Image provided by: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Lincoln, NE
About The Hesperian / (Lincoln, Neb.) 1885-1899 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 16, 1893)
f 6 THE HESPERIAN I he laid the dog in the grave and covered him up. About his trial Serge remembered very lit tle, except that they had taken him to the court house and he had not found the State. He remembered that the room was full of people, and some of them talked a great deal, and that the young lawyer who de fended him cried when his sentence was read. That lawyer seemed tounderstand it all, about Jfatushlra and the State, and everything. Serge thought he was the handsomest and most learned man in the world. He had fought day and night for Serge, without ' sleeping and almost without eating. Serge could always see him as he looked when he paced up and down the platform, shaking the hair back from his brow and trying to get it through the heads of the jurymen that love was love, even if it was for a dog. The people told Serge that his sent nee had been commuted from death to imprisonment for life by the clemency of the court, but he knew well enough that it was by the talk of that lawyer. He had not deserted Serge after the trial even, he had come with him to the prison and had seen him put on his con vict clothing. "It's the State's badge of knighthood, Serge, "he said, bitterly, touching one of the stripes. "The old emblem of the royal gar ter, to show that your blood is royal." Just as the six o'clock whistle was blow ing, the guard returned. "You are to go to your cell tonight, and if you don't do no better in the morning, you are to be strung up in the dark cell, come along." Serge laid down his hammer and followed him to his cell. Some, of the men made lit tle book shelves for their colls and pasted pictures on the walls. Serge had neither books nor pictures, and he did not know how to ask for any, so hie cell was bare. The cells were only six by four, just a little larger than a grave. As a rule, the prisoners suffered from no particular cruelty, only from the elimination of all those little delicacies that make men men. The aid of the prison authorities seemed to be to make everything unneces rarily ugly and repulsive. The littlo things in which fine feeling is most truly manifest received no respect at all. Serge's bringing up had been none of the best, but it took him some time to get used to eating without knife or fork the indifferent food thrust in square tin bowls under the door of his cell. Most of the men read at night, but he could not read, so he lay tossing on his iron bunk, wondering how the fields were looking. His greatest deprivation was that he could not see the fields. The love of the plains was strong in him. It had always been so, ever since ho was ,a little fellow, when the brown grass was up to his shoulders and the straw stacks were the golden mountains of fairy-land. Men from the cities on the hills never under stand this love, but the men from the plain country know what I mean. When ho had tired himself out with longing, ho turned over and fell asleep. He was never impa tient, for he believed that the State would come some day and explain, and take him to herself. He watched for her coming every day, hoped for it every night. In the morning the work went no better, They watched him all the time and ho could do nothing. At noon they took him into the dark cell and strung him up. They put his arms behind him and tied them together, then passed the rope about his neck, drawing arms up as high as they could be stretched, so that if he let them "sag" he would stran gle, and so they left him. The cell was perfectly bare and was not long enough for a man to lie at full length in. The prisoners were told to stand up, so Serge stood. At night his arms were let down long enough for him to eat his bread and water, then he was roped up again. All night long he stood there. By the end of the next day the pain in his arms was almost unendurable. Thoy were paralyzed from the shoulder down so that the guard had to feed him like a baby. The next day and the next night and the next &tmn.LSw4. 0lh& htwlLrt-Xyt ajfauj.. tjLuixt LMfmamtu..j z&,j ggiwHWiMMffiMrt -1 M 4 ,
