Archie started; and the deputy laughed. "Notify them." "Ever convicted before? No? Why, Koerner, you really must not lie to me like that!" When the statistical questions were finished the deputy said: "Now, Koerner, you got a stretch in the sentence; you’ll gain a month’s good time if you behave yourself; don’t talk; be respectful to your superiors; mind the rules; you can write one letter a month, have visitors once a month, receive all letters of proper character addressed to you. Your number is 48963. Take him and frisk him, Jimmy." The deputy warden hooked his cane over his arm and shambled out. Archie watched him, strangely fascinated. Then the guard touched him on the shoulder, tossed a bundle of old clothing over his arm, and said: "This way." They made him bathe, then the barber shaved him, and he donned his prison clothes, which were of gray like those worn by the trusties he had seen at the gate of the prison. But the clothes did not fit him; the trousers were too tight at the waist and far too long, and they took a strange and unaccountable shape on him, the shape, indeed, of the wasted figure of an old convict who had died of consumption in the hospital two days before. The guard took Archie to the dining-room, deserted now, and he sat down at one of the long tables and ate his watery soup and drank the coffee made of toasted bread--his first taste of the "boot-leg" he had heard his late companions talk about. And then the idle house, stark and gloomy, with silent convicts ranged around the wall. On an elevated chair at one end, where he might have the scant light that fell through the one high window, an old convict, who once had been a preacher, read aloud. He read as if he enjoyed the sound of his own voice, but few of the prisoners listened. They sat there stolidly, with heavy, hardened faces. Some dozed, others whispered, others, whom the prison had almost bereft of reason, simply stared. The idle house was still, save for the voice of the reader and the constant coughing of a convict in a corner. Archie, incapable, like most of them, of concentrated attention, sat and looked about. He was dazed, the prison stupor was already falling heavily on his mind, and he was passing into that state of mental numbness that made the blank in his life when he was in the workhouse with Mason. He thought of Mason for a while, and wondered what his fate and that of Dillon had been; he thought of Gusta, and of his mother and father, of Gibbs and Curly, wondering about them all; wondered about that strange life, already dim and incredible, he had so lately left in what to convicts is represented by the word "outside." He wished that he had been taken with Mason and Dillon. Then he thought of Kouka--thought of everything but the theft of the revolver, which bore so small a relation to his real life.