Hawes however did but repeat his threat of some new torture on the morrow that should far eclipse all he had yet endured; and shaking his fist at his helpless body left him with his torture.
One hour of bitter, racking, unremitting anguish had hardly rolled over this young head ere his frame, weakened by famine and perpetual violence, began to give the usual signs that he would soon sham--swoon we call it when it occurs to any but a prisoner. As my readers have never been in Mr. Hawes's man-press, and as attempts have been made to impose on the inexperience of the public and represent the man-press as restriction not torture, I will shortly explain why sooner or later all the men that were crucified in it ended by shamming.
Were you ever seized at night with a violent cramp? Then you have instantly with a sort of wild and alarmed rapidity changed the posture which had cramped you; ay though the night was ever so cold you have sprung out of bed sooner than lie cramped. If the cramp would not go in less than half a minute that half-minute was long and bitter. As for existing cramped half an hour, that you never thought possible. Imagine now the severest cramp you ever felt artificially prolonged for hours and hours. Imagine yourself cramped in a vise, no part of you movable a hair's breadth, except your hair and your eyelids. Imagine the fierce cramp growing and growing, and rising like a tide of agony higher and higher above nature's endurance, and you will cease to wonder that a man always sunk under Hawes's man-press. Now, then, add to the cramp a high circular saw raking the throat, jacket straps cutting and burning the flesh of the back--add to this the freezing of the blood in the body deprived so long of all motion whatever (for motion of some sort or degree is a condition of vitality), and a new and far more rational wonder arises, that any man could be half an hour cut, sawed, crushed, cramped, Mazeppa'd thus, without shamming--still less be four, six, eight hours in it, and come out a living man.
The young martyr's lips were turning blue, his face was twitching convulsively, when a word was unexpectedly put in for him by a bystander.
The turnkey Evans had been half sullenly half sorrowfully watching him for some minutes past.