Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/128

 with a sudden movement had jerked the old man's arm behind him and twisted it brutally. That scream was ringing now in Varge's ears, the hollow, agonised features were before his eyes, as they had been that day. It had lasted the bare fraction of a second. His fist had whipped to Wenger's jaw—and Wenger had stretched his length upon the floor, stunned, a full ten feet away.

He had not done it impulsively—instantaneously almost as was the act, quick as was the rush of anger at Wenger's coward deed, he had struck the blow with cold, sober deliberation. He had known the consequences—an assault upon a guard was the last act he could hope to commit with impunity. It was the offence heinous, and its punishment was—the lash—the lash, strapped to the triangular black "horse" that he had seen one day in the corridor of the underground cells. There was no excuse for an assault upon a guard—none—it was the lash.

They had taken him then to the warden's office, and Wenger, smooth, plausible liar, had told his story, guarding himself at every point.

"He's a bad egg," Wenger had stated to the warden. "He's in thick, as I've told you before, with the worst of them. Why, there ain't a day goes by that I don't have to warn him."

Just God! Would it come some day to that?—when human endurance would be at an end, when his brain would stagger and reel with mad drunkenness, and Wenger's blood be on his soul!

He had watched those keen, steel-grey eyes, watched the warden's face, he remembered, trying to read in them his sentence. Six lashes?—twelve?—eighteen