The police had got the crowds driven back by now, and had ropes
across the street to hold them, and inside the roped space were
several ambulances and a couple of patrol-wagons. Peter was shoved
into one of these latter, and a policeman sat by his side, and the
bell clanged, and the patrol-wagon forced its way slowly thru the
struggling crowd. Half an hour later they arrived at the huge stone
jail, and Peter was marched inside. There were no formalities, they
did not enter Peter on the books, or take his name or his finger
prints; some higher power had spoken, and Peter’s fate was already
determined. He was taken into an elevator, and down into a basement,
and then down a flight of stone steps into a deeper basement, and
there was an iron door with a tiny slit an inch wide and six inches
long near the top. This was the “hole,” and the door was opened and
Peter shoved inside into utter darkness. The door banged, and the
bolts rattled; and then silence. Peter sank upon a cold stone floor,
a bundle of abject and hideous misery.
These events had happened with such terrifying rapidity that Peter
Gudge had hardly time to keep track of them. But now he had plenty
of time, he had nothing but time. He could think the whole thing
out, and realize the ghastly trick which fate had played upon him.
He lay there, and time passed; he had no way of measuring it, no
idea whether it was hours or days. It was cold and clammy in the
stone cell; they called it the “cooler,” and used it to reduce the
temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving
device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own
tormented mind did the rest.
And surely no more tormented mind than the mind of Peter Gudge had
ever been put in that black hole. It was the more terrible, because
so utterly undeserved, so preposterous. For such a thing to happen
to him, Peter Gudge, of all people--who took such pains to avoid
discomfort in life, who was always ready to oblige anybody, to do
anything he was told to do, so as to have’an easy time, a
sufficiency of food, and a warm corner to crawl into! What could
have persuaded fate to pick him for the victim of this cruel prank;
to put him into this position, where he could not avoid suffering,
no matter what he did? They wanted him to tell something, and Peter
would have been perfectly willing to tell anything--but how could he
tell it when he did not know it?
The more Peter thought about it, the more outraged he became. It was
monstrous! He sat up and glared into the black darkness. He talked
to himself, he talked to the world outside, to the universe which
had forgotten his existence. He stormed, he wept. He got on his feet
and flung himself about the cell, which was six feet square, and
barely tall enough for him to stand erect. He pounded on the door
with his one hand which Guffey had not lamed, he kicked, and he
shouted. But there was no answer, and so far as he could tell, there
was no one to hear.
When he had exhausted himself, he sank down, and fell into a haunted
sleep; and then he wakened again, to a reality worse than any
nightmare. That awful man was coming after him again! He was going
to torture him, to make him tell what he did not know! All the ogres
and all the demons that had ever been invented to frighten the
imagination of children were as nothing compared to the image of the
man called Guffey, as Peter thought of him.
Several ages after Peter had been locked up, he heard sounds
outside, and the door was opened. Peter was cowering in the corner,
thinking that Guffey had come. There was a scraping on the floor,
and then the door was banged again, and silence fell. Peter
investigated and discovered that they had put in a chunk of bread
and a pan of water.
Then more ages passed, and Peter’s impotent ragings were repeated;
then once more they brought bread and water, and Peter wondered, was
it twice a day they brought it, or was this a new day? And how long
did they mean to keep him here? Did they mean to drive him mad? He
asked these questions of the man who brought the bread and water,
but the man made no answer, he never at any time spoke a word. Peter
had no company in that “hole” but his God; and Peter was not well
acquainted with his God, and did not enjoy a tete-a-tete with Him.
What troubled Peter most was the cold; it got into his bones, and
his teeth were chattering all the time. Despite all his moving
about, he could not keep warm. When the man opened the door, he
cried out to him, begging for a blanket; each time the man came,
Peter begged more frantically than ever. He was ill, he had been
injured in the explosion, he needed a doctor, he was going to die!
But there was never any answer. Peter would lie there and shiver and
weep, and writhe, and babble, and lose consciousness for a while,
and not know whether he was awake or asleep, whether he was living
or dead. He was becoming delirious, and the things that were
happening to him, the people who were tormenting him, became
monsters and fiends who carried him away upon far journeys, and
plunged him thru abysses of terror and torment.
And yet, many and strange as were the phantoms which Peter’s sick
imagination conjured up, there was no one of them as terrible as the
reality which prevailed just then in the life of American City, and
was determining the destiny of a poor little man by the name of
Peter Gudge. There lived in American City a group of men who had
taken possession of its industries and dominated the lives of its
population. This group, intrenched in power in the city’s business
and also in its government, were facing the opposition of a new and
rapidly rising power, that of organized labor, determined to break
the oligarchy of business and take over its powers. The struggle of
these two groups was coming to its culmination. They were like two
mighty wrestlers, locked in a grip of death; two giants in combat,
who tear up trees by the roots and break off fragments of cliffs
from the mountains to smash in each other’s skulls. And poor
Peter--what was he? An ant which happened to come blundering across
the ground where these combatants met. The earth was shaken with
their trampling, the dirt was kicked this way and that, and the
unhappy ant was knocked about, tumbled head over heels, buried in
the debris; and suddenly--Smash!--a giant foot came down upon the
place where he was struggling and gasping!