"Life," said the youth, and then went back to his bench. He did not look up again, though Archie glanced back at him over his shoulder.
"Trusties," Bentley explained. "They've got a snap."
In the office, where many clerks were busy, they waited; presently a sallow young man came out from behind a railing. The sheriff unlocked his handcuffs and blew on the red bracelet the steel had left about his wrist.
"Hot day," said the sheriff, wiping his brow. The sallow clerk, on whom the official air sat heavily, ignored this and said:
"Let's have your papers."
He looked over the commitments with a critical legal scowl that seemed to pass finally on all that the courts had done, and signaled to a receiving guard.
"Good-by, Archie." Bentley held out his hand.
"Good-by," said Archie.
"Come on," said the receiving guard, tossing his long club to his shoulder in a military way. The great steel door in the guard-room swung open; the guard sitting lazily in a worn chair at the double inner gates threw back the lever, and the receiving guard and Archie entered the yard.
It was a large quadrangle, surrounded by the ugly prison houses, with the chapel and the administration building in the center. Archie glanced about, and presently he discerned in the openings between the buildings companies of men, standing at ease. A whistle blew heavily, the companies came to attention, and then began to march across the yard. They marched in sets of twos, with a military scrape and shuffle, halted now and then to dress their intervals, marked time, then went on, massed together in the lock-step. As they passed, the men looked at Archie, some of them with strange smiles. But Archie knew none of them; not Delaney, with the white hair; not the Pole, who had been convicted of arson; not the Kid, nor old Deacon Sammy, who still wore his gold-rimmed glasses, nor Harry Graves. Their identity was submerged, like that of all the convicts in that prison, like that of all the forgotten prisoners in the world. The men marched by, company after company, until enough to make a regiment, two regiments, had passed them. A guard led Archie across the yard to the administration building. As they entered, a long, lean man, whose lank legs stretched from his easy chair half-way across the room, it seemed, to cock their heels on a desk, turned and looked at them. He was smoking a cigar very slowly, and he lifted his eyelids heavily. His eyes were pale blue--for some reason Archie shuddered.