Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/189

Rh window-socket, and hung there, face to face with the moon. The window was open, for the night was warm. What was it that he heard? The lowing and bleating of frightened animals—at Smithfield, doubtless—being penned for the killing like himself! But that was not all. There was something more insistent, something nearer at hand and unceasing; nay, increasing too. The pulse of a multitude—the murmur of a mob. A street song at dead of night—to while away the hours—his last hours on earth. Street cries! “Life and trial of Thomas Erichsen,” as like as not; but they should not add “execution.” Not yet at all events. He would do something to die for first!

A tug at the bars—they yielded nothing. Another, with all his might, and his knees drawn up against the sill; not an inch, not the sixteenth part of one! The bars were hopeless. He sprang back into the cell, and stood there with the full moon laughing in his white face and blazing eyes. Very well! He would brain the next turnkey who came near him, and so at least deserve his death, even if he could not slip into the dead man’s clothes and thus away. So the hot fit had followed the cool; so madness trod upon the heels of rational thought.

The murmur of the crowd had done it; it had left him a wounded lion, and his maddened eyes were now roving round the cell in search of that with which to shed blood for blood. They lit upon the metal wash-stand fixed (like the iron candlestick) to the wall. In an instant the washstand was torn out by the roots, and poised over the cropped yellow head, while the loose tin things rang like cymbals on the floor. The clatter was slow to cease. It was followed inevitably by hurried