A Crime on Canvas by Fred M. White — Read

CONVICT 196 Opened his eyes, dimly conscious of the fact that to-day something was going to happen. It was still early morning, and the faint ray of dawn was struggling with the last shades of night, so that the prison cell was full of hard brown shadows. The prisoner turned on his wretched bed asking himself in a sleepy way what it was that was about to happen to him. Then, in a somnolent, cynical way he dismissed the idea. For what, indeed, was likely to happen to him? Here he was in a place where one day was so hideously like another that men sometimes went mad from the sheer monotony of it. Why at the dawn of this beautiful spring morning should he suddenly take it into his head that the awful routine of his life was all at once to be broken?

And yet, dismiss the subject as he would, it came cropping up again and again until he could see the outline of the window of his cell and the faint suggestion of a rosy dawn behind it. He was wide awake now, and gradually his brain resumed its normal function. The truth came to him with a swiftness and suddenness that brought him upright in his bed, trembling in every limb and sweating in every pore. The faint flush of day behind the grating grew into a long beam of light which cast itself like a lance, all gold and dazzling, across the greyness of the ceiling.