Lem had peeped out at the bath-house door upon this spectacle with awesome eyes. He stood in open-mouthed wonder, and was aroused only when Last Time spoke and touched his arm.
"The night bull 'll come on now, and he'll be hollerin' for me--we better git along," he said. "You won't eat with them men. You'll git yours in the dining hall inside."
Upon reaching the cell-house, Last Time conducted Lem to the tables at the front end of the basement corridor where the Court prisoners were already at supper, and then left him. A soup-bowl, filled with a substance that at least resembled coffee; a plate of beans, and a thick piece of bread were placed in front of Lem by a convict waiter.
Lem felt at the moment that he never again would want to eat anything. Not only was his appetite wholly gone, but the mere sight of this food was nauseating, although he had not tasted anything since he had eaten breakfast at home the day before.
While he sat looking about him with lugubrious eyes, the man next to him--an uncouth individual indeed--whispered surreptitiously:
Lem pushed the whole fare over to him gladly. Presently a gong rasped out two harsh, reverberating notes. At this the men, some forty in number, rose, fell into line and straggled up the basement steps to the main corridor. At the head of the steps Lem met Last Time, who was apparently waiting for him.
"I'll show you your cell now. You're 420--right next to me on the first tier."
Here a great commotion of hurrying feet sounded below and overhead on the tiers above, mingled with the metallic ring of keys and the cold clanking of steel doors and the rattle of iron. And from far up the dim corridor Lem heard a sound that, somehow, filled him with a strange dread. It was the rising and falling of a scraping, tide-like rhythm--the muffled rhapsody of a hundred-legged lock-step. The last column of convicts was marching into the cell-house from the dining hall on the plaza.
It was the on-coming of a grisly, striped, argus-eyed multiped, with fifty heads. This ugly sound reverberated soft and stealthful at first; like the padded feet of some fabulous, carnivorous monster sneaking into this cavernous mortuary to gloat over the dead souls it had cached here. Then again, beneath the nearer tumult, this natant, ill rhythm died down to a measured, sinister moan, echoing through the stone corridors in soughing jabs, like sounds marking the visitation of some maimed Hydra.