One day he was
missing. He had been supposed to be sick or asleep for several
hours, for apparently lie lay in bed, and was lying very still. But
that was only an ingeniously constructed dummy. The young man
himself had made a hole under his bed into an adjoining vacant cell,
the door of which stood open. He had crawled through his hole, come
out of the vacant cell door, and gone up to the prison garret, where
he found some old pieces of rope. These he tied together, and
getting out at the cupola upon the roof, he managed to let himself
down on the outside of the building and got away. He was never
recaptured. The Warden said that some one must have told him about
the adjoining vacant cell, with its always open door, else how would
the young man have known it?
I was accused of imparting this valuable information, and I suffered
four weeks' confinement in that horrible dungeon on the mere
suspicion. This made ten weeks in all of my prison-life in a hole in
which I suffered so that I hoped I should die there.
One of the prisoners was a desperate man, named Hall. He was a
convicted murderer, and was sentenced for life. He too, worked about
in the prison and the yards, dragging or carrying a heavy ball and
chain. When bundles of snaths were to be carried from one shop to
the other in the various processes of finishing, Hall had to do it,
and to carry his ball and chain as well, so that he was loaded like
a pack-horse. No pack-horse was ever so abused.
Of course he was ugly; the wardens and the keepers knew it, and
generally kept away from him.
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