“We’ll see what can be done,” I returned.

* * * * *

At the extreme end of the big cage, the end furthest from the entrance door, stood two cells not occupied.  The last of these I had chosen for my study, a la Monte Cristo.  The sheriff’s son had lent me a dozen of Opie Reid’s novels, a history of the Civil War from the Southern viewpoint, an arithmetic, and an algebra.  Here all day long I studied and wrote assiduously.  And it was here I went to sit on my stool and write the letter to the owner of the warehouse ... a certain Mr. Womber....

In it I pointed out the enormity of sending to the penitentiary two young men, on a merely technical charge of burglary.  For if we had gone into the place to rob, why had we so foolishly, then, gone to sleep?  And what, at the final analysis, could we have stolen but bales of hay, sacks of guano, and plowshares?  All of them too unwieldy to carry away unless we had other conveyance than our backs.  It was absurd, on the face of it.

Furthermore, I appealed to him, as a Christian, to let us go free ... in the name of God, not to wreck our lives by throwing us, for a term of years, into contact with criminals of the hardened type—­to give us one more chance to become useful citizens of our great and glorious country.

Bud laughed sneeringly when I read the letter aloud to him ... said it was a fine effort as a composition in rhetoric, but I might expect nothing of it—­if the perpetually drunk jailer really brought it to its destination—­except that it would be tossed unread into the wastebasket....

I pleaded with the jailer to deliver it for me ... told him how important it would be to our lives ... adjured him to consider our helpless and penniless state.  He promised to deliver it for me.

“I have nothing to give you, now,” I ended, “but, if I ever get free, I’ll send you twenty-five dollars or so from up home, when I reach the North.”

* * * * *

A prisoner’s first dream is “escape.”  Voices outside on the street, the sight of the tops of green trees through bars, dogs barking far away, the travels of the sun as shown by moving bands of light on the walls and in the cells—­all remind him of the day when he was, as he now sees it, happy and free ... he forgets entirely, in the midst of the jail’s black restraints, the lesser evils of outside, daily life.  Even the termagant wife is turned into a domestic angel.

* * * * *

Under the smoky prison lamp made of a whiskey bottle filled with oil, and a shred of shirt drawn through a cork, we planned to cut out.

“The way to do it is easy,” said the little pickpocket, “in the sole of every good shoe is a steel spring.  I’ll take the steel from my shoe.  There’s already one bar removed from the chuck-hole (No use trying to reproduce the dialect).  If we saw out another bar, that will give us enough room for going through.  Then it will be easy to dig out the mortar between the bricks, in the jail wall.  Once out, we can make for the river bottoms, and, by wading in the water, even their bloodhounds can’t track us.”