Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/25

Rh court of his state. But in forcing Judge Purvis on the district bench it had crowded aside Zug's favorite son-in-law, in Zug's own district, and humiliated him in the home of his friends. By their subsequent reward of that humiliation the "D. & C. people" had only served to justify his resentment in his own eyes, though he had come to feel less bitterness toward the "D. & C." than toward Purvis. He wished—humanly enough—to despise Purvis, to look down on him, to find him guilty of some act that should make him contemptible; for Zug was not so small in mind that he could be satisfied with a mere resentment.

He waited, frowning darkly.

He was disappointed in Daneen's appearance when the guard led him in to the office. The convict was no longer a possibly innocent man; he had been made into a criminal. His head had become the sinister cropped skull of dishonor. Stripped of his beard, his face below the eyes had a wrinkled, unwholesome, repellent pallor. His ill-fitting prison stripes disfigured him as much as they degraded. He stumbled in his clumsy convict shoes. He looked ridiculous, odious, evil. There remained only the dignity of pathos in his mute eyes.

Zug, without rising, dismissed the guard with a jerk of the head toward the door, and said to Sam, in a kindly gruffness: "Come over here." Sam did not move. He stood with his arms hanging, his head drooped. Johns took him by the sleeve and drew him up beside the warden's table-desk. His