That was as far as I got.  With a growl and a leap he was upon me.  Again he lifted me in the air and crashed me down into the chair.

“No nonsense, Standing,” he warned.  “Make a clean breast of it.  Where is the dynamite?”

“I don’t know anything of any dynamite,” I protested.

Once again I was lifted and smashed back into the chair.

I have endured tortures of various sorts, but when I reflect upon them in the quietness of these my last days, I am confident that no other torture was quite the equal of that chair torture.  By my body that stout chair was battered out of any semblance of a chair.  Another chair was brought, and in time that chair was demolished.  But more chairs were brought, and the eternal questioning about the dynamite went on.

When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain Jamie relieved him; and then the guard Monohan took Captain Jamie’s place in smashing me down into the chair.  And always it was dynamite, dynamite, “Where is the dynamite?” and there was no dynamite.  Why, toward the last I would have given a large portion of my immortal soul for a few pounds of dynamite to which I could confess.

I do not know how many chairs were broken by my body.  I fainted times without number, and toward the last the whole thing became nightmarish.  I was half-carried, half-shoved and dragged back to the dark.  There, when I became conscious, I found a stool in my dungeon.  He was a pallid-faced, little dope-fiend of a short-timer who would do anything to obtain the drug.  As soon as I recognized him I crawled to the grating and shouted out along the corridor: 

“There is a stool in with me, fellows!  He’s Ignatius Irvine!  Watch out what you say!”

The outburst of imprecations that went up would have shaken the fortitude of a braver man than Ignatius Irvine.  He was pitiful in his terror, while all about him, roaring like beasts, the pain-racked lifers told him what awful things they would do to him in the years that were to come.

Had there been secrets, the presence of a stool in the dungeons would have kept the men quiet, As it was, having all sworn to tell the truth, they talked openly before Ignatius Irvine.  The one great puzzle was the dynamite, of which they were as much in the dark as was I. They appealed to me.  If I knew anything about the dynamite they begged me to confess it and save them all from further misery.  And I could tell them only the truth, that I knew of no dynamite.

One thing the stool told me, before the guards removed him, showed how serious was this matter of the dynamite.  Of course, I passed the word along, which was that not a wheel had turned in the prison all day.  The thousands of convict-workers had remained locked in their cells, and the outlook was that not one of the various prison-factories would be operated again until after the discovery of some dynamite that somebody had hidden somewhere in the prison.