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Rh 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 approached; it hung over them, gray and ponderous, turreted as a mediæval 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 Rh