Page:9009 (1908).djvu/152

Rh 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 balanced, 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 butterfly 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- Rh