“Why did you quit your job?” his Honor asked.

Now the teamster had already explained how his job had quit him, and the question took him aback.

“Your Honor,” he began confusedly, “isn’t that a funny question to ask?”

“Thirty days more for quitting your job,” said his Honor, and the court was closed.  That was the outcome.  The teamster got sixty days all together, while the rest of us got thirty days.

We were taken down below, locked up, and given breakfast.  It was a pretty good breakfast, as prison breakfasts go, and it was the best I was to get for a month to come.

As for me, I was dazed.  Here was I, under sentence, after a farce of a trial wherein I was denied not only my right of trial by jury, but my right to plead guilty or not guilty.  Another thing my fathers had fought for flashed through my brain—­habeas corpus.  I’d show them.  But when I asked for a lawyer, I was laughed at.  Habeas corpus was all right, but of what good was it to me when I could communicate with no one outside the jail?  But I’d show them.  They couldn’t keep me in jail forever.  Just wait till I got out, that was all.  I’d make them sit up.  I knew something about the law and my own rights, and I’d expose their maladministration of justice.  Visions of damage suits and sensational newspaper headlines were dancing before my eyes when the jailers came in and began hustling us out into the main office.

A policeman snapped a handcuff on my right wrist. (Ah, ha, thought I, a new indignity.  Just wait till I get out.) On the left wrist of a negro he snapped the other handcuff of that pair.  He was a very tall negro, well past six feet—­so tall was he that when we stood side by side his hand lifted mine up a trifle in the manacles.  Also, he was the happiest and the raggedest negro I have ever seen.

We were all handcuffed similarly, in pairs.  This accomplished, a bright nickel-steel chain was brought forth, run down through the links of all the handcuffs, and locked at front and rear of the double-line.  We were now a chain-gang.  The command to march was given, and out we went upon the street, guarded by two officers.  The tall negro and I had the place of honor.  We led the procession.

After the tomb-like gloom of the jail, the outside sunshine was dazzling.  I had never known it to be so sweet as now, a prisoner with clanking chains, I knew that I was soon to see the last of it for thirty days.  Down through the streets of Niagara Falls we marched to the railroad station, stared at by curious passers-by, and especially by a group of tourists on the veranda of a hotel that we marched past.

There was plenty of slack in the chain, and with much rattling and clanking we sat down, two and two, in the seats of the smoking-car.  Afire with indignation as I was at the outrage that had been perpetrated on me and my forefathers, I was nevertheless too prosaically practical to lose my head over it.  This was all new to me.  Thirty days of mystery were before me, and I looked about me to find somebody who knew the ropes.  For I had already learned that I was not bound for a petty jail with a hundred or so prisoners in it, but for a full-grown penitentiary with a couple of thousand prisoners in it, doing anywhere from ten days to ten years.