Here a woman laughed; there one began softly to echo the cry; cell warily hailed cell.
"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"
The pulsing hate of it now filled the corridors. A door opened somewhere, and a metallic footfall began to echo briskly from iron stairs.
"Is it mesilf ye're wantin', darlin'?" called a fat-throated voice. "I'll not keep ye waitin'. With ye in a jiffy!"
There was a sound of shooting bolts, a brief scuffle, the click of handcuffs, and a ragged retreat. Presently a door slammed, and the matron's steps alone retraced the lower corridors. Far in the distance, muffled by intervening walls, its two emphatic words only audible, the eerie defiance still rose and untiringly persisted until it again entered the fabric of Jean Fanshaw's dreams.
That cry somehow struck the dominant note of the prison. Its bitterness, its mental squalor, its agonizing repression, its smouldering revolt, all focussed in that hysterical out-burst against constituted authority. Jean heard it again and again in the ensuing months, and in each instance it broke the stillness of night. The second time it startled, but did not frighten. The third she thrilled to its message, knowing it at last for her own fiery heartache made articulate. But this was afterward.
In the beginning Stella Wilkes overshadowed their background. She and Jean had had a grammar-school acquaintance in the days before respectability and the Wilkes girl—as Shawnee Springs knew her—parted company; and it was to this period of democratic equality and relative innocence to which Stella chose sentimentally to revert when she first found a chance to speak.
"Can't say I feel a day older than I did then," she went on, sociably. "Do I look it?"
Jean made some answer. Stella indeed seemed no different; looking a mature woman at sixteen, she had simply marked time since. A mole, oddly placed near one corner of her mouth where another girl would dimple, still fascinated by its unexpectedness. Stella noticed this and laughed.
"Remember how all you little kids used to rubber at my mole?" she said. "It made me mad. I don't care now when people stare, but I wish it was on my neck. 'Moles on the neck, money by the peck,' you know. Queer, ain't it, that two of us from the old West Street school should strike this joint together? It's just the same as if we'd gone away to college—I don't think! Any Shawnee Springs news to tell?"