“My quarrel is personal with him. He sent me here in the first instance without any cause and was going to strike me just now when I hit him.”
“Enough,” was the stern reply. “You have admitted your infamous act. The first portion of your punishment will be administered to-morrow;” and with that he turned on his heel and left me to my own reflections.
They were gloomy enough. I had once seen a man knouted, and had winced as the lash tore the flesh from the poor devil’s back. I would rather have been sentenced to be shot at once; and for a few mad moments I indulged in wild thoughts of self-destruction or of attempting a fierce attack on some one in the prison which would bring a capital sentence.
Sanity returned presently, however, and after a time the extraordinary circumstances of Volna’s visit began to claim my thoughts.
What baffled me as much as anything was that Colonel Bremenhof had addressed her by her Christian name. What could he be to her, or she to him? He had evidently brought her to the prison to identify me; but what could be his motive? Could she have fallen under suspicion? What did he know, and how had he guessed that she and I had been together? Had she been confronted with the police agent of the Devil’s Staircase incident? Was she to be charged? That did not seem possible in view of the fact that she was apparently free and he had spoken to her as to a friend.
I raked my wits over and over again in repeated attempts to answer these questions, only to give up the puzzle as hopeless.
No one came near me again all that afternoon and evening, and as the hours passed, the thought of what was in store for me on the morrow became more and more oppressive. And when, at length, I heard the warders going their night rounds, I am free to confess I was very close to despair.
I dreaded the lash as fully as any poor devil who was ever sentenced to it deservedly; and I found myself speculating, with a coward’s fear, upon the gruesome ordeal.
I could not sleep for the shuddering horror of the thing. In vain I told myself that men had gone through it before, and that what they had endured, I could probably endure. There was no consolation in that. The one thought that did afford me a gleam of grim comfort was that if I did get through it and was ever free, Colonel Bremenhof should taste something of the horrors he had caused me to endure before I would call my account with him square.
There was a great deal of the brute in me in those lingering hours of despair.