Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/16

4 cheerfulness, with a cynical humor, protruding his tongue when he laughed. He was generally regarded as a comic character, but "no such fool as you 'd think."

He had found it impossible to get any reply from his prisoner, or even any attention. Sam sat dumb, staring at the red plush of the seat before him, with his black eyebrows raised and his forehead wrinkled. It was not that he ignored Johns, but, evidently, that he did not hear him.

The deputy decided, first, that Sam was "a sulky tramp."

As a tramp he was typical—collarless, in a dirty linen shirt, with a leather belt supporting trousers spotted with oil stains, his shoes looking as if they had been worn in a lime-pit, his straw hat soiled and stained, his beard rusty. And yet his face, in a painting, would have drawn the eyes of an art gallery. It was full of the record of life, of things seen and suffered, though perhaps not understood. His mild blue eyes were set in a vacancy of thought. The lifted eyebrows of his frown suggested a mute groping.

He had been found guilty of train-wrecking—of causing the deaths of thirty-two passengers on the "D. & C." railway, by loosening a rail on the bridge across the Little Sandy near Golden Gorge. And he had been sentenced to imprisonment for life.

This shocking fact did not affect the deputy at all. Professionally, he had no more interest in the reason for the man's imprisonment than a "funeral director"