To render rest or comfort impossible a lighted lamp was placed within three feet of the prisoner's eyes and kept burning brightly all night. His jailer knew he had but one eye whose sight remained and that he was a chronic sufferer from neuralgia.
His escape from Fortress Monroe was a physical impossibility without one of the extraordinary precautions taken. The purpose of these arrangements could have only been to inflict pain, humiliation and possibly to take his life. He had never been robust since the breakdown of his health on the Western plains. Worn by privation and exposure, approaching sixty years of age, he was in no condition physically to resist disease.
The damp walls, the coarse food, the loss of sleep caused by the tramp of sentinels inside his room, outside and on the roof over his head and the steady blaze of a lamp in his eyes at night within forty-eight hours had completed his prostration.
But his jailers were not content.
On May twenty-third, Captain Titlow entered his cell with two blacksmiths bearing a pair of heavy leg irons coupled together by a ponderous chain.
"I am sorry to inform you, sir," the polite young officer began, "that I have been ordered to put you in irons."
"Has General Miles given that order?"
"He has."
"I wish to see him at once, please."
"General Miles has just left the fort, sir."