They formed a line, as for inspection. 9009 and the pickpocket, alive; then Miller, the burglar, and the boy, dead; then the other two convicts, alive. But the living men had dead faces.
They stood there, it seemed to them a long time. Above, the sky was very blue; the sun beat down upon their shaven heads; it poured perpendicularly upon the eyes of the dead men, which did not blink; and there was a still, warm silence, and underneath this still warm silence, a low steady buzzing. 9009 shuffled his feet. “Quiet!” growled the captain of the yard.
He stood before them, like a colonel before his spread regiment, looking at them with an inspecting frown; then a satisfaction smoothed his visage; “all right,” he said to Jennings.
Jennings shouted down the yard; at the signal the gates of the jute-mill lane swung inward, and through the turreted arch in the wall the lock-step line emerged.
It came smoothly, in a lithe continuous flow, as if it were to be endlessly, through the arch, into the yard, undulating like a snake, gray as
