As I stood there absorbed in the terrors before me, I was startled by
the click of the catch and the clink of keys, followed by the noiseless
swing of the steel door as it closed again.
I turned and looked down the corridor.
Into the gloom of this inferno, this foul-smelling cavern, this
assemblage of beasts, stepped a girl of twenty. A baby wrapped about
with a coarse shawl lay in her arms.
She passed me with eyes averted, and stood before the gate of the last
steel cage--the woman's end of the prison--the turnkey following slowly.
Cries of "Howdy, gal! What did ye git?" wore hurled after her, but she
made no answer. The ominous sound of drawn bolts and the click of a key,
and the girl and baby were inside the bars of the cage. These bars,
foreshortened from where I stood, looked like a row of gun-barrels in an
armory rack.
"That girl a prisoner?" I asked the Warden.
I didn't believe it. I knew, of course, that it couldn't be. I instantly
divined that she had come to comfort some brother or father, or lover,
perhaps, and had brought the baby with her because there was no place to
leave it at home.
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