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By Root 29602 0

as out of place in Number Two as a white chicken amongst a black flock. But he accepted this with the same equanimity that he accepted everything else. He remembered Prew and eagerly made friends with him, and he quickly arrived at a worship of Jack Malloy that surpassed even that of Blues Berry and came very close to the point of embarrassment the way he followed Jack around like a puppy. When they came to playing games in the evenings he tried as hard with that as he tried with everything else, when he was normal, and suffered the knee-punctures and burned hands of Indian-wrassle and the sore ribs of The Game as uncomplainingly as he suffered everything else. Once, he even managed to stay up at The Game through the five smallest men and was cheered roundly. He achieved the distinction of being the first man in the history of Number Two who was ever offered exemption from playing games, but he refused to sit on the sidelines and not play, although he was never known to have won any game from anybody, up to the time they all started taking it easy on him.

They took him under their wing and looked after him and adopted him as a sort of a mascot. His crazy spells when he was coming out of one of his lapses did not bother them and they did not need to set up a guard system because without exception they were all adepts at rough and tumble fighting and had been since childhood. If one of them woke up to find him choking on him he would wrassle loose from him, knock him out, and then put him back to bed where he would wake up in the morning his old mild affable self again. None of them in Number Two, in fact nobody in the Stockade, considered him even remotely dangerous. Even a mind like Jack Malloy could not have seen danger in such an ineffectually murderous Indiana farmboy. That he would ever be the match that would touch off the fuse that would blow apart the tautly balanced status quo of the Stockade as a whole and Number Two in particular, and alter the whole lives of several of them, even unto the Outside, was frankly laughable.

It happened without warning or expectation, out on the rockpile one afternoon. Since he had come into Number Two, the Indiana farmboy had gradually grown more and more bitter about life in an affable sort of a way. It was not like him, and nobody ever knew afterwards if it was because he was trying to emulate his new heroes, or if it was because his spells had cost him his time-off-for-good-behavior and, with his final removal to Number Two, lengthened his one-month sentence into a two-month one.

That afternoon he was in one of his dreamy lapses. Prew was working between Blues Berry and Stonewall Jackson when he came out of it They had been watching for the signs, and no sooner had the Indiana farmboy dropped his hammer and looked up wildly than the three of them fell on him and held him down until he was all right again. Then they all four went on back to work without thinking anything much about it since they were all used to the procedure by now.

But a little while later the Indiana farmboy stepped over to them with an unusually affably resolute look and asked if one of them would break his arm for him.

“What the hell for, Francis?” Prew wanted to know.

“Because I want to go to the hospital,” the Indiana farmboy explained.

“What do you want to go to the hospital for?”

“Because I’m sick and tired of this goddam hole,” the Indiana farmboy said affably. “I’ve pulled my whole month’s sentence and I’ve still got twenty-six days to do. Twenty-six more days.”

“How would you like to have six months to do, like me?” Jackson said.

“I wouldnt like it,” the Indiana farmboy said.

“Breaking your arm wont help you to get out any quicker,” Prew said reasonably.

“It’ll get me two or three weeks in the hospital though.”

“Anyway, how the hell could we break your arm? Take it over our knee like a stick and break it?” Prew said, “An arm’s hard to break, Francis.”

“I’ve already thought of that,” the Indiana farmboy said triumphantly. “I can lay my arm down between two rocks and one of you can hit it with a sledgehammer. That would break it quick and easy and give me at least two weeks vacation in the hospital.”

“I don’t want to do it, Francis,” Prew said, suddenly f