Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/93

 seemed to find some satisfaction, some relief in the common bond, grim, drear and heavy-weighted though it was, that linked them together—Varge found none.

He had shuddered as he had felt the hands of the man behind him on his shoulders when the lock-step formed—and once, that was the first day, he had involuntarily jerked the man's hands away, and the guard, Wenger, one of the day guards in the carpenter shop, had struck him smartly with his short cane. It was not easy yet to lay his own hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him in that dull-treaded, scuffling, humiliating march. It was not pride in its caddish sense—it was the natural revulsion of a clean-souled, clean-handed man from the familiarity, the touch, the intimacy of guilt.

Pitiless days!—that ate into the iron of his soul as remorselessly as drops of acid eat to the metal's core. Even the air around him, the air he breathed, was different from the air of the world without—it was heavy, always heavy, charged with the nauseating odour of disinfectant. And always, ever, there were bars of steel, and iron doors, and walls of stone—and eyes upon him, watching him with cold relentless vigilance even in his sleep.

At night, he would awaken and listen—a terrible silence would be around him; then a soft tread would mount the iron steps, up one tier, then another, come along the steel bridge and stand like a black shadow before the bars of his cell. He would sleep again. Cheerless dawn, harbinger of waking hopelessness, would creep through the high windows that faced the cells across the empty space between the outer wall and the iron-railed platform that ran the length of the corridor