"We can't do a thing," said Bud, "we're in for it, good and proper."
"—tell you what I'll do," I responded, "I'll write a letter to the owner of the warehouse and appeal to his humanity."
"You romantic jack-ass," yelled Bud, his nerves on edge. He walked away angry. He came back calmer.
"Look here, Gregory, I want you to excuse that outburst—but you are a fool. This is real life we're up against now. You're not reading about this in a book."
"We'll see what can be done," I returned.
At the extreme end of the big cage, the end furthest from the entrance door, stood two cells not occupied. The last of these I had chosen for my study, a la Monte Cristo. The sheriff's son had lent me a dozen of Opie Reid's novels, a history of the Civil War from the Southern viewpoint, an arithmetic, and an algebra. Here all day long I studied and wrote assiduously. And it was here I went to sit on my stool and write the letter to the owner of the warehouse ... a certain Mr. Womber....
In it I pointed out the enormity of sending to the penitentiary two young men, on a merely technical charge of burglary. For if we had gone into the place to rob, why had we so foolishly, then, gone to sleep? And what, at the final analysis, could we have stolen but bales of hay, sacks of guano, and plowshares? All of them too unwieldy to carry away unless we had other conveyance than our backs. It was absurd, on the face of it.
Furthermore, I appealed to him, as a Christian, to let us go free ... in the name of God, not to wreck our lives by throwing us, for a term of years, into contact with criminals of the hardened type—to give us one more chance to become useful citizens of our great and glorious country.
Bud laughed sneeringly when I read the letter aloud to him ... said it was a fine effort as a composition in rhetoric, but I might expect nothing of it—if the perpetually drunk jailer really brought it to its destination—except that it would be tossed unread into the wastebasket....