and I shook hands. The hand was thick and hard, the knotted knuckles
leaving an unpleasant impression behind them as they fell from
my fingers.

A second door immediately behind this one was now reached, the Sergeant
acting as guide. This door was of solid wood, with a square panel cut
from its centre, the opening barred like a birdcage. Peering through
these bars was the face of another attendant. This third door, at a
mumbled word from the Sergeant, was opened wide enough to admit us into
a room in which half a dozen deputies were seated at cards. In the
opposite wall hung a fourth door, of steel and heavily barred, through
which, level with the eyes, was cut a peep-hole concealed by a swinging
steel disk.

The Sergeant moved rapidly across the room, pushed aside the disk and
brought to view the nose and eyes of a prison guard.

As our guide shot back a bolt, a click like the cocking of a gun sounded
through the room, followed by the jangle of a huge iron ring strung with
keys. Selecting one from the number, he pushed it into the key-hole and
threw his weight against the door. At its touch the mass of steel swung
inward noiselessly as the door of a bank-vault. With the swinging of the
door there reached us the hot, stuffy smell of unwashed bodies under
steam-heat--the unmistakable odor that one sometimes meets in a
court-room.

Marny and I stepped inside. The Sergeant closed the slab of steel,
locking us inside, and then, nodding to us through the peep-hole,
returned to his post in the office.