“Well, then, I must try if I can't make you. Fetch the jacket.”
“Oh! for Heaven's sake don't torture me, sir. There is nobody more willing to work than I am. And if you will but give me a day or two to get my strength after the fever, you shall see how I will work.”
“There! there! —— your palaver! Strap him up.”
He was in no condition to resist, and moreover knew resistance was useless. They jammed him in the jacket, pinned him tight to the wall, and throttled him in the collar. This collar, by a refinement of cruelty, was made with unbound edges, so that when the victim, exhausted with the cruel cramp that racked his aching bones in the fierce gripe of Hawes's infernal machine, sunk his heavy head and drooped his chin, the jagged collar sawed him directly and lacerating the flesh drove him away from even this miserable approach to ease. Robinson had formed no idea of the torture. The victims of the Inquisition would have gained but little by becoming the victims of the separate and silent system in —— Jail.
They left the poor fellow pinned to the wall, jammed in the strait waistcoat, and throttled in the round saw. Weakened by fever and unnatural exertion, he succumbed sooner than the inquisitors had calculated upon. The next time they came into the yard they found him black in the face, his lips livid, insensible, throttled, and dying. Another half minute and there would have hung a corpse in the Hawes pillory.
When they saw how nearly he was gone they were all at him together. One unclasped the saw collar, one unbraced the waistcoat, another sprinkled water over him—not a bucketful this time, because they would have wetted themselves. Released from the infernal machine, the body of No. 19 fell like a lump of clay upon the men who had reduced him to this condition. Then these worthies were in some little trepidation; for though they had caused the death of many men during the last two years, they had not yet, as it happened, murdered a single one on the spot openly and honestly like this; and they feared they might get into trouble. Adjoining the yard was a bath-room; to this they carried No. 19. They stripped him, and let the water run upon him from the cock, but he did not come to; then they scrubbed him just as they would a brick floor with a hard brush upon the back till his flesh was as red as blood; with this and the water together he began to gasp and sigh and faintly come back from insensibility to a new set of tortures; but so long was the struggle between life and death that these men of business, detained thus unconscionably about a single thief, lost all patience with him; one scrubbed him till the 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.