"Ain't ye goin' to eat your punk?"
Lem shook his head.
"Kin I have it?"
Lem pushed the whole fare over to him gladly. Presently a gong rasped out two harsh, reverberating notes. At this the men, some forty in number, rose, fell into line and straggled up the basement steps to the main corridor. At the head of the steps Lem met Last Time, who was apparently waiting for him.
"I'll show you your cell now. You're 420—right next to me on the first tier."
Here a great commotion of hurrying feet sounded below and overhead on the tiers above, mingled with the metallic ring of keys and the cold clanking of steel doors and the rattle of iron. And from far up the dim corridor Lem heard a sound that, somehow, filled him with a strange dread. It was the rising and falling of a scraping, tide-like rhythm—the muffled rhapsody of a hundred-legged lock-step. The last column of convicts was marching into the cell-house from the dining hall on the plaza.
It was the on-coming of a grisly, striped, argus-eyed multiped, with fifty heads. This ugly sound reverberated soft and stealthful at first; like the padded feet of some fabulous, carnivorous monster sneaking into this cavernous mortuary to gloat over the dead souls it had cached here. Then again, beneath the nearer tumult, this natant, ill rhythm died down to a measured, sinister moan, echoing through the stone corridors in soughing jabs, like sounds marking the visitation of some maimed Hydra.
The denotation of this eery evil tread of ruined lives grated terribly on Lem's highly tensioned nerves. And oddly enough, he did not seek to shut it out—this revolting, dreadful scrape, that nothing can ever imitate. On the contrary, he strained his ears for it, impelled by the same indefinable, weird influence that charms one to turn again and look back upon a horror that has fascinated the eyes. Thus was Lem fascinated by this hateful noise. Enthralled in this that had dominated his senses, for the moment, he had unconsciously ascended the skeleton iron stairs.
When he aroused himself, Last Time was pointing into the cell allotted him, and looking at him pityingly. Lem shot one swift look into this dark hole, then withdrew his startled eyes and fastened them upon the convict's scarred visage. The boy's eyes were freighted with the igneous luster of some unnamable terror that seemed to stultify his senses, leaving his manly instincts in the grip of some perverted agency that he did not know was there.
If Lem Lutts had possessed a pistol, he would have killed himself in that instant. Quaking perceptibly, he hung back from the cell door. His hand trembled as he held to the railing of the iron porch. His lips moved, and he tried to tell the convict something. The world seemed to be falling about his ears, carrying his soul down into the fumes of hades. Of all the subtle, dormant influences that awake, and invade the scheme of human life to sway the impulses of men, there is none so bewildering as this phase of psychological prompting which holds its profound mystery intact, and baffles solution.