John merely nodded his head.
“To the county jail, sergeant!”
The soldiers turned and John descended the stairs, and again passed through the crowd, his head erect, his face an immovable mask.
In fifteen minutes the heavy bolt shot into place and he was a prisoner awaiting trial for life, locked in a filthy cell of the common jail of the county of Independence.
He had often been to this jail as a lawyer to interview prisoners whom he had defended at various times, but he had paid no attention to the building. The complaints of the discomforts of the jail he had always taken as a humorous contribution to life.
He was amazed to discover that the place into which he had been suddenly thrust was an inner room opening into a corridor with no means of light or ventilation save the single iron-grilled door—a veritable hell-hole whose heat was so stifling and air so foul with disgusting odours he could scarcely breathe. By the rays of the little kerosene lamp which hung in the corridor, flickering, sputtering and stinking, he saw that there was not a trace of furniture in the room, not even a pile of straw on which to sleep. The floor had evidently not been swept in a year, the dust lay in piles, and the room had just been vacated by four perspiring Negro convicts who had been removed to the penitentiary to serve sentences for burglary, arson and murder.
It was impossible to sit down, it was unthinkable to lie down, and so for five hours back and forth he walked the length of his cell like a caged panther.
For the first hour his proud spirit was sustained by the enormity of the degradation thus heaped upon him. He felt sure that such treatment was given him for a purpose. He knew that all the prisoners of the county were not treated as swine. In his anger he paused once, determined to demand a chair or bed of some kind, and found that he could only make his wants known by yelling down two flights of stairs to the guard who stood at the outer door of the last floor. He could not thus humiliate himself.
For the first time he realised what it meant to be deprived not only of the comforts but the common decencies of human life. In fierce anger he silently raved for two hours and then a strange calm came over his soul. His hands grasped the iron bars of the door and he stood as if in a trance while the unconscious minutes lengthened into hours. A beautiful face bent above him. Her voice, low and tender with the music of love, filled all space. The stifling cell vanished. He was in the open fields with her hand in his. He woke with a laugh, and caught the glint of the first beams of the rising sun stealing through the window of the corridor.