But it is no laughing matter when a man in irons tries to walk.
Meantime, the women became more sympathetic than ever with the prisoner, and openly railed at the heydukes.
"You murderers! It is a sin and a shame to treat him thus! And such a pretty gentleman too! If we were only men we would soon teach you gaolers to mend your manners. Why you are worse than the Turks themselves."
"Drive the women out of the yard," cried Janosics furiously, "and then let us be getting on, for the cage is ready for the bird."
And some of the heydukes promptly drove out the women, while the rest looked after Ráby. In one of them, who helped him to rise, Ráby recognised the man who had brought him the pitcher with the false bottom when he was in prison. The man also evidently pitied him in his stumbling efforts to drag one foot before the other, and showed him how he could best do it by carefully measuring each step forward. But the pain of the irons which had already begun to cut into his flesh, was well-nigh unbearable, and it was with the greatest difficulty he staggered to the cell prepared for him—a small damp dark hole with a little grated orifice for air through which the falling snow was drifting.
No stove warmed the frozen depths of his dungeon, but there was a huge stake in the wall to which was affixed an iron chain: to this the fetters of the prisoner were made fast, so that he could stir no further than the small tether it allowed, and had to lie or crouch day and night in the heap of straw, which was his only bed. An earthen pitcher and a wooden bowl held respectively the drinking water and black bread which were to last him a week, for having provided them, they needed not to trouble further for some days about the inmate of the cell. And there was no pitcher this time with a false bottom!
Now Ráby was to know what it meant to be a captive indeed.
CHAPTER XLII.
Poor Ráby, he was a prisoner in such surroundings that they would have served for the wildest page of romance. No sound came to him from the outer world, as he lay there chained to the blank wall in his living grave—the underground dungeon whose door no key opened. Yet for all this he was not forgotten.