'Why, who's to know?'
'Well,' replied the warder, looking round, 'it 'ud stun yer to count the spies that seem to be bred regular in a place like this, one man watching another for the reward. But I'll chance it, I will, the first time I go ashore. Now then, you Fifty-five, what are you making all that row for?'
The occupant of the next cell, Number Fifty-five, as he was in due sequence, had apparently gone mad. He raved and shrieked, cursed and yelled continuously. He banged at the door, which he could not well kick as they had taken away his boots. But ever and anon he amused himself with wildly extravagant rhapsodies, as well as by devoting his gaolers to the infernal deities, as also the heads of any Church running counter to his sectarian prejudices. Then he was taken out, secured, and hauled before the chief officer for punishment. That autocrat ordered the sullen-visaged 'Vandemonian,' as the warders designated him, to undergo several days in the 'box' on bread and water. He was carried off, struggling and cursing, by main force, being crammed into the 'box' aforesaid. This retreat, which was inspected by Lance on another occasion, appeared to be a species of oubliette, apparently in the very keel of the vessel, so constructed that the delinquent could neither stand up, lie down, nor sit with ease. In addition to this rigorous confinement a gag was placed in the mouth of the offender if he refused to stop his unseemly outcry.
A few minutes before eleven o'clock Lance's door was unlocked, and he was summoned forth to take part in a new portion of the programme. Being marched into the centre of the passage, he there saw a large iron cage, of which the door, just sufficiently large to admit one man, was opened. On either side stood an armed sentry with rifle at the poise.
An additional pair of warders was in attendance. The inmates of the cells, called by number, not by name, shuffled or stumbled out and made for the door of the cage, like tamed wild beasts under the keeper's whip.
It was a piteous, strangely-moving sight to a lover of his kind, had such been there. Men of various types and all ages obeyed the summons—the white-haired convict, reckless and hopeless, the larger half of whose life had been spent within prison walls, and who was now doomed to linger out the last years of a ruined life in places of confinement. The whole expression of the face denoted the human wreck which the forçat had become. The evil eye, furtive yet ferocious, the animal mouth and jaw, the shaven, sallow cheek—every faculty once capable of rising to the loftier attributes of manhood seemed obliterated—the residuum but approached the type of the simian anthropoid—bestial, savage, obscene.
'Great God!' thought Lance, as one by one the felons passed into this cage, some young and hardly developed into fullest manhood like himself, some of middle age, some stunted and decrepit, bowed and misshapen from constant confinement and the weight of their irons, yet all with the same criminal impress upon form and feature,—'Great God! shall I ever become like these men? And yet once I had as little fear of becoming what I am——'
He passed in last, the door was shut, the cage commenced to ascend. His companions grinned and chuckled as, with a brutal oath, the older convict asked what he was sent on board for.
Lance hesitated for a moment, and then, reflecting that if he attempted to show what his companions in misery might consider airs of superiority they would find some way of revenging themselves, answered in as careless a manner as he could assume—
'Well, I knocked over the head warder at Ballarat.'