Then Mr. Constable returned to his cheerless room at the hotel and locking himself in, lay down on the sofa, only to offer his body as a pavement for files of close-cropped and shaven men who passed over him with the steady tramp-tramp, tramp-tramp of the lock-step, stamping him into the ground gladly and sternly, gloatingly and viciously—deeper and deeper, until he felt the damp earth upon his face and heard less and less clearly the tread of those marching feet.
Then it ceased altogether and Mr. Constable smiled in his sleep as he dreamed he was dead, only to awake with a shriek when he felt that he was living.
The next morning the Warden met him on the street.
“How’s the local colour getting on?” he asked pleasantly.
“I was working with it all last night.”
The Warden stared silently at the speaker for a moment, frowned slightly and passed on.
“Good God!” he muttered to himself, “if it makes a man look like that to write, I never want to read again.”
Mr. Constable left Sing Sing for Niagara, where he stopped long enough to write a letter in the public writing-room of an hotel. The composition of this missive, however, consumed several hours, for the writer kept glancing apprehensively over his shoulder and when anyone approached the table he covered his paper with the blotter and waited until he was alone again. But when at last the letter was finished he omitted to sign it, which was the more neglectful since no one could possibly have recognised the shaky handwriting as that of the snappy, energetic, confident Mr. Theodore Constable. Even the clerk in the New York Post Office who handled the envelope cursed the writer as he puzzled out the address.
Mr. Constable next visited Detroit presumably for the sole purpose of dictating curious statements to the hotel typewriter. These he mailed to New York with some enclosures, addressing the envelopes in large, childish capitals.