re; 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 . . . .

CHAPTER IV

In the meanwhile obtained the horror of the dungeons, after the discovery
of the plot to break prison. And never, during those eternal hours of
waiting, was it absent from my consciousness that I should follow these
other convicts out, endure the hells of inquisition they endured, and be
brought back a wreck and flung on the stone floor of my stone-walled,
iron-doored dungeon.

They came for me. Ungraciously and ungently, with blow and curse, they
haled me forth, and I faced Captain Jamie and Warden Atherton, themselves
arrayed with the strength of half a dozen state-bought, tax-paid brutes
of guards who lingered in the room to do any bidding. But they were not
needed.

"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, oppressed by the calamity of
human fate, apprehensive of what was to happen to me from what I had seen
happen to the others--I, a wavering waif of a human man and an erstwhile
professor of agronomy in a quiet college town, I hesitated to accept the
invitation to sit down.

Warden Atherton was a large man and a very powerful man. His hands
flashed out to a grip on my shoulders. I was a straw in his strength. He
lifted me clear of the floor and crashed me down in the chair.

"Now," he said, while I gasped and swallowed my pain, "tel