The Long Lane's Turning

by Hallie Erminie Rives

The work had come to be far more welcome to him than the cell, with the partner to whose society he was chained. The hum and click and throb stole his thought, and the automatic movements, in which he had become an adept, soothed his aching mind. For several hours this afternoon the mechanical occupation absorbed him and he worked on, noting little about him. Then, all at once, as he turned to pick up the bit of cotton waste with which he kept the steel clutches of the machine before him free from dust, he became conscious of something unaccustomed. His own machine was number eight. At the one adjoining, number nine, which was next to the broad middle way bisecting the shop, Paddy the Brick was wont to stand. Now, however, another man was in his stead. At near view Harry recognised him as one whose place was further along, next the wall, and glancing in that direction he saw that Paddy the Brick was running the other's machine.

The meaning of the "wireless" message leaped instantly to his mind. When, after dinner, the long line had broken and distributed its units, the man had taken number nine, and the exchange had been effected so quickly and naturally that it had been thus far unnoted by the watchful Superintendent sitting moveless on the raised platform at the end of the aisle, his revolvers on the desk before him. What did the transfer mean? Harry wondered. The men nearby worked on, but they seemed to be restive, waiting for something, with a subdued excitement and anxiety. As he glanced sideways toward the newcomer, at the haggard parchment visage, lean and ashen with the pallor of long confinement, he noted that the other kept his back to the platform and his head studiously bent over his machine, and there darted to Harry's recollection what Paddy the Brick had said one day to him—of the "lifer" and his hatred of the warden. The tapped message of the morning had spoken of the latter, too. "Your ... chance!" Could that have meant the chance to "get" the man he hated?

As if in answer to the startled thought, there sounded voices behind him. He looked over his shoulder. The Warden himself was entering the door at the end of the shop, and there were visitors with him.

Then instantly every conscious thought save one fled from him and he clapped a hand to his mouth to stifle a cry. With the Warden were three figures, a man and two women, and the women were Echo Allen and Nancy Langham.

A sickness like that of death rushed upon him. That she could come there—careless of the chance that she might see him in these loathsome surroundings—a common convict, with cropped hair and striped clothing, marked with all the badges of the jailbird—smote him with an unendurable pain. She, who knew that he had loved her—to see him in this guise! All the agony he had suffered rolled over him anew, intensified a thousand-fold. He pulled his cap-visor low over his eyes and snatching up the bit of oily waste, drew it across his cheek, smudging his face from chin to brow.

The little group of four had paused near the desk of the Superintendent, the Warden smilingly pointing out to the two girls the details of the work. Harry's fingers performed their task by sheer instinct; for his very life he had not been able to help stealing a swift sidelong look at Echo's face, pale beneath its russet cloud of hair, and he distinguished with a fierce bitterness the jaded shadows that had crept beneath her eyes, tokens that belied her conventionally polite show of interest. So, though she condemned him to this torture, she too suffered!

Could he have looked beneath that controlled exterior he would have discerned a pain and dread to match his own. With that luncheon in the dining-car a sense of fate had fallen upon her, heavy and irrevocable, as though some huge weight was closing down. The whip of conscience had driven her to this day's quest. If the law had erred—if, in truth an innocent man, as Mason believed, lay under condemnation—it was for lack of her testimony: the thought had laid upon her sensitive mind a new sense of guilty responsibility. She must be certain, beyond peradventure. The visit to the Evelands for the Thanksgiving season had furnished the opportunity and the round of the Penitentiary with Malcolm had arranged itself. It had been easy to advert to Mason's belief in the innocence of the prisoner he had defended, and it had seemed natural enough for her to ask the Warden to point out the man as they went through the shops. They had now entered the room in which he had told her the man worked—she was standing on the threshold of the knowledge she feared.

She started at the Warden's voice, close to her ear, above the rasping clamour of the machines: "The last row, at the end. The middle machine—that's the one."

With a quick intake of her breath she looked where he pointed. The colour faded from her cheeks. Doubt—if she had clung to doubt—was ended now! The man who had started with levelled pistol from behind the curtain of Craig's library had been short and stocky and round-shouldered. The side-face of the distant prisoner at whom she was now looking with such painful intensity, under the shadow of his cap-brim showed smudged with oil and dust; but his shoulders were broad and straight and his frame tall and lithe. Whatever the law said, this man was not the man who had shot Craig! She alone could swear it!

She felt suddenly a kind of terror of the place. She touched Malcolm's arm. "I've seen enough—please! Could we turn back now?"