hout the movement of a
muscle.

"Are you afraid to do it?" asked the warden.

A momentary light flashed in the convict's eyes.

"No!" he gasped; "you know I am not. But I can't--not yet--not yet."

The convict, whose ghastly pallor, glassy eyes, and gleaming teeth sat
like a mask of death upon his face, staggered to his feet.

"You have done it at last! you have broken my spirit. A human word has
done what the dungeon and the whip could not do.... It twists inside of
me now.... I could be your slave for that human word." Tears streamed
from his eyes. "I can't help crying. I'm only a baby, after all--and I
thought I was a man."

He reeled, and the warden caught him and seated him in the chair. He
took the convict's hand in his and felt a firm, true pressure there. The
convict's eyes rolled vacantly. A spasm of pain caused him to raise his
free hand to his chest; his thin, gnarled fingers--made shapeless by
long use in the slit of the dungeon door--clutched automatically at
his shirt. A faint, hard smile wrinkled his wan face, displaying the
gleaming teeth more freely.

"That human word," he whispered--"if you had spoken it long ago, if--but
it's all--it's all right--now. I'll go--I'll go to work--to-morrow."

There was a slightly firmer pressure of the hand that held the warden's;
then it relaxed. The fingers which clutched the shirt slipped away, and
the hand dropped to his side. The weary head sank back and rested on
the chair; the strange, hard smile still sat upon the marble face, and
a dead man's glassy eyes and gleaming teeth were upturned toward the
ceiling.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Inmate Of The Dungeon, by W. C. Morrow

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