Page:9009 (1908).djvu/132

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
CHAPTER ELEVEN


9009 had turned.

He had changed faces as he had changed stripes. Among his kind he now moved a being apart, hard-eyed, cruel-mouthed, a line of sullen craft between his brows, a sneer at the end of his ugly lips. And he was feared. He was different, now, from the others; a developed brute more dangerous than they. Processes meant to break him had merely warped him; they had made of him the grimmest thing that walks—a convict without hope.

He wore red stripes, as the convict who had killed the garotter had done, as Miller the highwayman had done. These red stripes singled him out from the others. They displayed him as a red blotch in the long gray lock-step line; they flashed him out, a red target amid the gray groups in yard or cell-house or dining-hall, to the

[ 120 ]