Chapter Sixty Eight.
The Lottery of Life and Death.
One by one the buttons were drawn forth from the bag,—each man, as he drew his, exhibiting it in his open palm, to satisfy the others as to its colour, and then placing it in a common receptacle,—against the contingency of its being required again for another like lottery!
Solemn as was the character of the ceremony, it was not conducted either in solemnity or silence. Many of the wretches even jested while it was in progress; and a stranger to the dread conditions under which the drawing was being made might have supposed it a raffle for some trifling prize!
The faces of a few, however, would have contradicted this supposition. A few there were who approached the oracle with cowed and craven looks; and their trembling fingers, as they inserted them into the bag, proclaimed an apprehension stronger than could have arisen from any mere courting of chance in an ordinary casting of lots.
Those men who were noisiest and most gleeful after they had drawn were the ones who before it had shown the strongest signs of fear, and who trembled most while performing the operation.
Some of them could not conceal even their demoniac joy at having drawn blank, but danced about over the raft as if they had suddenly succeeded to some splendid fortune.
The difference between this singular lottery and most others, was that the blanks were the prizes,—the prize itself being the true blank,—the ending of existence.