"No," she said, "but I think I'm just a little tired. Drive faster, 'Lige. I—I want to get home."
CHAPTER XXXI
AMBUSH
Lying in his bunk Harry awoke to the consciousness of another bleak dawn. The morning waking was always a pain to him, for in sleep the barriers fell away and the mind fared forth along the free, sweet highways of memory. He did not open his eyes at once, but he felt the rasp of the coarse blanket at his throat, smelled the cold clamminess of the granite floor, and realised by a thousand reminders of the sharpened senses that another round of the treadmill awaited him. He remembered drearily that to-morrow would be Thanksgiving Day. In the world outside it was the time of yellow maples and the red of the frost-kissed sumac, of wild grapes purpling in the thickets and clumps of alder blooms in the fence-corners—of blazing hearths and good fellowship!
Mingling with the stir of reawakening life in the corridors there sounded a light tap-tap—the tattoo of a tin spoon against the stone.
Without moving he opened his eyes. Paddy the Brick was up and dressed—if donning the cheap flannel shirt, the striped jacket and trousers, might be called dressing—and, stooped in the corner of the cell, was industriously at work with the 'prison-wireless.' For a while Harry watched him curiously; then suddenly his ear made out a word. For in time he had taken his cell-mate's sneering advice, and because the busy mind, turned too long upon itself, must perforce occupy itself with something extraneous, had mastered the code that was scratched in the white-washed wall. He had a retentive memory, sharpened now by disuse, and the tiny tap-tap that he had learned to distinguish through the muffling masonry, though he never used it as a means of communication, had soon become an open book to him. Strange things he had heard in this manner—furtive, uncouth gossip of that under-world, which, although much was couched in an unknown argot and was meaningless to him, had yet served in a way to lighten the unendurable emptiness. The word he had caught now was "visitors."
In another moment Harry was listening intently, for the sounds were spelling something which instinct told him was wickedly suggestive though he could not guess its purport. "Warden ... to-day," tapped the signalled code, "—take ... number nine ... machine ... your ... chance—"
Whatever else might have been said was blotted by the whirring clang of the electric gong in the central corridor. Through the great lamelliform bee-hive it sent its waking clamour, the signal for rising to the new day's tasks. With the sound Paddy the Brick thrust the stolen utensil out of sight and shot a stealthy glance at the upper bunk, but its occupant had apparently just awakened.
All the ensuing morning, as he rubbed himself down in the plenteous cold water which the spigot provided, and did his share in the cleaning of the bare cell—while he sopped his brown bread in the weak breakfast coffee, and presently tramped in the long file to the shop to feed the voracious machines with the clean-smelling leather—all the while Harry's brain was busy with the message he had heard. "Visitors?" Occasionally visitors had passed through the shops—panging reminders to him of the world outside. Perhaps in some devious way the other had heard that some would come to-day. But turn and twist the rest of the words how he might, they meant nothing. Dinner time came, with its lifting break in the unvarying monotony, then the long lock-step back to the shop and its labour.