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.  Oh, trust me as one who knows, hanging is an easy thing compared with the way live men may be hurt in all the life of them and still live.  I, too, suffered equally with them from pain and thirst; but added to my suffering was the fact that I remained conscious to the sufferings of the others.  I had been an incorrigible for two years, and my nerves and brain were hardened to suffering.  It is a frightful thing to see a strong man broken.  About me, at the one time, were forty strong men being broken.  Ever the cry for water went up, and the place became lunatic with the crying, sobbing, babbling and raving of men in delirium.

Don’t you see?  Our truth, the very truth we told, was our damnation.  When forty men told the same things with such unanimity, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie could only conclude that the testimony was a memorized lie which each of the forty rattled off parrot-like.

From the standpoint of the authorities, their situation was as desperate as ours.  As I learned afterward, the Board of Prison Directors had been summoned by telegraph, and two companies of state militia were being rushed to the prison.

It was winter weather, and the frost is sometimes shrewd even in a California winter.  We had no blankets in the dungeons.  Please know that it is very cold to stretch bruised human flesh on frosty stone.  In the end they did give us water.  Jeering and cursing us, the guards ran in the fire-hoses and played the fierce streams on us, dungeon by dungeon, hour after hour, until our bruised flesh was battered all anew by the violence with which the water smote us, until we stood knee-deep in the water which we had raved for and for which now we raved to cease.

I shall skip the rest of what happened in the dungeons.  In passing I shall merely state that no one of those forty lifers was ever the same again.  Luigi Polazzo never recovered his reason.  Long Bill Hodge slowly lost his sanity, so that a year later, he, too, went to live in Bughouse Alley.  Oh, and others followed Hodge and Polazzo; and others, whose physical stamina had been impaired, fell victims to prison-tuberculosis.  Fully 25 per cent. of the forty have died in the succeeding six years.