Old Man Anderson rubbed his right hand in the dirt and held it before his eyes in the blackness.  He knew that the moisture on it was Slattery’s blood.  The iron pipe in Old Man Anderson’s hands had struck Slattery on the head just once, but once was enough.

Old Man Anderson burst into hiccoughing sobs.  The younger convict punched him in the ribs, and swore at him in muffled tones.  Anderson stifled his sobs then, but continued to sniffle and shiver.  This time it would absolutely be The Chair for him—­if they got him!  In a few minutes they couldn’t help discovering Slattery.  Anderson never could give himself up now, however this business of the dugout and the hoped-for old sewer conduit should finally turn out.  In the beginning he had counted on crawling out, if worst came to worst, and surrendering.  But to crawl out now meant but one thing—­The Chair!

In all his fourteen years behind the walls the vision of The Chair had terrorized the old man.  When they had sent him to prison his first cell had been in the death-house, separated from The Chair only by a corridor that, they told him, was about twenty feet long, and took no more than five seconds to traverse—­with the priest.  Until they changed his cell, the gaunt, terrible Thing in the next room edged every day nearer, nearer, nearer, looming, growing, broadening before his morbid vision until it seemed to have cut off from his sight everything else in the world—­closer, closer until it was only seven incredible hours away!  Then had come the commutation of his sentence from death to life!

The next day Old Man Anderson, gray-haired even then, went out from the death-house among his gray-clad fellows, but straight into the prison hospital, where for three months be lay a victim of chair-shock just as surely as was ever a man shell-shocked on the Flanders front.  And never since had the hands of the man wholly ceased to quiver and to shake.

Now he was a murderer for the second time!  In the blackness he stretched out his hand, and ran it over a stack of tin cans.  Detroit Jim had been mighty clever!  Canned food from the storehouse, enough to last perhaps two weeks!  Detroit Jim had had a storehouse job.  Twice a day, during the last ten days, the wiry little ferret-faced second-story man had got away with at least one can from the prison commissary.  Also he had provided matches, candles, and even a cranky little flashlight.  Only chewing tobacco, because you can smell smoke a long way when you are hunting escaped convicts.  And a can of water half the size of an ash can!

Despair fastened upon Old Man Anderson, and a wave of sickness swept over him.  All the food in the world wouldn’t bring Slattery back to life.  And again that Thing in the death-house rose before his mind’s eyes.  Throughout all the years he had carried a kind of dread that sometime a governor might come along who would put back his sentence where it had been at first—­and then all his good behaviour in these endless years would count for nothing.  Until Detroit Jim had told him about the long-forgotten sewer conduit, he had never even thought to disobey the prison rules.