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 dungeon. 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-morrow?' 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 reason of these evidences of his incredible
self-control--made a formidable picture as he proceeded:

"When