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By Root 13784 0

his second stretch to find it still being played in its original form without embellishments (which was a compliment in itself), and stayed to take it over again. He played with a live combative sense and indomitable will that, coupled with his physique, was almost impossible to down. When Malloy played, the contest, instead of being a fight for Malloy to stay up, was a fight for all the others to try and put him down. Prew made him go down once, and only once, and felt as if he had accomplished something that was magnificent. If there was anything that Jack Malloy of the gentle smile and dreamer’s eyes was vain of, it was his physique and his prowess with it. He was a big man in the sense in which Chief Choate was big, rather than in the sense that Warden was big, and he was without Chief Choate’s fat-degeneration. And, compared to his intellectual attainments which (to them) were almost mystical, he was proud of his physical prowess in the same way a high school football captain is vain of his swimming and diving. But this was no more strange to them than everything else about him.

To Number Two, Jack Malloy was an enigma in the same way that all living symbols are enigmas to the men who symbolize them. Prew came to know him pretty well during the time Angelo was in the Hole making his fight, better than any of the others ever got to know him. He came to know him well enough to realize that the sole reason The Malloy let him get behind the curtain shrouding his past was not because Malloy saw him as an equal who would understand, but because to Malloy he was an inferior who openly needed help. The need for help seemed to be the only key that could unlock Jack Malloy.

It was a bad time for Prew, when Angelo was doing his “30 Days” in the Hole. He had pictured it ahead of time how it would be, with Angelo deciding definitely one night that tomorrow was The Day, and the resulting handclasps and last final conversations and farewells. He had expected to have a chance to say goodby. But when it came, it did not happen that way.

He had been there a full month with Angelo trying every day to make up his mind to do it, to lay it out and then push it through, and every time something happened to make the little guy postpone again. In spite of his fantastic courage, even Angelo did not quite have the nerve to start it off. It was going to be a bad ordeal, the worst yet, and Angelo knew it, and he could never quite bring himself to make a beginning. When it happened, it came as a surprise to all of them including Angelo, as a result of something clear outside Maggio’s control, and there were no farewells at all.

The guard Turniphead Turnipseed had taken quite a dislike to Angelo for some obscure private reason, and this dislike had grown until it was an open flagrant heckling every time Turnipseed got near him. This one morning on the rockpile, when Turnipseed was on detail “in the pit” as the guards called the post down in the quarry, which because of the heat and dust was considered the worst detail on the place, Turnipseed, probably through irritation, had ridden Maggio even worse than usual, calling The Wop down every time he stopped his hammer long enough to breathe, reading him off particularly insultingly every time he spoke a word, obviously trying to goad him into something Turnipseed could turn him in for; until finally Turnipseed came clear over to him where a group of them were working, carrying his riotgun cradled in his left arm and slapped him in the face for not stopping talking. Prew was in the group and close enough to Angelo so that he could see the snapping bright black eyes. For the first time since he had known him there was none of that pinpoint-concentrated fury that liberties against his person always brought to the little Italian’s eyes. Maggio’s eyes were cold and calculating, as if he was also realizing at the same moment Prew’s heart skipped with it, that this was it, this was his chance, the situation he had been waiting for and trying to create, and that if he did not take advantage of it now he