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Why do even we who sit here speak as we have been speaking with hushed and lowered voices? that very sense of a presence unseen around us, that hovers over us, is a mightier safeguard than the strongest bolts and locks, than the steel-barred vaults of any bank.
I was duly arrested upon a warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile, duly locked up over night in a steel-barred cell full of vermin in a building housing some five hundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms under circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air nor a glimpse of the sunshine or the sky.
When, an hour later, he left the barber-shop, tearing himself away from the interminable farewells of the proprietor, he passed down a broad street, lonely and silent, between two rows of docks. The steel-barred gates were closed and locked.
And as he stood looking at it, with the machinery roaring about him, and the sunlight beating in through steel-barred windows sixty feet high, in all the confusion of shavings and oil-soaked wood, polished sliding shafts streaked with thick blue grease, stifling odours of creosote and oily "wipes", Wolf's eyes would fill with tears and he would shake his head at his own emotion, and try to laugh it away.
It was a quiet evening, but Rachael liked it. She liked their simple, affectionate talk, their reminiscences, the serenity of the large, plainly furnished rooms, the glowing of coal fires in the old-fashioned steel-barred grates. She liked Alice Valentine's placidity, the sureness of herself that marked this woman as more highly civilized than so many of the other women Rachael knew.
So the sergeant wrote: "No address," and nodded to a jailer, who took the prophet by the arm and led him away through a steel-barred door. Abell and I went outside and joined the rest of the group. None of us knew just what to do with the exception of Everett, who sat on the steps with his notebook, and made me repeat to him word for word what Carpenter had said!
We set the cage on the ground; he unlocked and opened the steel-barred door, and, kneeling, carefully arranged the pies along the centre of the cage. "I have a curious presentiment," he said, "that I shall not come out of this experiment unscathed." "Don't, for Heaven's sake, say that!" I broke out, my nerves on edge again. "Why not?" he asked, surprised. "I am not afraid." "Not afraid to die?"
It was the light of the rising moon coming through his little, steel-barred window. To Kent it had crept into his cell like a living thing. He watched it, fascinated. His eyes followed it to the foot-square aperture, and there, red and glorious as it rose over the forests, the moon itself filled the world. For a space he saw nothing but that moon crowding the frame of his window.
Unable to extort a word from Jim that would lead to the arrest of his jocker, the officers dragged the staggering, heart-broken lad back to his cell and locked him up. When from sheer exhaustion he fell asleep late in the night, he dreamed that Kansas Shorty's grinning face was pressed against his steel-barred cell door.
But for "Davie," the desk-man, who it turned out was also to be my room-mate, and a few wistful-eyed negroes in the steel-barred room in the center of the building, the station was deserted. "Circus," said the desk-man briefly. When I mentioned the matter of weapons he merely repeated the word with the further information that only the station commander could issue them.
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