Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/101

 blasted traitor that he was!), and had been going from bad to worse ever since. It was against Jenny's advice that he joined the Union. She had a knack of being right, though she was not much of a talker. Another time—but when would that be?'

So Bill—'a hunter of the hills,' more or less, as was the Prisoner of Chillon—had to pass the weary hours until the day of trial, and he could exchange the confinement of the gaol for the expansive scenery of the dock—restricted as to space, certainly, but having an outlook upon the world, and a sort of companionship in the crowd of spectators, lawyers, and witnesses, finishing up with the Judge.

At this judicial potentate Bill looked long and wistfully. He had an idea that a Judge was a ruthless administrator of hard laws, with a fixed prejudice against working-men who presumed to do anything illegal, or in fact to trouble themselves about anything but their work and wages. However, he could not fail to see in this Judge a mild, serious, patient gentleman, showing greater anxiety to understand the facts of the case than to inflict sentences. Still, he was only partly reassured. Might he not be one of those benevolent-seeming ones—he had heard of such—who would talk sweetly to the prisoner, reminding him of the happy days of childhood, and his, perhaps, exemplary conduct when he used to attend Sunday School—trust that he intended to lead a new life, and then paralyse him with a ten years' sentence, hard labour, and two days' solitary in each month?

He did not know what to expect. Wasn't there Pat Macarthy, who got three years for assault with intent to commit grievous bodily harm (certainly he more than half killed the other man)? Well, his wife worked his farm, and slaved away the whole time, denying herself almost decent clothes to wear. At the end of his term, he came out to find her hopelessly insane; she had been taken to the Lunatic Asylum only the week before.

Bill hardly thought that Jenny would go 'off her head,' in the popular sense. It was too level and well-balanced. But if he was sentenced to three or five years more of this infernal, hopeless, caged-in existence, he expected he would.

The prisoners that he had watched in the exercise yard didn't seem to mind it so much. But they were old and wornout; had nothing much to wish themselves outside for.