It was market-day.  The narrow window of the jail looked down directly on the carts and wagons drawn up in a long line, where they had unloaded.  He could see, too, and hear distinctly the clink of money as it changed hands, the busy crowd of whites and blacks shoving, pushing one another, and the chaffering and swearing at the stalls.  Somehow, the sound, more than anything else had done, wakened him up,—­made the whole real to him.  He was done with the world and the business of it.  He let the tin fall, and looked out, pressing his face close to the rusty bars.  How they crowded and pushed!  And he,—­he should never walk that pavement again!  There came Neff Sanders, one of the feeders at the mill, with a basket on his arm.  Sure enough, Neff was married the other week.  He whistled, hoping he would look up; but he did not.  He wondered if Neff remembered he was there,—­if any of the boys thought of him up there, and thought that he never was to go down that old cinder-road again.  Never again!  He had not quite understood it before; but now he did.  Not for days or years, but never!—­that was it.

How clear the light fell on that stall in front of the market! and how like a picture it was, the dark-green heaps of corn, and the crimson beets, and golden melons!  There was another with game:  how the light flickered on that pheasant’s breast, with the purplish blood dripping over the brown feathers!  He could see the red shining of the drops, it was so near.  In one minute he could be down there.  It was just a step.  So easy, as it seemed, so natural to go!  Yet it could never be—­not in all the thousands of years to come—­that he should put his foot on that street again!  He thought of himself with a sorrowful pity, as of some one else.  There was a dog down in the market, walking after his master with such a stately, grave look!—­only a dog, yet he could go backwards and forwards just as he pleased:  he had good luck!  Why, the very vilest cur, yelping there in the gutter, had not lived his life, had been free to act out whatever thought God had put into his brain; while he—­No, he would not think of that!  He tried to put the thought away, and to listen to a dispute between a countryman and a woman about some meat; but it would come back.  He, what had he done to bear this?

Then came the sudden picture of what might have been, and now.  He knew what it was to be in the penitentiary,—­how it went with men there.  He knew how in these long years he should slowly die, but not Until soul and body had become corrupt and rotten,—­how, when he came out, if he lived to come, even the lowest of the mill-hands would jeer him,—­how his hands would be weak, and his brain senseless and stupid.  He believed he was almost that now.  He put his hand to his head, with a puzzled, weary look.  It ached, his head, with thinking.  He tried to quiet himself.  It was only right, perhaps; he had done wrong.  But was there right or wrong for such as he?  What was right’?  And who had ever taught him?  He thrust the whole matter away.  A dark, cold quiet crept through his brain.  It was all wrong; but let it be!  It was nothing to him more than the others.  Let it be!