Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/20

8 and then unlocked another door, in the side of his cage, to let in an official in a blue uniform whom the loquacious Johns greeted as "Cap'n."

"Here 's the noisiest bum I ever seen," Johns said, as he released Sam from his handcuffs. "He 's about as chatty as a load o' lumber."

Sam stared past them at nothing.

"He 's a terror to think," Johns said. "You can see that."

They looked at him for the first time, and there was something in the sadness of his set eyes that abashed all but Johns. The captain, with the bruskness of a man who had blundered upon the scene of a private emotion, immediately signed to the turnkey, who noiselessly opened the third door. The captain hurried Sam through it, holding him by the upper arm, and led him down the hall to a large arch that opened on the prison courtyard. A guard, sitting in a steel cage above them, with a pump-gun across his knees, looked down watchfully on their backs as they stepped into the graveled court. And Sam was "in the Pen."

Here, between the gray stone ramparts of the outer walls, stood a gray stone quadrangle of cell-houses, work-shops, and barrack-like buildings, guarded by sentries with rifles in watch-towers, or by men at grated doors with loaded canes and concealed revolvers. These men wore blue uniforms. Their sole work in life was to watch over seven hundred other men, in striped yellow-and-black uniforms, so as to prevent them from escaping from the little granite hell to which they had