Trooper Tales — page 203: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE LAST CELL TO THE RIGHT. Nobody knew the real reason why Stanley was so hag- gard and white, when he came out from the Spanish prison at Bayamon. He had served five days for missing retreat. He certainly was not starved, because they fed him as usual from troop rations. Yet Stanley was a dif- ferent cavalryman when he returned for duty. Now, the best of troopers have done time in the guard- house. Some captains use the old Spanish prisons of Porto Rico for guard-houses these days. ‘There is one in Manati, a high interior town, sixty miles from San Juan. I had ten days against me when I was put in there. Why? Well, that story has already been told. At any rate, I only served seven. The other three days and many more were in the hospital. It was what I saw which shriveled up my nerve. When the realization came to me that it was a physical impossibility to dream away the whole ten days, I looked about. The aspect was not an inspiration. I sat in a small, stone-paved plaza, surrounded by cells, dark, dirty and depressing. [here was a well in the centre of the prison yard, and when one walked across the flagging, CONNIE HOOKS;