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Moyamensing looks like a prison. It is solidly, awfully suggestive of the sternness of its duty and of the hopelessness of its failing in it. It stands like a great fortress of the Middle Ages in a quadrangle of cheap brick and white dwelling-houses, and a few mean shops and tawdry saloons. It has the towers of a fortress, the pillars of an Egyptian temple; but more impressive than either of these is the awful simplicity of the bare, uncompromising wall that shuts out the prying eyes of the world and encloses those who are no longer of the world. It is hard to imagine what effect it has on those who remain in the houses about it. One would think they would sooner live overlooking a graveyard than such a place, with its mystery and hopelessness and unending silence, its hundreds of human inmates whom no one can see or hear, but who, one feels, are there.

Bronson, as he looked up at the prison, familiar as it was to him, admitted that he felt all this, by a frown and a slight shrug of the shoulders. “You are to wait here until twelve,” he said to the driver of the nighthawk. “Don’t go far away.”

Bronson and the boy walked to an oyster-saloon that made one of the line of houses facing the gates of the prison on the opposite side of the street, and seated themselves at one of the tables from which Bronson could see out towards the northern entrance of the jail. He told Gallegher to eat something, so that the saloon-keeper would make them welcome and allow them to remain, and Gallegher climbed up on a high chair, and heard the man shout back his order to the kitchen with a faint smile of anticipation. It was eleven o’clock, but it was even then necessary to begin to watch, as there was a tradition in the office that prisoners with influence were sometimes released before their sentence was quite fulfilled, and Bronson eyed the “released prisoners’ gate” from across the top of his paper. The electric lights before the prison showed every stone in its wall, and turned the icy pavements into black mirrors of light. On a church steeple a block away a round clock-face told the minutes, and Bronson wondered, if they dragged so slowly to him, how tardily they must follow one another to the men in the prison, who could not see the clock’s face. The office-boy finished his supper, and went out to explore the neighborhood, and came back later to say that it was growing colder, and that he had found the driver in a saloon, but that he was, to all appearances, still sober. Bronson suggested that he had better sacrifice himself once again and eat something for the good of the house, and Gallegher assented listlessly, with the comment that one “might as well be eatin’ as doin’ nothin’.” He went out again restlessly, and was gone for a quarter of an hour, and Bronson had re-read the day’s paper and the signs on the wall and the clipping he had read before, and was thinking of going out to find him, when Gallegher put his head and arm through the door and beckoned to him from the outside. Bronson wrapped his coat up around his throat and followed him leisurely to the street. Gallegher halted at the curb, and pointed across to the figure of a woman pacing up and down in the glare of the electric lights, and making a conspicuous shadow on the white surface of the snow.

“That lady,” said Gallegher, “asked me what door they let the released prisoners out of, an’ I said I didn’t know, but that I knew a young fellow who did.”

Bronson stood considering the possible value of this for a moment, and then crossed the street slowly. The woman looked up sharply as he approached, but stood still.