I, beaten and sore, without water for a night long and a day long, faint with hunger, weak from a beating that had been added to five days in the dungeon and eighty hours in the jacket, oppressed by the calamity of human fate, apprehensive of what was to happen to me from what I had seen happen to the others—I, a wavering waif of a human man and an erstwhile professor of agronomy in a quiet college town, I hesitated to accept the invitation to sit down.
Warden Atherton was a large man and a very powerful man. His hands flashed out to a grip on my shoulders. I was a straw in his strength. He lifted me clear of the floor and crashed me down in the chair.
“Now,” he said, while I gasped and swallowed my pain, “tell me all about it, Standing. Spit it out—all of it, if you know what’s healthy for you.”
“I don’t know anything about what has happened . . .”, I began.
That was as far as I got. With a growl and a leap he was upon me. Again he lifted me in the air and crashed me down into the chair.
“No nonsense, Standing,” he warned. “Make a clean breast of it. Where is the dynamite?”
“I don’t know anything of any dynamite,” I protested.
Once again I was lifted and smashed back into the chair.
I have endured tortures of various sorts, but when I reflect upon them in the quietness of these my last days, I am confident that no other torture was quite the equal of that chair torture. By my body that stout chair was battered out of any semblance of a chair. Another chair was brought, and in time that chair was demolished. But more chairs were brought, and the eternal questioning about the dynamite went on.
When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain Jamie relieved him; and then the guard Monohan took Captain Jamie’s place in smashing me down into the chair. And always it was dynamite, dynamite, “Where is the dynamite?” and there was no dynamite. Why, toward the last I would have given a large portion of my immortal soul for a few pounds of dynamite to which I could confess.