He
had been in a break in which eleven of his kind were shot down. He had
been through a mutiny, where, in the prison yard, with gatling guns
trained upon them, three hundred convicts had been disciplined with pick
handles wielded by brawny guards.
He had known every infamy of human cruelty, and through it all he had
never been broken. He had resented and fought to the last, until,
embittered and bestial, the day came when he was discharged. Five
dollars were given him in payment for the years of his labor and the
flower of his manhood. And he had worked little in the years that
followed. Work he hated and despised. He tramped, begged and stole,
lied or threatened as the case might warrant, and drank to besottedness
whenever he got the chance.
The little girl was looking at him when he awoke. Like a wild animal,
all of him was awake the instant he opened his eyes. The first he saw
was the parasol, strangely obtruded between him and the sky. He did not
start nor move, though his whole body seemed slightly to tense. His eyes
followed down the parasol handle to the tight-clutched little fingers,
and along the arm to the child's face. Straight and unblinking he looked
into her eyes, and she, returning the look, was chilled and frightened
by his glittering eyes, cold and harsh, withal bloodshot, and with no
hint in them of the warm humanness she had been accustomed to see and
feel in human eyes.
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