Five years had been worked out. Her health was gone, her nervous system had become a wreck. The damp rooms, the chilling stones, the ceaseless toil, were the slow torture that had undermined her constitution, and consumed her vitality.
Her narrow cell had become, to her imagination, the home of demons who haunted her with her crime.
The other women had told me that the ghost of the murdered woman came to Mary McCullum every night, all in her bloody garments, and set her shrieking in her dreams.
Should such a criminal go unpunished? The halter could bring no surer death than what was slowly creeping upon her. Restrained of her liberty she should be, and from the power to do further harm. Labor for her own support should be required of her. Connected with it, a sufficient amount of rest to secure health, a place to sleep free from the damp and noisome air of a stone prison.
A plenty of wholesome food should be allowed her; time and space for repentance given, time to think upon the error of her ways, and instruction that would teach her how to do it.
That worrisome night was to meet with one more "thrilling adventure" before it passed away into the light of the following day.
I lay, tossing from side to side, after I returned to my bed. Sleep was out of the question. I lay, tossing thoughts about the circumstances that surrounded me to and fro in my mind, trying to analyze, to distinctness, the mixed up conclusions that arose from them.
Another unearthly cry rung out on the air, and startled me from my perplexed meditations. It was more like the shriek of an animal in distress, than a human sound.
Wail followed wail, in quick succession. Can it be a human being? I asked myself, as I hurried on some clothing. It must be, there is nothing else here that can make such a noise.
I stopped to listen, as I went to search it out. It came from one quarter, and then, from another. If it were made in one cell, it possessed a wonderful power of ventriloquism.
I remembered the hooting and whistling of the night before, and immediately inferred that the same mischievous girls, who made the disturbance in the evening, had set up this cry and echoed it around from division to division, in order to make a night of it.