Archie had been able to endure the confinement as long as Mason and Dillon and Mandell and Squeak were there; the five men had formed a class by themselves; they had a certain superiority in the eyes of the other prisoners, who were confined for drunkenness, for disturbance, for fighting, for petty thefts and other insignificant offenses. But when his companions were taken away, when his own hope of liberty failed, he grew morose. The city prison was an incredibly filthy place. The walls dripped always with dampness. High up, a single gas-jet burned economically in its mantle, giving the place the only light it ever knew. A bench ran along the wall below it, and on this bench the prisoners sat all day and talked, or stretched themselves and slept; now and then, for exercise, they tried chinning themselves from the little iron gallery that ran around the cells of the upper tier. Twice a day they were fed on bologna and coffee and bread. At night they were locked in cells, the lights were put out, and the place became a hideous bedlam. Men snored from gross dissipations, vermin crawled, rats raced about, and the drunken men, whose bodies from time to time were thrown into the place, went mad with terror when they awoke from their stupors, and cursed and blasphemed. The crawling vermin and the scuttling rats, the noises that suggested monsters, made their delirium real. The atmosphere of the prison was foul, compounded of the fumes of alcohol exhaled by all those gaping mouths, of the feculence of all those filthy bodies, of the foul odors of the slop-pails, of the germs of all the diseases that had been brought to the place in forty years. Archie could not sleep; no one could sleep except those who were overcome by liquor, and they had awful nightmares.
His few moments of relief came when the turnkey, a man who had been embruted by long years of locking other men in the prison, opened the door, called him with a curse and turned him over to Kouka. Then the respite ended. He was subjected to new terrors, to fresh horrors, surpassing those physical terrors of the night by infinity. For Kouka and Quinn took him into a little room off the detectives' office, closed and locked the door, and then for two hours questioned him about the robbery of the post-office at Romeo, about countless other robberies in the city and out of it; they accused him of a hundred crimes, pressed him to tell where he had stolen the revolver. They bent their wills against his, they shook their fingers under his nose, their fists in his face; they told him they knew where he had got the revolver; they told him that his companions had confessed. He was borne down and beaten; he felt himself grow weak and faint; at times a nausea overcame him--he was wringing with perspiration.
The first day of this ordeal he sat in utter silence, sustained by dogged Teutonic stubbornness. That afternoon they renewed the torture; still he did not reply.
The morning of the second day, though weakened in body and mind, he still maintained his stubbornness; that afternoon they had brought McFee with a fresh will to bear on him. By evening he told them he had stolen the revolver in Chicago. He did this in the hope of peace. It did gain him a respite, but not for long. The next morning they told him he had lied and he admitted it; then he gave them a dozen explanations of his possession of the revolver, all different and all false. Then, toward evening, Kouka suddenly fell upon him, knocked him from his chair with a blow, and then, as he lay on the floor, beat him with his enormous hairy fists. Quinn, the only other person in the room, stood by and looked on. Finally, Quinn grew alarmed and said:
"Cheese it, Ike! Cheese it!"
Kouka stopped and got up.
Archie was weeping, his whole body trembling, his nerves gone. That night he lay moaning in his hammock, and the man in the cell under him and the man in the cell next him, cursed him. In the morning they took him again up to the detective's office; this was the morning of the third day. Archie was in a daze, his mind was no longer clear, and he wondered vaguely, but with scarcely any interest, why it was that Kouka looked so smiling and pleasant.
"Set down, Arch, old boy," Kouka said, "and let me tell you all about it."
And then Kouka told him just where he had stolen the revolver, and when, and how--told him, indeed, more about the hardware store and the owners of it than Archie had ever known. And yet Archie did not seem surprised at this. He felt numbly that it was no longer worth while to deny it--he wondered why he ever had denied it in the first place. It did not matter; nothing mattered; there was no difference between things--they were all the same. But presently his mind became suddenly clear; he was conscious that there was one unanswered question in the world.
"Say, Kouka," he said, "how did you tumble?"