Drenched and beaten, utterly exhausted, he lay like a limp rag, until three men had spent their strength upon the pump. Then to the pool they dragged him, and “ducked” him three times into the dark, stagnant water. Then back to the warden who asked if he “thought he had enough.”
“Not enough to make me take your jaw,” was the foolish answer.
“The lash,” said the warden, and the miserable, half-drowned creature was taken away to be beaten “into subjection.”
The guard overlooked the punishment. A stout, burly convict was required to perform it. He would have refused, being in like strait, only that he knew the uselessness. He had been there a long time, forty years, and according to his sentence would be there for fifty more. He had picked up a little scripture at the prison Sunday school, so that when he lifted the whip above the back they had made bare for it, he whispered, by way of apology:—
“And one Simon, a Cyrenian, him they compelled to bear the cross.”
But Jim didn’t understand even if he had heard. All he heard was that low, patient voice calling him “friend.”
In the afternoon he was sent down to the mines, subdued, but not conquered. Every evil passion of his nature had been aroused, and would never slumber again.
After that first day’s experience he seemed indeed a wild beast. He fought among the prisoners, rebelled against the rules of the prison, would have nothing to do with any but the worst of the men, shirked his work until he had to be strapped and beaten, in short, made a record that had never been surpassed by any previous man on the prison record.
Yet, when there was danger of any kind, he was the first there. One morning there was an explosion in the mine, and more than a score of prisoners were in danger of being suffocated before help could reach them. Indeed everybody was afraid to venture in that black hole from which the hot, sulphurous gases were pouring. Everybody but Jim. Even the warden had to admit Jim’s courage. “He aint afraid of the devil,” he declared, when he saw the boy jump into an empty coal car, call to the mule to “git up,” and disappear in the gas and smoke with the empty cars rumbling behind him. It was a long time before he came out, but he brought ten insensible convicts in his first haul. The lessees recommended him for that, and promised to make it good sometime if he kept on at that rate.
Another time there was a fire. The rumbling old rat-hole was threatened with destruction, and with it three hundred and seventy-five of the State’s charges. The men glared like beasts through the cracks of the tottering stockade. Liberty, it would come surely in some form. The fire was confined for a time to the wing where the hospital was. But when it mounted in a great blood-dappled sheet of flame to the top of an old rotten tower above the main building, where the prisoners were huddled, it became evident that all must go unless the old tower could be torn away. Up the uneven, rickety wall went Jim, nimble as a squirrel. Crack! crack! fell the dead boards, then with a clang and clamor, down rolled the old bell from its perch, carrying with it the last of the burning tower.