Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/123

 breaks, breaks to which the monotony was a boon. Harold Merton's visit—bad days and nights had followed that. And then the horror of that forty-eight hours of solitary confinement in the blackness, that had been—Varge raised his head and looked around him—it was afternoon and he was amidst the now all too-familiar surroundings of the carpenter shop. A sense of strange unrest was upon him, premonitory, pregnant of something he could not define. It had been with him that morning, yesterday in a lesser degree and vaguely, intermittently, for a week now. It was as though this afternoon it were attaining culmination. Yet now the surroundings were as they always were—there was no change—there was never any change.

Down the shop, by the entrance to the stock-room where the lumber was piled and the tools were kept, Wenger, the guard, with heavy, red, florid face, narrow-eyed, the under lids puffed out and hanging like flabby little sacks, leaned against the door. There was the same coarse sneer on his lips that was always there, and the red in his face seemed to flaunt, as it always flaunted, the twenty-two white, bloodless faces that rose above grey-and-black striped bodies here and there about the room. There was the same hoarse, guttural snapping of the planer eating its way along the surface of a rough plank; the shriller note of the flying band-saw, ending each time in a sharp crescendo as it worked clear of the wood. Twisty Connors' cunning little eyes met his and drifted away with a furtive glance toward Wenger; the instructor at his desk was busy over blueprints; old Blackie Lunn, the man who coughed at night, the man on account of whom he had got that