Monday morning I refused to work, explaining to the officer in charge that I was not lazy, but felt they had no right to order me to work before I was convicted. He appeared surprised, and took me to the office of the prison captain. He heard me out, and turning to the guard, said: “Throw this fresh kid in the cooler and leave him there till he gets ready to work.”
I was given an old pair of overalls and a cotton shirt to wear in the “cooler,” where my outside clothes would have been ruined. The cooler or dark cell was the same as other cells, except that there was nothing in it and the door was solid, admitting no light. The floor and walls were of thin steel and very cold. I slept on the floor without any kind of bedding or cover. There was but one fixture in the cell, a sheet-metal bucket smelling strongly of chloride of lime. My sentence carried the further punishment of bread and water, one thick slice a day and about a quart of water.
A guard opened the cell in the afternoon the first day and put in a quart tin cup of water but no bread. As he was closing the cell, he said, not unkindly: “You’re a damned fool, kid. You’d better weaken and promise to go on the pump. I’ll tell the captain now, if you want, and you won’t have to freeze in here to-night.”
“No, I won’t weaken,” I declared.
“All right, but if you change your mind just rap on the door with that tin cup.”
My teeth were chattering before nine o’clock that night, it was so cold. I could not sleep on the cold steel floor and walked up and down in my stocking feet all night. The next morning it became warmer and I slept in fits till noon when the guard came with my bread and a fresh cup of water. The bread was about half eaten when something got between my teeth that made me stop chewing, hungry as I was.
I examined it, lying on my belly at the bottom of the door, where there was a crack of light. It was a piece of chicken quill about an inch long. I couldn’t imagine how it got into the bread, and out of curiosity and having nothing else to do, I broke it apart. There was a tightly rolled piece of paper inside, on which was written: “Stick. We’ll feed you to-night.” There was no name, no explanation. I knew it was from my cellmates, and put in the balance of the day trying to figure how they would manage to get food into that tight cell in plain view of a guard all day and night.
The cell above me was part of the prison proper, and was occupied by two prisoners doing time. That afternoon I heard unusual noises in it, and they indicated that some one was moving out or in. Immediately after “lockup” in the evening there was another new noise. Prisoners in dungeons rely almost entirely on sounds to tell them what is going on about them. Every sound has its meaning. No sound escapes them, and any new or unusual sound must be thought out and classified at once.
The sound that attracted my attention was a low, grinding rasping that seemed to come from the floor of the cell above, which was the roof of my cell. One person above walked back and forth with his shoes on, making considerable noise. Something very unusual. The rasping became more distinct, and after an hour’s thought I concluded that somebody up above was boring a hole through the thin steel floor and that the walking was to cover the noise of drilling and to keep watch for the guard. Before nine o’clock there was an inch hole in the floor, and strips of tender meat, long pieces of bread, toasted to hold them together, cigarettes, and matches were being lowered into my cell. After them came a long, thin piece of rubber hose, from which I sucked about a quart of strong coffee.
I spent about three weeks in the cooler and never missed my evening meal. My cellmates bribed the night guard to give me a blanket at night, which he took away from me before he went off watch in the morning, to protect himself. All in all, I didn’t fare so badly and was getting pretty well settled down to life in the dark cell when they took me out one evening and sent me back to my cell with instructions to be ready in the morning to go to court. I found my clothes in good shape and a clean shirt had been procured for me by my cellmates.