“Two days in the solitary cell on bread and water, wasn’t it?” asked Blalock. “He didn’t have any good words for it.”
The warden flushed.
“Few of those who taste of it do,” he admitted. “Too much a matter of being left alone with your thoughts and your conscience. They’ll punish you as much as anything can do. Well, suppose you take an adjournment and come on to dinner? Will you want to make the regular inspection tour of the prison?”
“Oh, sure,” yawned the chairman. “Undoubtedly, everything is all right, as usual, but if we omitted it the newspapers would have something to howl about.”
He rose, and, with the rest of the commission trailing them, followed the warden to the dining-room.
“Well, let’s make the inspection and have it over with,” Stevenson suggested, when the meal was finished. “Where do we go first, warden?”
“Through the shops and smaller buildings first, then the cells. That way you’ll end up closest to the administration building and you can go back into conference with the least delay.”
Uniformed guards stood smartly at attention as the warden piloted the commission through. “Trusties” ingratiatingly hovered about the party, eager to be of service. Great steel-barred doors swung open at the approach of the commission and clanged to noisily behind it. The afternoon sunlight, slanting through the bars, relieved the somberness of the cell blocks and revealed them in their spick-and-spanness, made ready for the occasion.
“Well, everything seems to be O. K.,” said the chairman, as the party again drew near to the offices. “Anyone else got any suggestions?”
“Yes, I’d like to see the dark cell,” answered the secretary. “I don’t recall ever visiting it, and that fellow Ellis interested me. He said it was a pocket edition of Hades. Where is it, warden?”