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Updated: June 2, 2025
He was pitiful in his terror, while all about him, roaring like beasts, the pain-racked lifers told him what awful things they would do to him in the years that were to come. Had there been secrets, the presence of a stool in the dungeons would have kept the men quiet, As it was, having all sworn to tell the truth, they talked openly before Ignatius Irvine.
And Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, of all men concerned, the utterest, absolutist, innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few short weeks. And now I must tell how entered the forty lifers upon my dungeon stillness. I was asleep when the outer door to the corridor of dungeons clanged open and aroused me.
One dungeon at a time, and dungeon by dungeon, they messed and pulped the lifers. They were impartial. I received the same pulping as the rest. And this was merely the beginning, the preliminary to the examination each man was to undergo alone in the presence of the paid brutes of the state. It was the forecast to each man of what each man might expect in inquisition hall.
"Fourteen years of quod fourteen years of prison-food fourteen years of such a life that * prayers, Sundays, and the * parson that read 'em was as good as a holiday! Why I tell you! It was so bad the lifers would try it on again and again, to kill themselves, and were only kept off of doing it by the cat, if they missed their tip."
This is no imaginary picture, a man is a man, and one of the cruellest tortures to submit him to is to deprive him absolutely of hope and make good his evil because it requires an effort which is useless, and evil his good because it is easier and costs the loss of nothing. Perhaps the majority of lifers are those whose sentences have been commuted from the death penalty.
Question soon arising as to whether life prisoners could be brought under the new law, it was decided that lifers who had served fifteen years were eligible, if of good record, not an extravagant act of mercy, and in obtaining this concession it was made known that the warden of Atlanta Penitentiary was instrumental.
The conspiracy to escape of the forty lifers, the search for the alleged dynamite, and all the treacherous frame-up of Cecil Winwood was news to them. As they told me, news did occasionally dribble into solitary by way of the guards, but they had had nothing for a couple of months. The present guards on duty in solitary were a particularly bad and vindictive set.
It has taken the place of Macquarie Harbour. What excitement there will be among them when the schooner goes down on Monday!" "Excitement! Indeed? How charming! Why?" asked Meekin. "To bring up the witnesses, my dear sir. Most of the prisoners are Lifers, you see, and a trip to Hobart Town is like a holiday for them."
He was guilty of a slip that gave me five years of solitary confinement and that placed me in this condemned cell in which I now write. And all the time I knew nothing about it. I did not even know of the break he had inveigled the forty lifers into planning. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. And the rest knew little. The lifers did not know he was giving them the cross.
It was a great day, for the two lifers had become three, although they accepted me only on probation. As they told me long after, they feared I might be a stool placed there to work a frame-up on them. It had been done before, to Oppenheimer, and he had paid dearly for the confidence he reposed in Warden Atherton's tool.
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