Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/17

Rh has in the cause of death; it was enough for him that "the body of Samuel Daneen was in his hands for delivery to its living tomb. He had had sufficient cynical experience of the courts of his state to know that innocence was sometimes convicted and that guilt often went free; but this was a matter that was not on his "beat," as he would say; he could not help the innocent any more than he could impede the guilty.

He was only anxious, at the moment, to know whether or not Sam was a bachelor—for it was one of his theories of life that marriage preserved a man to virtue, whereas bachelorhood led through dissipation to disease, shiftlessness, the poor farm, or a penal institution. His own wife, he held, had made a man of him.

He wished to preach to Sam from some such text, and it piqued him that Sam rejected his friendly overtures of conversation. He bounced himself impatiently on the springs of his seat, or he turned suddenly to look back over his shoulder at the car; and each time he contrived, as if accidentally, to give a twisting wrench to the bare wrist that was chained to his handcuff. At last Sam, without a change of his blank look, uttered a low, moaning groan that came as if it had worked its way up from the very depths of inarticulate distress.

It gave Johns a chill. He said to himself: "He 's bug! He 's crazy!" And, sitting very quiet, he watched his prisoner warily, askance.

Sam showed no further sign of life, having now