Page:Hours Spent in Prison.djvu/34

 gnashing of teeth, cynical jokes, curses, and hisses were heard, forming together a hellish noise.

“Move aside! Give place for Salman!”

A band of men were shouting this, dragging something behind them. This thing was a man, or rather a corpse, half naked, with dried up flesh, bruised and bleeding, covered with mud and feathers. The legs were tied with a cord. The men drew it along the street, and it marked the path behind them with a pool of black blood. The skinny arms of this miserable remnant of a man were bathed in blood, and between them, where the shoulder-blades meet, a terrible shapeless ball full of holes was bumping on the stones—it was the head of the dead man. A boy began to tread upon this body; his feet went through to the bowels of the murdered man,