The entrance of a contractor brought diversion. The contractor, McBride, a man with a red face and closely-cropped white hair, smoking a cigar the aroma of which was eagerly sniffed in by the convicts, came with the receiving guard. At the guard’s command, Archie stood up, and the contractor, narrowing his eyes, inspected him through the smoke of his cigar. After a while he nodded and said: "He’ll do--looks to me like he could make bolts. Ever work at a machine?" he suddenly asked. Archie shook his head. "Put him on Bolt B," said the contractor; "he can learn." The day ended, somehow; the evening came, with supper in the low-ceiled, dim dining-hall, then the cells. "You’ll lock in G6," said the guard. Archie marched to the cell-house, where, inside the brick shell, the cells rose, four tiers of them. The door locked on Archie, and he looked about the bare cell where he was to spend a year. For an hour, certain small privileges were allowed; favored convicts, in league with officials, peddled pies and small fruits at enormous commissions; somewhere a prisoner scraped a doleful fiddle. Near by, a guard haggled with a convict who worked in the cigar shop and stole cigars for the guard to sell on the outside. The guard, it seemed, had recently raised his commission from fifty to sixty per cent., and the convict complained. But when the guard threatened to report him for his theft, the convict gave in. At seven o’clock the music ceased, and hall permits expired. Then there was another hour of the lights, when some of the convicts read. Then, at eight, it grew suddenly dark and still. Presently Archie heard the snores of tired men. He could not sleep himself; his pallet of straw was alive with vermin; the stillness in the great cell-house was awful and oppressive; once in a while he heard some one, somewhere, from a near-by cell, sigh heavily. Now, he thought, he was doing his bit at last; "buried," the guns called it. Finally, when the hope had all gone from his heart, he fell asleep. The summer night fell, and the prison’s gray wall merged itself in the blackness; but it still shut off the great world outside from the little world inside. The guards came out and paced the walls with their rifles, halting now and then with their backs to the black forms of the cell-houses, and looked out over the city, where the electric lights blazed. XII