The prisoner gathered up his ball, hugged it carefully, almost tenderly, in his arms, and, with infinity delicacy as to the irons on his feet, he shuffled carefully, yet somehow swiftly out. I saw him an instant in the brilliant glittering sunlight framed by the door; he looked back, and then he disappeared, leaving only the blank surface of the cobblestones with the heat trembling over them. My grandfather put on his glasses, turned to his desk, and took up some papers there. And I waited, in the still, hot room. The minutes were ticked off by the clock. I wondered at each loud tick if it was the minute in which it would be proper for the prisoner to kick off those irons from his ankles and start to run. And then, after a few minutes, a man appeared in the doorway, and said breathlessly: “Joe, he has escaped!” It was Uncle John, a brother of my grandfather, one of the Brands of Kentucky, then on a visit--one of those long visits by which he and my grandfather sought to make up the large arrears of the differences, the divisions, and the separations of the great war. He was nearly of my grandfather’s age, and like him a large man, with a white though longer beard. At his entrance my grandfather did not turn, nor speak, and Uncle John Brand cried again: “Joe, he’s gone, I tell you; he’s getting away!” My grandfather looked up then from his papers and said: “John, you’d better come in out of that heat and sit down. You’re excited.” “But he’s getting away, I tell you! Don’t you understand?” “Who is getting away?” “Why, that prisoner.” “What prisoner?” “The prisoner out there in the Square. He has escaped! He’s gone!” “But how do you know?” “I just saw him running down Main Street like a streak of lightning.” My grandfather took out his silk handkerchief, passed it over his brow, and said: “To think of anyone running on a day like this!” And Uncle John Brand stood there and gazed at his brother with an expression of despair. “Can’t you understand,” he said, speaking in an intense tone, as if somehow to impress my grandfather with the importance of this event in society, “can’t you understand that the prisoner out there in the Square has broken away, has escaped, and at this minute is running down Main Street, and that he’s getting farther and farther away with each moment that you sit there?” I had a vivid picture of the man running with long strides, in the soft dust of Main Street; he must even then, I fancied, be far down the street; he must indeed be down by Bailey’s, and perhaps Bailey’s dog was rushing out at him, barking. And I hoped he would run faster, and faster, and get away, though I felt it was wrong to hope this. Uncle John Brand seemed to be right; though I did not like him as I liked my grandfather. “But how could he get away?” my grandfather was asking. “He was in irons.”