Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/19

Rh Handcuffed to the deputy, he was drawn up the stone steps of the administration building, in the cheerful sunlight, and led into the coolness of a white-tiled hall that echoed at once with Johns's "Well, boys, how are you? How are you?" There was a note of eager escape from silence in the exuberance of his voice. He turned Sam into a receiving office and held him standing before a wooden railing while he gave a clerk the mittimus from the judge who had passed sentence. "All right," the clerk said. "I 'll give it to you on your way out"—referring to the receipt for the prisoner. He was busy making up his quarry accounts for the warden's annual report. "How are your feet?" he asked, with his pen across his teeth, grinning.

"Still steppin' heavenward, little one," the deputy replied from the doorway. "Be good."

He took Sam down the tiled hall to its farther end, where a turnkey sat in a cage made of two ceiling-high gratings across the passageway and two grated doors in the sidewalls. Johns greeted him jovially. He nodded in reply, with a slow smile, but he did not speak.

He had a manner of being unwilling that he should be distracted by conversation from his attention to his life-work of opening and closing four grated doors so as to have only one door at a time unlocked. He did not even glance at the new prisoner in reply to Johns's genial, "Brought y' another ol' bachelor, Jake." When they had entered his cage he locked the door behind them, spoke softly into a telephone on the wall,