud. He let himself fall back, and 
 lay there, eyes up. The little white cloud re 
 ceded, receded, seemed about to withdraw with 
 in a secret door, up there in the blue dome. He 
 shut his eyes; when he reopened them, the little 
 cloud was again in its place. 
 
 A bee buzzed by an hour passed. A golden 
 spider weaved a fragile net from one blade of 
 grass to another. 
 
 [192]
 
 9009 
 
 A soft drum of hoofs on the sward threw him 
 sitting up, his hand on his rifle. At the edge 
 of the meadow a colt stood regarding him ob 
 liquely, half-scared, its long knobbed forelegs 
 far apart. "Phoo!" said Collins. With a de 
 fiant flip of hind-heels, the colt vanished down 
 the slope. 
 
 Collins remained thus, seated, rifle in hand, a 
 moment. His movement at the approach of the 
 colt had been slow; now a languor was in him 
 in his limbs, in his veins, a heavy languor, rather 
 pleasant. He lay down again and gazed up at 
 the little white cloud. It retreated within the 
 depths of the heavens. He shut his eyes. It 
 sprang forth again, playfully. 
 
 And meanwhile a posse was laboriously climb 
 ing toward the rounded hill crowned with pines. 
 It filed up slowly, in long zigzags. At its head 
 was the sheriff, patient and grim; he was guided 
 by the boy whom Collins had met at the water 
 ing-trough. 
 
 The posse debouched upon the plateau, and 
 quietly, following the gestured commands of the 
 
 [193]
 
 9009 
 
 sheriff, the men scattered in a circle behind the 
 pines crowning it. 
 
 One of the men stepped upon a dry twig, and 
 Collins sat up to the crackle. He saw the man, 
 dodging behind a tree, and at the same time, an 
 other, then arms passing or faces peering from 
 behind other trees. He grasped his rifle and 
 half stood up. 
 
 He remained thus, on his knee, a moment; 
 he seemed listening intently, listening not to 
 what might come from the outside, but to some 
 subtle inner command. And a great wave of 
 lassitude, of the inexplicable lassitude that for 
 several days had lurked about him, now whelmed 
 him in a long, heavy and enveloping caress. 
 
 "Oh, hell!" he said and he lay down again 
 on his back, in the lush grass, and gazed up at 
 the little white cloud far up in the blue sky, the 
 fresh tender blue sky. 
 
 And to the sheriff s raised ordering hand, the 
 man-hunters began to shoot. They shot from a 
 circle, at the stretched figure in the centre. It 
 was hidden by the grass, it lay flat, it was a hard 
 
 [194]
 
 9009 
 
 shot; the thing took a long time. Bullets spat 
 tered all about Collins; after a while one went 
 through his left arm, which lay across his chest. 
 To the sting he rose, half angrily, and made a 
 movement toward his rifle, then, "Oh, hell!" he 
 s-aid again, with heavy indifference. 
 
 It was almost sundown when the wily old 
 sheriff, taught by many lessons the futility of 
 haste, ordered a concentric advance. The men 
 rushed forward; they met face to face above a 
 lifeless body. 
 
 The sheriff touched it lightly with the tip of 
 his boot. " Well," he said, and his low voice in 
 the still air had an unexpected, booming finality; 
 " well, he was a bad one." 
 
 But John Collins, with glazed eyes, was star 
 ing up at the cloud. 
 
 THE END 
 
 [195]
 
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