Rathbone stood upright for several minutes gazing at these things. Then with a long, hopeless sigh, to the accompanying jingle of his fetters, he turned and sat down once more upon his bed.
As prisoners do, he had contracted the habit of talking aloud to himself. It was a poor comfort—this mournful echo of one's own voice!—but it seemed to make the profound solitude more bearable for a moment. He began a miserable monologue now.
"I must understand it!" he said. "That is the first step of all, if I am to keep my brain, if there is ever to be the slightest chance of escape, I must understand this terrible and secret business.
"What are these fiends doing to me?
"Let me go through the whole thing slowly and in order."
He began to reconstruct the scenes of his frequent torture, with the logic and precision with which he would have worked out a proposition of Euclid. It was the only way in which he could keep a grip upon a failing mind; a logical process of thought alone could solve this horrid mystery.
What happened every day, sometimes two or three times a day? Just this. He would be lying on his bed, reading, perhaps, if the electric lights were turned on. There would be a sudden creak and rattle of the big pulleys high up in the roof, a rattle which came without any warning whatever.
Then the central chain, to which all the other thinner chains were fastened, would begin to tighten and move. Slowly, inch by inch, as if some one were turning a winch-handle outside the cell, the chain wound up into the roof. As it did so, the smaller chains, which were fixed to the steel bands upon his limbs, tightened also.
Struggle as he might, the arrangements and balance of the weights were so perfect that in less than a minute he would be swinging clear of the bed, as helpless as a bale of goods at the end of a crane.
Then the upward movement of the chain would stop, the door open with a clicking of its massive wards, and Guest would come in.