Trooper Tales — page 204: what you’re looking at

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

190 The Last Cell to the Right. his footsteps sounded with a cavernous reverberation in the black water chamber below. The entrance to the plaza was a big iron gate which was open in the daytime and guarded by a Spanish policeman. At sunset the prisoners were locked in the cells, and the plaza was left untenanted save by stray ponies and pallid moon bars. It was in one of those cells that Juan Tosta, the sweet singer of the Great White Cliffs, sang mournful melodies and sick- ened—Juan Tosta, once the dreadel brigand Black Stick. Every one of those cells has been the abode of living death. Men and women and babies have suffered there in ways hardly conceivable to white people. Tad was born in that last cell to the right, where the stocks are. Tad studied me from head to foot when I first became his fellow-convict. He had the eyes of the wizened woman who crouched at the door of the last cell. Three years before, without a cry or sound, Tad had filled his lungs for the first time —filled them with the foul air of a prison. An old con- vict woman told me this. His arms were like any other baby boy’s, but if there was ever a voice in his throat it had not yet been used. His head held some kind of a brain. You could see that by his eyes, but Tad never learned to smile. A garment hung about the brown baby, and about the garment hung the same odor which reached my nostrils, when I ventured too close to the woman who sat at the entrance of the last cell—sat almost hidden behind her gaunt knees. Her lips, her breastless figure never moved, Eomichbooks:co