And I went on to my fate—a fate I could not have foreseen. What a trip it was—one I never shall forget. We arrived at Keene, a lively though old-fashioned town, and the county-seat of Cheshire County, and I was, for the first time in my life, behind prison bars.
After all the years since that tremendous affliction, the like of which turns black hair to gray and the smooth brow into furrows, I can’t bring myself to a calm retrospection of the scenes in which I was powerless in the strong hands of my unscrupulous enemies. But in all the blackness that memory still brings up to me, I have one bright remembrance of the faithfulness of my relatives and close friends, who, thank God, believed me innocent then, and do to this day.
While awaiting the action of the law and consulting frequently with my lawyers, I had ample time to learn the inside story of the Walpole bank robbery, of which I had no knowledge, save what I heard from neighbors and the newspapers. I had no pecuniary interest in the bank; therefore, when the arrest came, I had forgotten that a crime of that sort had been committed. Many of its details were told me later, by Detective Golden, and such as he didn’t know were supplied me by others, among whom were my legal advisers.
CHAPTER IV
THE UNEQUAL FIGHT
May no other man realize what I suffered in the weeks of confinement in the jail at Keene.
Innocent of the crime of burglary, a man who had always stood up boldly among his fellow-men, looking all squarely in the eye, to be thus ignominiously, horribly entangled in the meshes of the law was to set upon him the torments of hell. I doubt, if there be a corner set apart, in the infernal region, in which certain condemned ones must meditate forever over their evil deeds, whether their mental agony will be a tittle of the writhing anguish that besieged my soul, until I was left a wreck of my former self.
Ay, the torture I endured—an indescribable, lingering horror—can in no manner be compared with the most excruciating physical distress that mortal may bear and survive, except to demonstrate, by comparison, the insignificance of the latter. So far apart are they, that they stand as the East from the West, the remotest Past from the remotest Future.
I was at times far removed from a calm contemplation of my position, and on more than one occasion wondered if my brain would retain its normal reasoning. Once I feared that I would go stark mad, with the wild rush of a thousand fancies, pursuing each other through my brain, like so many little green-eyed imps. Oh, it was horrible. And there came moments when I cursed man and God, and raved that man was a misnomer for all that was devilish and that God was only a myth. Again, and I was being sifted, as it were, through a sieve of the finest mesh, that part of me left in the sieve being transformed into all that was vile, and my pulverized self passing through, all the good in me, being blown to the four winds of heaven. No doubt that this was a fantasy, yet as I lay in my cold cell I was so vividly impressed that it seemed a hideous reality.
Following such an affliction, there would come calmer moments, in which I was able to contemplate my condition, in much the same manner as a hardened criminal. When this mood possessed me, I had an awful, haunting dread of what the future might hold to rule my after days. But, as the time passed, and I had frequent consultations with my attorney; talked of the associations I had had with the man Wyckoff, whom I had come to know as Mark Shinburn; discussed my arrest at Stoneham, when I believed, at first, that I was the victim of a joke; and went over the various stages of my case, I began, at intervals, to be somewhat philosophical.