CHAPTER V
In the station-house a fat sergeant sat dozing upon his throne. “Another vagrant,” said the policeman, as if to say there was no special need to rouse himself.
“What was he doing?” the sergeant asked.
“Sleeping in a doorway,” was the reply.
By this time Samuel had come to realize the futility of protest. He accepted his fate with dumb despair. He gave the information the sergeant asked for—Samuel Prescott, aged seventeen, native born, from Euba Corners, occupation farmer, never arrested before.
“All right,” said the man, and went back to his nap; and Samuel was led away, and after a pretense at a search was shoved into a cell and heard the iron door clang upon him.
He was alone now, and free to sob out his grief. It was the culmination of all the shame and horror that he could ever have imagined; first, to have to beg, and then to be locked up in jail. He knew now what they did with men who were out of work and starving.
He lay there weeping, and then suddenly he sat up transfixed. From the cell next to him had come a cry, a horrible blood-curdling screech, more like the scream of a wild cat than any human sound. Samuel listened, his heart pounding.
There came the voice of a man from across the corridor—“Shut up, you hag!” And after that bedlam broke loose. The woman—Samuel realized at last that the scream had come from a woman—broke forth into a torrent of yells and curses. Such hideous obscenities, such revolting blasphemies he had never heard in his life before—he had never dreamed that life contained within it the possibility of such depravity. It was like an explosion from some loathsome sewer; and its source was the lips of a woman.
For ten minutes or so the tirade continued until it seemed to the boy that every beautiful and sacred thing he had ever heard of in his life had been defiled forever. Then a jailer strolled down the corridor, and with a few vigorous and judicious oaths contrived to quell the uproar.