Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/79

Rh That ought to be prime. I mean to be there if I stand all night for my place! Not fond of an execootion, sir?”

“I never saw one.”

“Never saw one! Well, that’s funny; and I ’aven’t missed one these fifteen years!”

Tom looked from his own ghastly visage in the mirror to the low, gloating face puckered with sly smiles at ghoulish memories. He went elsewhere for his shave. And slowly but at last the grateful night closed in; the busy City streets became empty, echoing chasms; and Tom, feeling more than ever the guilty cynosure, drifted westward with the ebbing tide of innocent, free men.

His great dread was of the hackney-coachman. His friend Jim was perhaps the one man in the streets of London who could at present identify him at sight. He squandered fivepence on the latest Globe. It contained no fresh particulars. His name had not yet transpired, so Jim was still his chiefest terror. He tarried in narrow alleys where four wheels could not follow him. In one of these a second-hand bookseller, smoking a churchwarden on his doorstep, stared at Tom critically. Thereupon he slunk into the nearest street. It was Newgate Street. He stood before the sombre walls of the prison itself, and continued so to stand, impersonally fascinated, with a sudden end to all sense of danger, as though a nerve were killed.

There was no moon, but the wide clear space above the prison walls was pricked with the brightest stars Tom had ever seen. He wondered whether it was in mercy or in mockery that the stars shone their best over that monument of gloom and horror; then his speculations took a more practical direction. How thick were those grimy walls? Where was Greenacre? What was