a tone of brooding drunken insinuation, “you know the man I mean, don’t you?”
Eugene made no answer, and in a moment he repeated the question, in a more insistent and pugnacious tone:
“Don’t you?” he demanded.
And Eugene said, “Yes.”
“You’re damned right you do,” he said in a low, ruminant, and brooding tone. “Everybody knows whom I mean. He’s a cousin of yours,” said Blake, and then began to mutter to himself:
“I’ll kill him! So help me, God, I’ll kill him!” And suddenly, starting from his cot with a scream of baffled misery and anguish, he began to beat his fist into the hard slate wall again, yelling:
“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!… You son of a bitch, I’ll kill the two of you!… I’ll send you both to hell where you belong, if it’s the last thing that I ever do!”
And he began to sob horribly and curse foully, and pounded his fist into the wall again until he was exhausted, and went back and sat down on his cot again, muttering his drunken and impotent threats.
And Eugene did not try to answer him, for there was nothing he could say. George Pentland was his cousin, and had taken Blake’s wife away from him, and got her love; and Blake was dying, and they knew it. And suddenly it seemed to Eugene that there was in this whole story something dark and hideously shameful which he had never clearly seen in life before, which could not be endured, and which yet suspended over every man who ever lived the menace of its intolerable humiliation and dishonour.
For to see a man—a manly-looking man, strong of body, fearless and bold of glance, deep of voice—physically humiliated and disgraced, slapped and whipped like a cur before his wife, his mistress, or his children, and forced to yield, retreat and slink away, to see his face turn white and the look of the coward shine through his mask of manhood, is not an easy thing to see.
Presently they heard steps coming along the corridor again, and they were so certain they belonged to a messenger bringing them release that they all arose instinctively, and stood before the barred doors of the cells, waiting to walk out into the air of freedom again. To their astonishment the visitor was Kitchin. They had forgotten him completely, and
