“There’s only one thing, lads,” Skysail Jack finally said.  “It’ll soon be morning, and then they’ll take us out and give us bloody hell.  We were caught dead to rights with our clothes on.  Winwood crossed us and squealed.  They’re going to get us out one by one and mess us up.  There’s forty of us.  Any lyin’s bound to be found out.  So each lad, when they sweat him, just tells the truth, the whole truth, so help him God.”

And there, in that dark hole of man’s inhumanity, from dungeon cell to dungeon cell, their mouths against the gratings, the two-score lifers solemnly pledged themselves before God to tell the truth.

Little good did their truth-telling do them.  At nine o’clock the guards, paid bravoes of the smug citizens who constitute the state, full of meat and sleep, were upon us.  Not only had we had no breakfast, but we had had no water.  And beaten men are prone to feverishness.  I wonder, my reader, if you can glimpse or guess the faintest connotation of a man beaten—­“beat up,” we prisoners call it.  But no, I shall not tell you.  Let it suffice to know that these beaten, feverish men lay seven hours without water.

At nine the guards arrived.  There were not many of them.  There was no need for many, because they unlocked only one dungeon at a time.  They were equipped with pick-handles—­a handy tool for the “disciplining” of a helpless man.  One dungeon at a time, and dungeon by dungeon, they messed and pulped the lifers.  They were impartial.  I received the same pulping as the rest.  And this was merely the beginning, the preliminary to the examination each man was to undergo alone in the presence of the paid brutes of the state.  It was the forecast to each man of what each man might expect in inquisition hall.

I have been through most of the red hells of prison life, but, worst of all, far worse than what they intend to do with me in a short while, was the particular hell of the dungeons in the days that followed.

Long Bill Hodge, the hard-bitten mountaineer, was the first man interrogated.  He came back two hours later—­or, rather, they conveyed him back, and threw him on the stone of his dungeon floor.  They then took away Luigi Polazzo, a San Francisco hoodlum, the first native generation of Italian parentage, who jeered and sneered at them and challenged them to wreak their worst upon him.

It was some time before Long Bill Hodge mastered his pain sufficiently to be coherent.

“What about this dynamite?” he demanded.  “Who knows anything about dynamite?”

And of course nobody knew, although it had been the burden of the interrogation put to him.

Luigi Polazzo came back in a little less than two hours, and he came back a wreck that babbled in delirium and could give no answer to the questions showered upon him along the echoing corridor of dungeons by the men who were yet to get what he had got, and who desired greatly to know what things had been done to him and what interrogations had been put to him.