An hour later, at two A.M., Dunlap fearfully watched the indicator for Old Tower Number Three. Reports from all other posts had been received. Then, just once, the indicator trembled uncertainly, made almost a quarter turn to the left and snapped back to a vertical position. At three o’clock it did not move. Nor did it move at four o’clock.
A week passed. Not a tremor disturbed the “ghost tower” indicator.
Then, one morning at one-thirty o’clock, an unearthly, piercing scream in the cell house awaked half the men in the building and sent the cell house guard scurrying down to cell twenty-one on the corridor; for it was from this cell that the blood-chilling scream had come.
The bloodless, perspiration-dampened face of Malcolm Hulsey, the “lifer,” was pressed against the bars of the cell door when the guard arrived. The convict’s great hands grasped the bars and his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bulk, clad in only a regulation undershirt, twitched, started and trembled from head to foot. A horrible fear distended his eyes, his teeth clicked together and the muscles of his face worked spasmodically.
“Sick, Hulsey?” the guard demanded, hardened to such nerve-shattering outbursts in a building full of tortured souls.
“I saw—I saw—” Hulsey began, his teeth chattering and rendering speech well-nigh impossible. “I saw—Oh, Mr. Hill, please give me a cellmate—now, tonight! I—I’m a sick man, Mr. Hill. Nerves all shot to pieces, I guess. Can’t I have a cellmate to talk to, Mr. Hill?”
“What did you see?” the guard asked.
“He was standing right where you are now,” Hulsey whispered hoarsely. “Pointing his finger at me, he was, when I opened my eyes and saw him. Smiling, too. I—I”—a violent shudder—“I could see through him, Mr. Hill; could see the bars on that window beyond him. I—”
“Who? See who?” the guard interrupted.
Hulsey seemed to realize, then, that he was talking too much; that he was not conducting himself as the hardest convict in the prison should.