Next to him lank Wagner stood, waiting with closed lips; his lips
as grey as those of the dead man on the floor. Rank Judge had not moved,
but the harness on his wooden stump creaked softly as his weight shifted
from leg to leg. Fat Buck Walker was perspiring almost grotesquely, like
an earthenware pitcher. Great drops hung from his chin, from his
uptilted nose, and his cotton shirt was dark. Slim Simpson, white
before, was like a corpse; only his great boyish eyes stared out, as a
somnambulist stares, as one hypnotised. Last of all, at the end of the
line was the stranger from the East, representative of another world.
Piteous, horrible, the others had been; but he--but for his clothes, his
most intimate friend would not have recognised him at that moment. In
him, blind, racking terror was personified. To have saved his soul he
could not keep still, and his heavy walking shoes grated as they
shuffled on the rough floor. He had bitten his lip and the blood stood
in his mouth and trickled down, down his clean-shaven face. His eyes,
like those of Slim Simpson, were abnormally wide, but shifting
constantly in a hopeless search for a place of concealment, of safety.
If aught in his life merited retribution, the man paid the price a
hundred times over and over that second.
Thus man by man they stood waiting; a background no art could reproduce,
no stage manager prodigal of expense. If on earth there ever was a hell,
that tiny frontier room with the smoke-blackened ceiling and the single
kerosene lamp sputtering on the wall, was the place.
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