The Inmate of the Dungeon | Page 4

line. The warden didn't ask the other men if they saw me get my tobacco and slip back into the old line. He just ordered me to fall in. I told him I would die before I would do that. I said I wanted my just dues and no more, and I asked him to call on the other men in line to prove that I hadn't been up.
"He said, That's enough of this.' He sent all the other men to the cells, and left me standing there. Then he told two guards to take me to the cells. They came and took hold of me, and I threw them off as if they were babies. Then more guards came up, and one of them hit me over the head with a club, and I fell. And then, sir"--here the convict's voice fell to a whisper--"and then he told them to take me to the dungeon."
The sharp, steady glitter of the convict's eyes failed, and he hung his head and looked despairingly at the floor.
"Go on," said the chairman.
"They took me to the dungeon, sir. Did you ever see the dungeon?"
"Perhaps; but you may tell us about it."
The cold, steady gleam returned to the convict's eyes, as he fixed them again upon the chairman.
"There are several little rooms in the dungeon. The one they put me in was about five feet by eight. It has steel walls and ceiling, and a granite floor. The only light that comes in passes through a slit in the door. The slit is an inch wide and five inches long. It doesn't give much light because the door is thick. It's about four inches thick, and is made of oak and sheet steel bolted through. The slit runs this way"--making a horizontal motion in the air--"and it is four inches above my eyes when I stand on tiptoe. And I can't look out at the factory wall forty feet away unless I hook my fingers in the slit and pull myself up."
He stopped and regarded his hands, the peculiar appearance of which we all had observed. The ends of the fingers were uncommonly thick; they were red and swollen, and the knuckles were curiously marked with deep white scars.
"Well, sir, there wasn't anything at all in the dungeon, but they gave me a blanket, and they put me on bread and water. That's all they ever give you in the dimgeon. They bring the bread and water once a day, and that is at night, because if they come in the daytime it lets in the light.
"The next night after they put me in--it was Sunday night--the warden came with the guard and asked me if I was all right. I said I was. He said, 'Will you behave yourself and go to work to-morow?' I said, 'No, sir; I won't go to work till I get what is due me.' He shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'Very well: maybe you'll change your mind after you have been in here a week.'
"They kept me there a week. The next Sunday night the warden came and said, 'Are you ready to go to work to-morrow,' and I said, 'No; I will not go to work till I get what is due me.' He called me hard names. I said it was a man's duty to demand his rights, and that a man who would stand to be treated like a dog was no man at all."
The chairman interrupted. "Did you not reflect," he asked, "that these officers would not have stooped to rob you?--that it was through some mistake they withheld your tobacco, and that in any event you had a choice of two things to lose--one a plug of tobacco, and the other seven years of freedom?"
"But they angered me and hurt me, sir, by calling me a thief, and they threw me in the dungeon like a beast.... I was standing for my rights, and my rights were my manhood; and that is something a man can carry sound to the grave, whether he's bond or free, weak or powerful, rich or poor."
"Well, after you refused to go to work what did the warden do?"
The convict, although tremendous excitement must have surged and boiled within him, slowly, deliberately, and weakly came to his feet. He placed his right foot on the chair, and rested his right elbow on the raised knee. The index finger of his right hand, pointing to the chairman and moving slightly to lend emphasis to his narrative, was the only thing that modified the rigid immobility of his figure. Without a single change in the pitch or modulation of his voice, never hurrying, but speaking with the slow and dreary monotony with which he had begun, he nevertheless--partly by