“Five.”
“That’s three too many. I wish I’d been there. Wait till I get my green jacket,[3] I’ll carry a knife, and I’ll stick it into her.”
“She’s a brute,” adds another. “I’d serve her so too.”
Here a woman interposed on the other side and a fierce quarrel ensued and there was a hand to hand fight. The other prisoners gave the alarm; assistance arrived; and the combatants were secured and carried off to the dark cells.
The next affair occurred at school time. A prisoner, Smith, was checked by the matron for quarrelling with the monitress, whereupon Smith, seizing her stool, swore she would make away with the matron. Two other prisoners came to the rescue, and, pushing the matron into a cell close by, got in with her, and pulled the door to. Smith in a fury raced after them, but the cell gate was locked before she arrived, and she had to be satisfied with the grossest abuse from the further side. But Sara Smith was now mistress of the ward, and ranged up and down with uplifted stool, and fury in her looks, till the governor, bold Captain Chapman, came to the spot with his patrols, and she was, with some difficulty, overpowered.
So determined were the women to misconduct themselves, that they took in bad part the advice of the few who were well-disposed. When one Mary Anne Titchborne begged her companions to behave better, they turned at her en masse, pursuing her to her cell with horrid threats, brandishing their pattens over their heads, and swearing they would have her life. The following feminine feat at first sight appeared most extraordinary. One of the female prisoners, it was declared, had in the night jumped out of her window, on the second floor, into the airing-yard below, a height of seventeen feet; and the governor, who visited her about 7 a.m., four hours after the accident, found her sitting in her cell again, quietly at work, and “with the exception of a sprain, or a contusion of the fingers of the right hand, quite unhurt.” According to this woman’s story, she determined to take her life about ten o’clock and threw herself out of her window. “It seems incredible,” remarks Captain Chapman, “that she could have effected this, as the sash of the window opens from the bottom with the hinge, forming thus an acute angle—in fact a V—having an aperture about ten inches wide. Not a single pane of glass was broken, and Miller, for all her fall, was unhurt, beyond a scratch or two upon her fingers.” Miller when questioned further stated that on reaching terra firma she was at first quite stunned. By and by she got up and walked about the yard for several hours; then, finding it cold, she returned to her ward, which she accomplished easily, as all the external doors and passage gates had been left unlocked. This carelessness with reference to “security” locks, as they are called, or the gates that interpose between the prisoners and fresh air, might easily make the hair of a modern gaoler stand on end; and even the considerate Governor Chapman was forced to reprimand the matrons for this gross neglect of duty. A little later Miller confessed her fraud. After school at night, she had managed to secrete herself in an unoccupied cell. No one missed her; and about eleven, coming out, she commenced to wander up and down the ward, going from cell to cell knocking.
“Who’s there?”
“Miller.”
“Where have you come from?”
“I have jumped out of the window, and got back through the gates, which were left open.”