Page:9009 (1908).djvu/155

Rh 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, carrying 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 gleaming cold, the “Stone Building,” hard and high, the cell-house, black-patched with barred windows, the cluster of outhouses before him, and especially, with a frigid intensity, an uncompromising malevolence, the stretch of beaten ground between him and his goal. Rh