He was not answered with the usual alacrity, and looked up to repeat his summons, when he observed a cell open and two turnkeys standing in earnest conversation at the door.  He mounted the stairs in great heat.

“What are you all humbugging there for, and why does not that young rascal turn out to work?  I’ll physic him, ——­ him!”

The turnkeys looked in their chief’s face with a strange expression of stupid wonder.  Hawes caught this—­his wrath rose higher.

“What d’ye stand staring at me like stuck pigs for?  Come out, No. 15, ——­ you all! why don’t you bring him out to the crank?”

Hodges answered gloomily from the cell, “Come and bring him yourself, if you can.”

At such an address from a turnkey, Hawes, who had now mounted the last stair, gave a snort of surprise and wrath—­then darted into the cell, threatening the most horrible vengeance on the bones and body of poor Josephs, threats which he confirmed with a tremendous oath.  But to that oath succeeded a sudden dead stupid staring silence; for running fiercely into the cell with rage in his face, threats and curses on his tongue, he had almost stumbled over a corpse.

It lay in the middle of the cell—­stark and cold, but peaceful.  Hawes stood over it.  If he had not stopped short his foot would have been upon it.  His mouth opened but no sound came.  He stood paralyzed.  A greater than he was in that cell, and he was dumb.  He looked up—­Hodges and Fry were standing silent, looking down on the body.  Fry was grave; Hodges trembled.  Part of a handkerchief fluttered from the bar of the window.  A knife had severed it.  The other fragment lay on the floor near the body, where Hodges had dropped it.  Hawes took this in at a glance and comprehended it all.  This was not the first or second prisoner that had escaped him by a similar road.  For a moment his blood froze in him.  He wished to Heaven he had not been so severe upon the poor boy.

It was but for a moment.  The next he steeled himself in the tremendous egotism that belongs to and makes the deliberate manslayer.

“The young viper has done this to spite me,” said he.  And he actually cast a look of petulant anger down.

At this precise point the minds that had borne his company so long began to part from it.  Fry looked in his face with an expression bordering on open contempt, and Hodges shoved rudely by him and left the cell.

Hodges leaned over the corridor in silence.  One of the inferior turnkeys asked him a question dictated by curiosity about the situation in which he had found the body.  “Don’t speak to me!” was the fierce, wild answer.  And he looked with a stupid wild stare over the railings.

So wild and white and stricken was this man’s face that Evans, who was exchanging some words with a gentleman on the basement floor, happening to catch sight of it, interrupted himself and hallooed from below, “What, is there anything the matter, Hodges?” Hodges made no reply.  The man seemed to have lost his speech for some time past.