Slow up. Keep steady."

As I rise to my feet my head seems to clear, the sparks disappear, the
sound of marching footsteps had already ceased. There is nothing to see or
hear--only the dreadful blackness and the dead silence of the night. I
take two turns about the cell, carefully refraining from kicking over the
bucket in the corner, and then stand close to the grating, in the hope of
a breath of cool, fresh air. But there is no such thing in this foetid
place.

"Joe! Are you awake?"

"Hello! What's the matter?"

"For God's sake talk to me!"

"Sure! What shall we talk about?"

"Anything. I don't care. Only something."

So Joe begins to chat with me, and presently Number Two joins in, and
Number Five has a few words to say. What we talk about I have not the
faintest recollection; it is the only part of this night's occurrences
that makes no impression whatever on my memory. I only know that I am
longing for speedy escape as I have seldom longed for anything; that I am
saying constantly to myself, "It can't be more than an hour more! They
must surely come in about forty minutes! Half an hour! Half an hour! It
can't go beyond that! Oh, why don't they come?"

I answer any remarks directed to me quite at random, for I am waiting,
waiting, waiting, and listening.

An hour and a half does not seem such an endless period of time usually.
Well, it all depends. When you are in a dark prison cell, waiting for
deliverance, it seems a lifetime. I lived through every hour in the minute
of that interminable period of five thousand four hundred seconds.

At last I hear a sound--one of the most welcome sounds I ever heard--the
six o'clock train blowing off steam over at the New York Central station.
I find myself wondering why I am not ready to shout with joy, and I
discover it is because I feel as if all power of emotion had been crushed
out of me. It is not merely utter and hopeless fatigue; it is as if
something had broken inside of me; as if I could never be joyous again; as
if I must be haunted forever by a sense of shame and guilt for my own
share of responsibility for this iniquitous place. My sensation, when at
last I hear the sound of the key in the lock of the outer door, is not one
of exultation, only of approaching relief from deadly pain--pain which has
become almost insupportable.

Once more we hear the outer door open and steps coming along the passage.
I rise from my seat on the floor, and put on my shirt