When the truckmen arrived they found Mike at the door of the warehouse coolly smoking a cigar. Quite naturally they thought he was the proprietor. After helping the men to load the trucks with $20,000 worth of expensive silks, "Sheeney Mike" turned out the lights, locked the door, and drove away to Medford, a suburb of Boston, where the goods were unloaded.
Before Mike found an opportunity to ship his plunder to New York he was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
He tried every means of escape he could think of without avail. At last, in his desperation to get out, he began drinking large quantities of strong soap suds. This made him deathly sick and unable to retain any nourishment. His sufferings became so intense that he had to be removed from his cell to the prison hospital.
In the prison hospital the doctor in charge began watching his patient to be sure that some trick was not being played on him. A careful examination of Mike revealed no organic trouble—the doctor could find no reason for the strange symptoms. And yet right in front of his eyes Mike would be taken with violent pains in the stomach, followed by vomiting.
The prison doctor was worried. He gave stomach tonics. Still the spasms and nausea continued. He put his patient on a cereal diet—but his vomiting was not lessened. He changed the diet; he gave beef juice; he changed it to milk and brandy—nothing brought relief.
The prison doctor was worried. Here was this once vigorous man wasting away to a pallid skeleton in spite of his best efforts. The doctor was a conscientious man and he called a consultation of two outside physicians at his own expense. They patiently went over the record of the case and examined "Sheeney Mike" minutely—there was nothing to account for the patient's alarming condition. Still, it might possibly be this or that, and so they would recommend trying a few things that had not yet been tried by the prison doctor.
"SHEENEY MIKE'S" ESCAPE
"Sheeney Mike" thought that the time had come for some new manifestation of his mysterious disease which would still further puzzle and frighten the doctor, so, as the new treatment of the consulting doctors was begun, Mike made preparation for some new symptoms. He scraped an opening in his right side and each night rubbed salt and pepper into it. He soon had an angry looking inflammation which shortly produced a flow of pus. When Mike had reached this achievement with his sore he languidly called the doctor's attention to it.
This new development was enough. The doctor sadly shook his head. Things were going from bad to worse.