rman,
without addressing any one particularly, remarked:
"There are ways of learning what occurs in a prison without the
assistance of either the wardens or the convicts."
Just then the guard appeared with the convict, who shambled in painfully
and laboriously, as with a string he held up from the floor the heavy
iron ball which was chained to his ankles. He was about forty-five years
old. Undoubtedly he once had been a man of uncommon physical strength,
for a powerful skeleton showed underneath the sallow skin which covered
his emaciated frame. His sallowness was peculiar and ghastly-It was
partly that of disease, and partly of something worse; and it was this
something that accounted also for his shrunken muscles and manifest
feebleness.
There had been no time to prepare him for presentation to the Board. As
a consequence, his unstockinged toes showed through his gaping shoes;
the dingy suit of prison stripes which covered his gaunt frame was
frayed and tattered; his hair had not been recently cut to the prison
fashion, and, being rebellious, stood out upon his head like bristles;
and his beard, which, like his hair, was heavily dashed with gray, had
not been shaved for weeks. These incidents of his appearance combined
with a very peculiar expression of his face to make an extraordinary
picture. It is difficult to describe this almost unearthly expression.
With a certain suppressed ferocity it combined an inflexibility of
purpose that sat like an iron mask upon him. His eyes were hungry and
eager; they were the living part of him, and they shone luminous
from beneath shaggy brows. His forehead was massive, his head of fine
proportions, his jaw square and strong, and his thin, high nose showed
traces of an ancestry that must have made a mark in some corner of the
world at some time in history. He was prematurely old; this was seen
in his gray hair and in the uncommonly deep wrinkles which lined his
forehead and the corners of his eyes and of his mouth.
Upon stumbling weakly into the room, faint with the labor of walking and
of carrying the iron ball, he looked around eagerly, like a bear
driven to his haunches by the hounds. His glance passed so rapidly and
unintelligently from one face to another that he could not have had
time to form a conception of the persons present, until his swift eyes
encountered the face of the warden, Instantly they flashed; he craned
his neck forward; his lips opened and became blue
|