CHAPTER III.

All that day I lay in the dungeon cudgelling my brains for the reason

of this new and inexplicable punishment. All I could conclude was that

some stool had lied an infraction of the rules on me in order to curry

favour with the guards.

Meanwhile Captain Jamie fretted his head off and prepared for the

night, while Winwood passed the word along to the forty lifers to be

ready for the break. And two hours after midnight every guard in the

prison was under orders. This included the day-shift which should have

been asleep. When two o’clock came, they rushed the cells occupied by

the forty. The rush was simultaneous. The cells were opened at the same

moment, and without exception the men named by Winwood were found out

of their bunks, fully dressed, and crouching just inside their doors.

Of course, this was verification absolute of all the fabric of lies

that the poet-forger had spun for Captain Jamie. The forty lifers were

caught in red-handed readiness for the break. What if they did unite,

afterward, in averring that the break had been planned by Winwood? The

Prison Board of Directors believed, to a man, that the forty lied in an

effort to save themselves. The Board of Pardons likewise believed, for,

ere three months were up, Cecil Winwood, forger and poet, most

despicable of men, was pardoned out.

Oh, well, the stir, or the pen, as they call it in convict argot, is a

training school for philosophy. No inmate can survive years of it

without having had burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest

metaphysical bubbles. Truth lives, we are taught; murder will out.

Well, this is a demonstration that murder does not always come out. The

Captain of the Yard, the late Warden Atherton, the Prison Board of

Directors to a man—all believe, right now, in the existence of that

dynamite that never existed save in the slippery-geared and all

too-accelerated brain of the degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood.

And Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, of all men concerned, the

utterest, absolutist, innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few short

weeks.

And now I must tell how entered the forty lifers upon my dungeon

stillness. I was asleep when the outer door to the corridor of dungeons

clanged open and aroused me. “Some poor devil,” was my thought; and my

next thought was that he was surely getting his, as I listened to the

scuffling of feet, the dull impact of blows on flesh, the sudden cries

of pain, the filth of curses, and the sounds of dragging bodies. For,

you see, every man was man-handled all the length of the way.

Dungeon-door after dungeon-door clanged open, and body after body was

thrust in, flung in, or dragged in. And continually more groups of

guards arrived with more beaten convicts who still were being beaten,

and more dungeon-doors were opened to receive the bleeding frames of

men who were guilty of yearning after freedom.

Yes, as I look back upon it, a man must be greatly a philosopher to

survive the continual impact of such brutish experiences through the

years and years. I am such a philosopher. I have endured eight years of

their torment, and now, in the end, failing to get rid of me in all

other ways, they have invoked the machinery of state to put a rope

around my neck and shut off my breath by the weight of my body. Oh, I

know how the experts give expert judgment that the fall through the

trap breaks the victim’s neck. And the victims, like Shakespeare’s

traveller, never return to testify to the contrary. But we who have

lived in the stir know of the cases that are hushed in the prison

crypts, where the victim’s necks are not broken.

It is a funny thing, this hanging of a man. I have never seen a

hanging, but I have been told by eye-witnesses the details of a dozen

hangings so that I know what will happen to me. Standing on the trap,

leg-manacled and arm-manacled, the knot against the neck, the black cap

drawn, they will drop me down until the momentum of my descending

weight is fetched up abruptly short by the tautening of the rope. Then

the doctors will group around me, and one will relieve another in

successive turns in standing on a stool, his arms passed around me to

keep me from swinging like a pendulum, his ear pressed close to my

chest, while he counts my fading heart-beats. Sometimes twenty minutes

elapse after the trap is sprung ere the heart stops beating. Oh, trust

me, they make most scientifically sure that a man is dead once they get

him on a rope.

I still wander aside from my narrative to ask a question or two of

society. I have a right so to wander and so to question, for in a

little while they are going to take me out and do this thing to me. If

the neck of the victim be broken by the alleged shrewd arrangement of

knot and noose, and by the alleged shrewd calculation of the weight of

the victim and the length of slack, then why do they manacle the arms

of the victim? Society, as a whole, is unable to answer this question.

But I know why; so does any amateur who ever engaged in a lynching bee

and saw the victim throw up his hands, clutch the rope, and ease the

throttle of the noose about his neck so that he might breathe.

Another question I will ask of the smug, cotton-wooled member of

society, whose soul has never strayed to the red hells. Why do they put

the black cap over the head and the face of the victim ere they drop

him through the trap? Please remember that in a short while they will

put that black cap over my head. So I have a right to ask. Do they,

your hang-dogs, O smug citizen, do these your hang-dogs fear to gaze

upon the facial horror of the horror they perpetrate for you and ours

and at your behest?

Please remember that I am not asking this question in the

twelve-hundredth year after Christ, nor in the time of Christ, nor in

the twelve-hundredth year before Christ. I, who am to be hanged this

year, the nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth after Christ, ask these

questions of you who are assumably Christ’s followers, of you whose

hang-dogs are going to take me out and hide my face under a black cloth

because they dare not look upon the horror they do to me while I yet

live.

And now back to the situation in the dungeons. When the last guard

departed and the outer door clanged shut, all the forty beaten,

disappointed men began to talk and ask questions. But, almost

immediately, roaring like a bull in order to be heard, Skysail Jack, a

giant sailor of a lifer, ordered silence while a census could be taken.

The dungeons were full, and dungeon by dungeon, in order of dungeons,

shouted out its quota to the roll-call. Thus, every dungeon was

accounted for as occupied by trusted convicts, so that there was no

opportunity for a stool to be hidden away and listening.

Of me, only, were the convicts dubious, for I was the one man who had

not been in the plot. They put me through a searching examination. I

could but tell them how I had just emerged from dungeon and jacket in

the morning, and without rhyme or reason, so far as I could discover,

had been put back in the dungeon after being out only several hours. My

record as an incorrigible was in my favour, and soon they began to

talk.

As I lay there and listened, for the first time I learned of the break

that had been a-hatching. “Who had squealed?” was their one quest, and

throughout the night the quest was pursued. The quest for Cecil Winwood

was vain, and the suspicion against him was general.

“There’s only one thing, lads,” Skysail Jack finally said. “It’ll soon

be morning, and then they’ll take us out and give us bloody hell. We

were caught dead to rights with our clothes on. Winwood crossed us and

squealed. They’re going to get us out one by one and mess us up.

There’s forty of us. Any lyin’s bound to be found out. So each lad,

when they sweat him, just tells the truth, the whole truth, so help him

God.”

And there, in that dark hole of man’s inhumanity, from dungeon cell to

dungeon cell, their mouths against the gratings, the two-score lifers

solemnly pledged themselves before God to tell the truth.

Little good did their truth-telling do them. At nine o’clock the

guards, paid bravoes of the smug citizens who constitute the state,

full of meat and sleep, were upon us. Not only had we had no breakfast,

but we had had no water. And beaten men are prone to feverishness. I

wonder, my reader, if you can glimpse or guess the faintest connotation

of a man beaten—“beat up,” we prisoners call it. But no, I shall not

tell you. Let it suffice to know that these beaten, feverish men lay

seven hours without water.

At nine the guards arrived. There were not many of them. There was no

need for many, because they unlocked only one dungeon at a time. They

were equipped with pick-handles—a handy tool for the “disciplining” of

a helpless man. One dungeon at a time, and dungeon by dungeon, they

messed and pulped the lifers. They were impartial. I received the same

pulping as the rest. And this was merely the beginning, the preliminary

to the examination each man was to undergo alone in the presence of the

paid brutes of the state. It was the forecast to each man of what each

man might expect in inquisition hall.

I have been through most of the red hells of prison life, but, worst of

all, far worse than what they intend to do with me in a short while,

was the particular hell of the dungeons in the days that followed.

Long Bill Hodge, the hard-bitten mountaineer, was the first man

interrogated. He came back two hours later—or, rather, they conveyed

him back, and threw him on the stone of his dungeon floor. They then

took away Luigi Polazzo, a San Francisco hoodlum, the first native

generation of Italian parentage, who jeered and sneered at them and

challenged them to wreak their worst upon him.

It was some time before Long Bill Hodge mastered his pain sufficiently

to be coherent.

“What about this dynamite?” he demanded. “Who knows anything about

dynamite?”

And of course nobody knew, although it had been the burden of the

interrogation put to him.

Luigi Polazzo came back in a little less than two hours, and he came

back a wreck that babbled in delirium and could give no answer to the

questions showered upon him along the echoing corridor of dungeons by

the men who were yet to get what he had got, and who desired greatly to

know what things had been done to him and what interrogations had been

put to him.

Twice again in the next forty-eight hours Luigi was taken out and

interrogated. After that, a gibbering imbecile, he went to live in

Bughouse Alley. He has a strong constitution. His shoulders are broad,

his nostrils wide, his chest is deep, his blood is pure; he will

continue to gibber in Bughouse Alley long after I have swung off and

escaped the torment of the penitentiaries of California.

Man after man was taken away, one at a time, and the wrecks of men were

brought back, one by one, to rave and howl in the darkness. And as I

lay there and listened to the moaning and the groaning, and all the

idle chattering of pain-addled wits, somehow, vaguely reminiscent, it

seemed to me that somewhere, some time, I had sat in a high place,

callous and proud, and listened to a similar chorus of moaning and

groaning. Afterwards, as you shall learn, I identified this

reminiscence and knew that the moaning and the groaning was of the

sweep-slaves manacled to their benches, which I heard from above, on

the poop, a soldier passenger on a galley of old Rome. That was when I

sailed for Alexandria, a captain of men, on my way to Jerusalem . . .

but that is a story I shall tell you later. In the meanwhile . . . .