for the rest of the day, my pal
informed me, so that the vaccine would have a chance to take. Then
next morning we would be put to hard labor in the prison-yard.

"But I'll get you out of the work as soon as I can," he promised.
"I'll get one of the hall-men fired and have you put in his place."

He put his hand into his shirt, drew out the handkerchief containing
my precious belongings, passed it in to me through the bars, and went
on down the gallery.

I opened the bundle. Everything was there. Not even a match was
missing. I shared the makings of a cigarette with my cell-mate. When I
started to strike a match for a light, he stopped me. A flimsy, dirty
comforter lay in each of our bunks for bedding. He tore off a narrow
strip of the thin cloth and rolled it tightly and telescopically into
a long and slender cylinder. This he lighted with a precious match.
The cylinder of tight-rolled cotton cloth did not flame. On the end a
coal of fire slowly smouldered. It would last for hours, and my
cell-mate called it a "punk." And when it burned short, all that was
necessary was to make a new punk, put the end of it against the old,
blow on them, and so transfer the glowing coal. Why, we could have
given Prometheus pointers on the conserving of fire.

At twelve o'clock dinner was served. At the bottom of our cage door
was a small opening like the entrance of a runway in a chicken-yard.
Through this were thrust two hunks of dry bread and two pannikins of
"soup." A portion of soup consisted of about a quart of hot water with
floating on its surface a lonely drop of grease. Also, there was some
salt in that water.

We drank the soup, but we did not eat the bread. Not that we were not
hungry, and not that the bread was uneatable. It was fairly good
bread. But we had reasons. My cell-mate had discovered that our cell
was alive with bed-bugs. In all the cracks and interstices between the
bricks where the mortar had fallen out flourished great colonies. The
natives even ventured out in the broad daylight and swarmed over the
walls and ceiling by hundreds. My cell-mate was wise in the ways of
the beasts. Like Childe Roland, dauntless the slug-horn to his lips he
bore. Never was there such a battle. It lasted for hours. It was
shambles. And when the last survivors fled to their brick-and-mortar
fastnesses, our work was only half done. We chewed mouthfuls of our
bread until it was reduced to the consistency of putty. When a fleeing