“It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite. The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You can’t weave jute. Your loom-rooms are fifty years behind the times.”

I showed him what a fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless incorrigible.

Give a dog a bad name… – you know this proverb. Very well. Warden Atherton gave the final sanction to the badness of my name. Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards were stupid monsters. Listen, and you will learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison, a convict, a degenerate poet. He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. This poet-forger’s name was Cecil Winwood [14] . I was the dog that had been given a bad name. Cecil Winwood needed the dogs with bad names, the desperate ones, the incorrigibles.

The lifers [15] detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them with his plan of a prison-break [16] , they laughed at him. But he fooled them in the end. He approached them again and again. Cecil Winwood claimed that he could dope the guards the night of the break.

“Talk is cheap,” said Bill Hodge [17] . “What we want is the goods. Dope one of the guards tonight. There’s Barnum [18] . He’s no good. He’s on the night watch. Dope him tonight and make him lose his job. Show me, and we’ll talk business with you.”

All this Long Bill told me afterward. Cecil Winwood demurred against the demonstration. He claimed that he must have time in which to steal the dope from the dispensary. They gave him the time, and a week later he announced that he was ready. Forty lifers waited for the guard Barnum to go to sleep. And Barnum did. He was found asleep, and he was discharged for sleeping on duty.

Of course, that convinced the lifers. But there was the Captain of the Yard [19] to convince. To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting the progress of the break—all fancied and fabricated in his own imagination. Winwood said that the forty men, in whose confidence he was, had already invented the prison-break and they had had dynamite which I had hidden somewhere.

All that day I lay in the dungeon. Meanwhile Captain prepared for the night, while Winwood was telling the forty lifers to be ready for the break. When two o’clock came, the guards rushed the cells occupied by the forty. The rush was simultaneous. The cells were opened at the same moment, the men named by Winwood were found fully dressed, and standing just behind their doors. The forty lifers were caught in readiness for the break. What if they did unite, afterward, in averring that the break had been planned by Winwood? Captain believed that the forty lied in an effort to save themselves. Cecil Winwood, forger and poet, most despicable of men, was pardoned out [20] .

Oh, well, the prison is a training school for philosophy. Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, the utterest, the innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few weeks.

They came for me. Ungraciously and ungently, with blow and curse, they haled me forth, and I faced Captain and Warden Atherton.

“Sit down,” said Warden Atherton, indicating a stout arm-chair.

I, beaten and sore, without water for a night long and a day long, faint with hunger, weak from a beating that had been added to five days in the dungeon and eighty hours in the jacket, hesitated to accept the invitation to sit down.

Warden Atherton was a large and very powerful man. He lifted me clear off the floor and crashed me down in the chair.

“Now,” he said, while I gasped and swallowed my pain, “tell me all about it, Standing.”

“I don’t know anything about what has happened…”, I began.

Again he lifted me in the air and crashed me down into the chair.

“No nonsense, Standing,” he warned. “Tell the truth about the prison-break.”

“I don’t know anything,” I protested.

Once again I was lifted and smashed back into the chair. The chair was demolished. Another chair was brought, and soon that chair was demolished. Even more chairs were brought, and the eternal questioning about the prison-break went on.

When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain relieved him; and then a guard took Captain’s place in smashing me down into the chair.

I do not know how many chairs were broken by my body. I was dragged back to the dark. There, when I became conscious, I found a stool in my dungeon.

And ever the examination went on. Ever, one at a time, convicts were dragged away and dragged or carried back again. They reported that Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie, exhausted by their efforts, relieved each other every two hours. While one slept, the other examined. And they slept in their clothes in the very room in which strong man after strong man was being broken.

And hour by hour, in the dark dungeons, our madness of torment grew. I suffered equally with the others from pain and thirst; but added to my suffering was the fact that I remained conscious to the sufferings of the others.

Don’t you see? Our truth, the very truth we told, was our damnation. When forty men told the same things, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie could only conclude that our words were a lie.

It was winter. We had no blankets in the dungeons. In the end they gave us water. I shall skip the rest of what happened in the dungeons. 25 per cent of the forty have died in the succeeding six years.