When, soon after 3 A.M. his eyes again opened, all was still. He lay in
a long room, rather dim, in the midst of a row of stretchers which were
shut in by bars containing locks and gates, and on the other side of the
room a row of stretchers, shut in by bars. At a table in the middle,
on which were bottles, lint, graduated glasses, sat a warder, with
outstretched legs and fallen head: near him, standing listless, a
convict hospital-orderly, who continually edged nearer the stove; and,
half-way down the room, another.
Occasionally there were calls from the sick-beds--whispered
shouts--apologetic and stealthy, as of men guiltily conscious of the
luxury of being ill; but neither night-warder nor orderlies made undue
haste to hear these summonses. There was, beside, an octagonal clock,
which ticked excessively in the stillness, as though the whole place
belonged to it.
Hogarth took off his boots under his blanket, and from them took out the
vials; then, sitting up, commenced to call the warder, at the same time
wetting the torn piece of shirt with some of the fluid.
“All right, I'm coming--shut up!” said the warder, but did not come.
So Hogarth grew loud; and the warder, presently rousing his drowsy bulk,
unlocked the gate of that compartment, as Hogarth said to himself: “Do
it handy...”
And as the warder stooped, Hogarth clapped the rag upon his mouth and
nose. A struggle followed a muffled sob, both standing upright now, till
the warder began to paw the air, sank, toppled upon the bed, whereupon
Hogarth slipped into the blanket again, and called out in the voice of
the warder: “Come here, Barrows--see if this man is dead “.
He had now drawn the warder over him, holding up his chest with one arm,
had also poured chloroform upon the rag, and when the convict-orderly
came, Hogarth, by means of a short struggle, had him asleep, then seized
the warder's truncheon and keys, and ran out in his stockinged feet.
At that sight, the sick, the dying, the two rows of stretchers, were
up on elbow, gazing with grins. To the second convict-orderly who came
running to meet him Hogarth hissed: “Not a word--or I brain you with
this! If I tie your feet, you won't have to answer for anything. Come
along....”
He was an old fellow, and when he realized the impending truncheon, the
menace of Hogarth's eyes, and the silence of the warder, he permitted
himself to be dragged toward Hogarth's stretcher; and his feet were
quickly knotted in his own stockings.
Now again Hogarth ran: but not many steps, when he felt himself tapped
on the back, and, glancing in a horror of alarm, saw one of the two
patients who had occupied with him his cage of bars--a wiry, long-faced
Cockney shop-boy, who had had his ankle crushed by a rock at the quarry.
“Are you off?” he asked.
“That's _my_ business--”
“No, you don't. Part, or I give the alarm”.
“What is it? Do you want to come with me?”
“That's about it”.
“But--your foot's sick, you fool”.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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