blood came under the bristles, another seized him by the hair of his head and jerked his head violently back several times, and this gave him such pain that he began to struggle instinctively, and, the blood now fairly set in motion, he soon moved.  The last thing he remembered was a body full of aching bones; the first he awoke to was the sensation of being flayed alive from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot.

The first word he heard was, “Put his clothes on his shamming carcass

“Shall we dry him, sir?”

“Dry him!” roared the governor, with an oath.  “No!  Hasn’t he given us trouble enough?” (Another oath.)

They flung his clothes upon his red-hot dripping skin, and Hodges gave him a brutal push.  “Go to your cell.”  Robinson crawled off, often wincing and trying in vain to keep his clothes from rubbing those parts of his person where they had scrubbed the skin off him.

Hawes eyed him with grim superiority.  Suddenly he had an inspiration.  “Come back!” shouted he.  “I never was beat by a prisoner yet, and I never will.  Strap him up.”  At this command even the turnkeys looked amazed at one another and hesitated.  Then the governor swore horribly at them, and Hodges without another word went for the jacket.

They took hold of him; he made no resistance; he never even looked at them.  He never took his eye off Hawes; on him his eye fastened like a basilisk.  They took him away, and pinioned, jammed and throttled him to the wall again.  Hodges was set to watch him, and a bucket of water near to throw over him should he show the least sign of shamming again.  In an hour another turnkey came and relieved Hodges—­in another hour Fry relieved him, for this was tiresome work for a poor turnkey—­in another hour a new hand relieved Fry, but nobody relieved No. 19.

Five mortal hours had he been in the vice without shamming.  The pain his skin suffered from the late remedies, and the deadly rage at his heart, gave him unnatural powers of resistance; but at last the infernal machine conquered, and he began to turn dead faint; then Hodges, his sentinel at the time, caught up the bucket and dashed the whole contents over him.  The effect was magical; the shock took away his breath for a moment, but the next the blood seemed to glow with fire in his veins and he felt a general access of vigor to bear his torture.  When this man had been six hours in the vise the governor and his myrmidons came into the yard and unstrapped him.

“You did not beat me, you see, after all,” said the governor to No. 19.  The turnkeys heard and revered their chief.  No. 19 looked him full in the face with an eye glittering like a saber, but said no word.

“Sulky brute!” cried the governor, “lock him up” (oath).  And that evening, as a warder was rolling the prisoners’ supper along the little natural railway made by the two railings of Corridor B, the governor stepped the carriage and asked for 19’s tin.  It was given him, and he abstracted one half of the man’s gruel.  “Refractory in the yard to-day; but I’ll break him before I’ve done with him” (oath).