The turnkey Evans had been half sullenly half sorrowfully watching him for some minutes past.

A month or two ago the lips of a prisoner turning blue and his skin twitching told Evans nothing.  He saw these things without seeing them.  He was cruel from stupidity—­from blockhead to butcher there is but a step.  Like the English public he realized nothing where prisoners were concerned.  But Mr. Eden had awakened his intelligence, and his heart waked with it naturally.

Now when he saw lips turning blue and eyes rolling in sad despair, and skin twitching convulsively, it occurred to him—­“this creature must be suffering very badly,” and the next step was “let me see what is hurting him so.”

Evans now stood over Josephs and examined him.  “Mr. Fry,” said he doggedly, “is not this overdoing it?”

“What d’ye mean, we are to obey orders, I suppose?”

“Of course, but there was no need to draw the jacket straps so tight as all this.  Boy’s bellows can’t hardly work for ’em.”

He now passed his hand round the hollow of the lad’s back.

“I thought so,” cried he; “I can’t get my finger between the straps and the poor fellow’s flesh, and, good heavens I can feel the skin rising like a ridge on each side of the straps; it is a black, burning shame to use any Christian like this.”

These words were hardly out of the turnkey’s mouth when a startling cry came suddenly from poor Josephs; a sudden, wild, piercing scream of misery.  In that bitter, despairing cry burst out the pent-up anguish of weeks, and the sense of injustice and cruelty more than human.  The poor thing gave this one terrible cry.  Heaven forbid that you should hear such a one in life, as I hear his in my heart, and then he fell to sobbing as if his whole frame would burst.

They were not much, these rough words of sympathy, but they were the first—­the first words, too, of humanity and reason a turnkey had spoken in his favor since he came into this hell.  Above all, the first in which it had ever been hinted or implied that his flesh was human flesh.  The next moment he began to cry, but that was not so easy.  He soon lost his breath and couldn’t cry though his very life depended on it.  Tears gave relief.  Dame Nature said, “Cry, my suffering son, cry now, and relieve that heart swelling with cruelty and wrong.”

But Hawes’s infernal machine said, “No, you shall not cry.  I give you no room to cry in.”  The cruel straps jammed him so close his swelling heart could but half heave.  The jagged collar bit his throat so hard he could but give three or four sobs and then the next choked him.  The struggle between Nature panting and writhing for relief, and the infernal man-press, was so bitter strong that the boy choked and blackened and gasped as one in the last agony.

“Undo him,” cried Evans hastily, “or we shall kill him among us.”

“Bucket,” said the experienced Fry quite coolly.