Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/124

 hours of "solitary," the most pathetic figure in the room, grey-haired, with hollow, hectic-flushed cheeks and burning eyes, crouched wearily, apathetically, over his work a few yards away.

Varge's eyes dropped to his bench—it was as it always was. His brow clouded—a prescience that had never failed him was with him now. What was it? It embraced Wenger; and it embraced Twisty Connors and the harder element in the shop that tacitly recognised Twisty's leadership—the Butcher, a giant of a man, beetle-browed, sullen-faced; Spud; the Mouser; Scotty and a dozen more—counterfeiters, forgers, cracksmen, desperate men to whom consequence was an unknown word. And it embraced, too, vague rumours, that lived tradition-like amongst the old-timers and was spread to the new, of an old brick sewer long out of use that led beneath the prison walls to the creek a quarter of a mile away, whose abandonment, so it was said, the town authorities had ordered years ago as it polluted the stream. No one seemed to know where it was—all talked of it, and each had his own idea. It lived for them much as the odour of baking bread wafted from a shop lives for the starving wretch without—there was bread; its existence held a glimmer of hope.

All these were as pieces of an elusive puzzle which Varge sought now to put together; and in that effort, logically, his mind went back to the first day—when Wenger had struck him with his cane. He had looked Wenger in the eye after that blow for a long time—and it had been Wenger's eyes that had dropped. That had been the beginning—he had earned the brutal, bullying enmity of the man then. Daily, with nagging