They came for me. Ungraciously and ungently, with blow and curse, they haled me forth, and I faced Captain and Warden Atherton.
“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, hesitated to accept the invitation to sit down.
Warden Atherton was a large and very powerful man. He lifted me clear off the floor and crashed me down in the chair.
“Now,” he said, while I gasped and swallowed my pain, “tell me all about it, Standing.”
“I don’t know anything about what has happened…”, I began.
Again he lifted me in the air and crashed me down into the chair.
“No nonsense, Standing,” he warned. “Tell the truth about the prison-break.”
“I don’t know anything,” I protested.
Once again I was lifted and smashed back into the chair. The chair was demolished. Another chair was brought, and soon that chair was demolished. Even more chairs were brought, and the eternal questioning about the prison-break went on.
When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain relieved him; and then a guard took Captain’s place in smashing me down into the chair.
I do not know how many chairs were broken by my body. I was dragged back to the dark. There, when I became conscious, I found a stool in my dungeon.
And ever the examination went on. Ever, one at a time, convicts were dragged away and dragged or carried back again. They reported that Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie, exhausted by their efforts, relieved each other every two hours. While one slept, the other examined. And they slept in their clothes in the very room in which strong man after strong man was being broken.
And hour by hour, in the dark dungeons, our madness of torment grew. I suffered equally with the others from pain and thirst; but added to my suffering was the fact that I remained conscious to the sufferings of the others.
Don’t you see? Our truth, the very truth we told, was our damnation. When forty men told the same things, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie could only conclude that our words were a lie.