Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/27

Rh and, after some sort of despairing consideration, ignored.

He sat down and drummed thoughtfully on his blotter-pad. "I suppose," he said. "I suppose."

He summed it up to Johns: "He 's got his, an' I guess he knows it." There was contempt in his pity—the natural contempt of such a man as he for the victim of those conditions of society over which he himself had triumphed. "Tell them to take him back," he ordered. "Tell them to ask the steward to give him work in the kitchen."

Johns had been watching and listening in an eager silence. He took Sam by the elbow, now, with the air of an old woman who has shared in a scene of family scandal and who conceals, in an expression of decent deprecation, her relish of the gossip in which she is to delight. He even stopped sympathetically to pick up Sam's prison cap as they passed it; and he gave the warden's instructions to the guard in the corridor, confidentially, in the manner of a loyal friend of the family who could be depended on to be discreet. ("I wonder what the hell 's up?" the guard asked the turnkey, and they both stared at the mysterious Sam.) "Well, Warden," Johns said, after an awkward pause of lingering, "I guess I 'll toddle along."

Zug grunted indifferently; and the deputy sheriff hurried away as fast as he could shuffle, to pursue the truth about Sam where he knew he could find it—in the sheriff's office.