The red, peering face beyond the bars, the tiny rimmed eyes with their matted lashes, the thick purple lips, the bulbous nose of the turnkey, represented British justice carried to the furthermost limit of caution and concern for His Majesty’s prisoners.
Fay had hated this guard over the five years at
Dartmoor as he had hated the gruel and molasses served in the morning, the stew at noon, or the gummy oakum piled in the cell to be picked strand by strand in an unending drudgery.
Now this “screw,� so called by the inmates of Dartmoor, had delivered the sweetest words ever dropped into human ears. Fay never knew how he dressed on that morning. It was done. He waited and pressed his slender body against the latticed bars, with his ears straining to catch the iron music of the thrown bolt.
The great key turned. The door swung open. Fay glided out from his cell and stood at attention with his fingers touching against the seams of his dirt-gray prison trousers.
The guard locked the door. He peered at the paper he held. He squinted at the number upon the stone over the doorway, then he motioned Fay to follow him up the long corridor of the white-flagged cell block.
The prisoner followed the burly form of his keeper. He threw back his keen-cut face while his eyes lighted with a sanguine fire that burned clear through the gloom to the iron door of liberty.
This door swung open after a signal was passed between guard and keeper. Prisoners pressed white faces to the many bars of the place. A whisper ran from cell to cell. The American was going free! They watched Fay as he passed through the arch and sank back into their narrow coffins as the great door clanged.
Fay waited, breathed silently, compressed his lips, then followed the guard along a narrow hallway and
into an open court, whose one high-barred gate was flanked by two castellated towers upon which sentries stood with rifles swung under their arms.