Texas-born, of the old pioneer stock that was always tough and stubborn, he had been unfortunate.  At seventeen years of age he had been apprehended for horse-stealing.  Also, he had been convicted of stealing seven horses which he had not stolen, and he had been sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment.  This was severe under any circumstances, but with him it had been especially severe, because there had been no prior convictions against him.  The sentiment of the people who believed him guilty had been that two years was adequate punishment for the youth, but the county attorney, paid according to the convictions he secured, had made seven charges against him and earned seven fees.  Which goes to show that the county attorney valued twelve years of Ross Shanklin’s life at less than a few dollars.

Young Ross Shanklin had toiled in hell; he had escaped, more than once; and he had been caught and sent back to toil in other and various hells.  He had been triced up and lashed till he fainted, had been revived and lashed again.  He had been in the dungeon ninety days at a time.  He had experienced the torment of the straightjacket.  He knew what the humming bird was.  He had been farmed out as a chattel by the state to the contractors.  He had been trailed through swamps by blood hounds.  Twice he had been shot.  For six years on end he had cut a cord and a half of wood each day in a convict lumber camp.  Sick or well, he had cut that cord and a half or paid for it under a whip-lash knotted and pickled.

And Ross Shanklin had not sweetened under the treatment.  He had sneered, and cursed, and defied.  He had seen convicts, after the guards had manhandled them, crippled in body for life, or left to maunder in mind to the end of their days.  He had seen convicts, even his own cell-mate, goaded to murder by their keepers, go to the gallows cursing God.  He had been in a break in which eleven of his kind were shot down.  He had been through a mutiny, where, in the prison yard, with gatling guns trained upon them, three hundred convicts had been disciplined with pick-handles wielded by brawny guards.

He had known every infamy of human cruelty, and through it all he had never been broken.  He had resented and fought to the last, until, embittered and bestial, the day came when he was discharged.  Five dollars were given him in payment for the years of his labour and the flower of his manhood.  And he had worked little in the years that followed.  Work he hated and despised.  He tramped, begged and stole, lied or threatened as the case might warrant, and drank to besottedness whenever he got the chance.