Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/26

14 prison cap lay on the carpet where he had been standing.

"He 's dotty, Warden," Johns apologized. "He 's doped." Zng replied, in an undertone, impatiently: "Leave him alone." He was absorbed in his scrutiny of the heavy, slanted sag of the mouth, the perplexed corrugation of the forehead, the sightless, wrinkled stare of the blue eyes. "Look at me," he said. "Here." He rose and put his hand to Sam's chin, and turned the face toward him.

For a moment the eyes did not even see him. They looked through him, beyond him. When at last the pupils focused on him, it was with the empty dullness of the gaze of a sick animal.

"What 've they been doin' to you?" Zug asked.

If he had been holding a cowed collie dog by the muzzle to speak to it, it might have watched him so—not looking at his lips when they moved, as even an intelligent child would, but at his whole face in a large, meaningless, dumb regard.

"You never wrecked that train, did you?"

It seemed as if he were about to answer. His eyebrows twitched and contracted. The muscles trembled in his lips with a fluttering that accompanied a clicking of his teeth. His eyes wavered irresolutely, but with a light of intelligence. And then suddenly the eyebrows went up in their plaintive frown again. His gaze set on the distance. His lips sagged back into their loose droop. And Zug felt that he had been heard