"If you blab, I'll kill you," she threatened hoarsely. "That's straight."
Jean shrugged her away. She attached no weight to the scrawl's ungrammatical hints of violence. Such vaporings were as common as they were idle. Nor was she moved when, on Friday, during recreation, the matron's alertness checked, though it failed truly to appraise, a catlike dart of Stella's to the rear. She did not escape, however, a certain sympathetic share in the tension which set the last day of the week apart from other days. The nerves of a reformatory are high-pitched. To be always dumb unless bidden to speak, forever aware of a spying eye, eternally the slave of Yea and Nay—such is the common lot. Double the feeling of repression, and you get the prison and hysteria. From the rising-bell, Saturday, till she slept again, Jean's senses were played upon by vague malign influences. All felt them. If sleeve brushed sleeve, a scowl followed; muttered curses sped the passing of every dish at meals; and in the stifling night some one raised the heart-clutching chant against the matron. This was the time Jean hailed it for her own.
Sunday brought no relief. The piping heat held unabated; hard work, the week-day safety-valve, was lacking. Only the matron could muster a smile. That smile! The prison file, passing, chapel bound, in Sunday review, felt the heat hotter and life more bitter because of it. The eyes of one girl blinked nervously; the fingers of a second spread clawlike, then clenched; the jaws of another set. If that woman laughed! The quadrangle peopled rapidly. Every building spun its blue-gray thread into the paths. The earliest comers were quite at the chapel steps when the prison girls, issuing from their frowning archway last, swung reluctantly into the treeless glare. Their smiling matron stood just within the shadow, looking exasperatingly cool in her white linen, and outrageously at peace with herself and her smug, well-ordered world. Then, abruptly, some trifle—perhaps a missing button, possibly a curl where should be puritanic simplicity, nothing more significant—loosed her sarcasm, her laugh and revolt.
A cry, different from the midnight defiance, yet as terrible, burst from one of the prison girls. Shrill, bird-like, prolonged, it was such a sound as the tortured captive at the stake may have heard from the encircling squaws. It was well known in the refuge; decade had bequeathed it to decade; and it was always the signal of mutiny. As throat after throat took it up, the commands of the matrons became mere angry pantomime. Rank upon rank melted in confusion, and the mob, lusting for violence, awaited only its directing fury.
A leader rose. Stella had secretly fomented this outbreak; it was her storm to ride openly if she dared. Yet it was scarcely a question of daring. This was her supreme hour, hers by right of might; and had another seized the lead she would have crushed her. With black locks tumbled, eyes kindled, cheeks afire, wanting only the scarlet gear of anarchy to cap her likeness to those women of other speech who braved barricades like men, she rallied disorder about her as the fiercer flame draws the less. Her following flocked from every quarter of the quadrangle—high-grade girls, girls but just clear of the guardhouse; the mature in years, the tender; the froward, the meek; spawn of the tenements, wayward from the farm; beggars, vagrants, drunkards, felons, wantons, thieves. Hysteria answering to hysteria, madness to madness, like filings to the magnet they came, and, among them, Jean.
And, among them, Jean.