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Yet I had more to endure and to triumph over.

Near morning I fell into a troubled sleep, throughout which the drawn twitch of muscle seemed an accent on every word of ill-omen I had ever spelt out of the alphabet of fear. If my body rested, my brain was an open chamber for any toad of ugliness that listed to “sit at squat” in.

Suddenly I woke to the fact that there was a knocking at my door–that there had been for some little time.

I cried, “Come in!” finding a weak restorative in the mere sound of my own human voice; then, remembering the key was turned, bade the visitor wait until I could come to him.

Scrambling, feeling dazed and white-livered, out of bed, I opened the door, and met one of the warders on the threshold. The man looked scared, and his lips, I noticed, were set in a somewhat boding fashion.

“Can you come at once, sir?” he said. “There’s summat wrong with the Governor.”

“Wrong? What’s the matter with him?”

“Why,”–he looked down, rubbed an imaginary protuberance smooth with his foot, and glanced up at me again with a quick, furtive expression,–“he’s got his face set in the grating of 47, and danged if a man Jack of us can get him to move or speak.”

I turned away, feeling sick. I hurriedly pulled on coat and trousers, and hurriedly went off with my summoner. Reason was all absorbed in a wildest phantasy of apprehension.

“Who found him?” I muttered, as we sped on.

“Vokins see him go down the corridor about half after eight, sir, and see him give a start like when he noticed the trap open. It’s never been so before in my time. Johnson must ha’ done it last night, before he were took.”

“Yes, yes.”

“The man said the Governor went to shut it, it seemed, and to draw his face to’ards the bars in so doin’. Then he see him a-lookin’ through, as he thought; but nat’rally it weren’t no business of his’n, and he went off about his work. But when he come anigh agen, fifteen minutes later, there were the Governor in the same position; and he got scared over it, and called out to one or two of us.”

“Why didn’t one of you ask the Major if anything was wrong?”

“Bless you! we did; and no answer. And we pulled him, compatible with discipline, but–“

“But what?”

“He’s stuck.”

“Stuck!”

“See for yourself, sir. That’s all I ask.”

I did, a moment later. A little group was collected about the door of cell 47, and the members of it spoke together in whispers, as if they were frightened men. One young fellow, with a face white in patches, as if it had been floured, slid from them as I approached, and accosted me tremulously.

“Don’t go anigh, sir. There’s something wrong about the place.”

I pulled myself together, forcibly beating down the excitement reawakened by the associations of the spot. In the discomfiture of others’ nerves I found my own restoration.

“Don’t be an ass!” I said, in a determined voice, “There’s nothing here that can’t be explained. Make way for me, please!”

They parted and let me through, and I saw him. He stood, spruce, frock-coated, dapper, as he always was, with his face pressed against and into the grill, and either hand raised and clenched tightly round a bar of the trap. His posture was as of one caught and striving frantically to release himself; yet the narrowness of the interval between the rails precluded so extravagant an idea. He stood quite motionless–taut and on the strain, as it were–and nothing of his face was visible but the back ridges of his jaw-bones, showing white through a bush of red whiskers.

“Major Shrike!” I rapped out, and, allowing myself no hesitation, reached forth my hand and grasped his shoulder. The body vibrated under my touch, but he neither answered nor made sign of hearing me. Then I pulled at him forcibly, and ever with increasing strength. His fingers held like steel braces. He seemed glued to the trap, like Theseus to the rock.