“There’s the gray beginning, Zooks,” he muttered to himself, in half-conscious quotation. He was as drowsy as a man can be who still steps along and keeps an open eye. The streets were empty, a sandy wind was walking them alone, and hard by the sullen river flowed on, the lamplights dimly reflected in the growing blue of morning. Barton was just passing the locked doors of the _Hit or Miss_--for he preferred to go homeward by the riverside--when a singular sound, or mixture of sounds, from behind the battered old hoarding close by, attracted his attention. In a moment he was as alert as if he had not passed a _nuit blanche_. The sound at first seemed not very unlike that which a traction engine, or any other monster that murders sleep, may make before quite getting up steam. Then there was plainly discernible a great whirring and flapping, as if a windmill had become deranged in its economy, and was laboring “without a conscience or an aim.” Whir, whir, flap, thump, came the sounds, and then, mixed with and dominating them, the choking scream of a human being in agony. But, strangely enough, the scream appeared to be half checked and suppressed, as if the sufferer, whoever he might be, and whatever his torment, were striving with all his might to endure in silence. Barton had heard such cries in the rooms of the hospital. To such sounds the Question Chambers of old prisons and palaces must often have echoed. Barton stopped, thrilling with a half-superstitious dread; so moving, in that urban waste, were the accents of pain. Then whir, flap, came the noise again, and again the human note was heard, and was followed by a groan. The time seemed infinite, though it was only to be reckoned by moments, or pulse-beats--the time during which the torturing crank revolved, and was answered by the hard-wrung exclamation of agony. Barton looked at the palings of the hoarding: they were a couple of feet higher than his head. Then he sprung up, caught the top at a place where the rusty-pointed nails were few and broken, and next moment, with torn coat and a scratch on his arm, he was within the palisade. Through the crepuscular light, bulks of things--big, black, formless--were dimly seen; but nearer the hoarding than the middle of the waste open ground was a spectacle that puzzled the looker-on. Great fans were winnowing the air, a wheel was running at prodigious speed, flaming vapors fled hissing forth, and the figure of a man, attached in some way to the revolving fans, was now lifted several feet from the ground, now dashed to earth again, now caught in and now torn from the teeth of the flying wheel.