Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/126

 and accepted into the fraternity that comprised the worst and most unscrupulous convicts in the penitentiary; he had found himself being invested with unwelcome authority, regarded with envy and something akin to unholy respect by the others, the lesser breed without the fold. But the opportunities for Twisty's confidences, and the Butcher's, and the others', apart from their own caution, had not been many—Wenger had seen to that. It had taken two months to arrive at the point where a rising and the "bumping off" of Wenger was mooted—"when all was ready," Since then, they had drawn away from him—his answer had been little to their liking.

Again Varge's eyes swept slowly, lingering on details, around the shop. Wenger, for the moment, had gone into the stock-room. Twisty Connors and the Butcher were dividing their glances between each other and the narrow, open doorway of the stock-room through which Wenger had disappeared. The instructor still sat at his desk beside the big iron doors in the centre of the side wall that gave entrance and egress to the shop; the heavy steel key, a foot in length, polished from much usage, hung from a hook above his head and glinted in the sunlight. A line of stooping, listless figures, their loose-fitting prison dress adding a uniform appearance of gauntness to each, were dotted along the length of the bench beneath the iron-barred windows. Another bench, paralleling the first, ran halfway down the middle of the room—his bench, where he worked. A half-dozen machines, each with a striped form bent over it, occupied the rest of the floor space to the end wall, in which was the stock-room door. A figure scuffled from