As soon as I was locked in, I sucked my arm clean.  And afterward I saw men who had not sucked and who had horrible holes in their arms into which I could have thrust my fist.  It was their own fault.  They could have sucked.

In my cell was another man.  We were to be cell-mates.  He was a young, manly fellow, not talkative, but very capable, indeed as splendid a fellow as one could meet with in a day’s ride, and this in spite of the fact that he had just recently finished a two-year term in some Ohio penitentiary.

Hardly had we been in our cell half an hour, when a convict sauntered down the gallery and looked in.  It was my pal.  He had the freedom of the hall, he explained.  He was unlocked at six in the morning and not locked up again till nine at night.  He was in with the “push” in that hall, and had been promptly appointed a trusty of the kind technically known as “hall-man.”  The man who had appointed him was also a prisoner and a trusty, and was known as “First Hall-man.”  There were thirteen hall-men in that hall.  Ten of them had charge each of a gallery of cells, and over them were the First, Second, and Third Hall-men.

We newcomers were to stay in our cells for the rest of the day, my pal informed me, so that the vaccine would have a chance to take.  Then next morning we would be put to hard labor in the prison-yard.

“But I’ll get you out of the work as soon as I can,” he promised.  “I’ll get one of the hall-men fired and have you put in his place.”

He put his hand into his shirt, drew out the handkerchief containing my precious belongings, passed it in to me through the bars, and went on down the gallery.

I opened the bundle.  Everything was there.  Not even a match was missing.  I shared the makings of a cigarette with my cell-mate.  When I started to strike a match for a light, he stopped me.  A flimsy, dirty comforter lay in each of our bunks for bedding.  He tore off a narrow strip of the thin cloth and rolled it tightly and telescopically into a long and slender cylinder.  This he lighted with a precious match.  The cylinder of tight-rolled cotton cloth did not flame.  On the end a coal of fire slowly smouldered.  It would last for hours, and my cell-mate called it a “punk.”  And when it burned short, all that was necessary was to make a new punk, put the end of it against the old, blow on them, and so transfer the glowing coal.  Why, we could have given Prometheus pointers on the conserving of fire.

At twelve o’clock dinner was served.  At the bottom of our cage door was a small opening like the entrance of a runway in a chicken-yard.  Through this were thrust two hunks of dry bread and two pannikins of “soup.”  A portion of soup consisted of about a quart of hot water with floating on its surface a lonely drop of grease.  Also, there was some salt in that water.