“The shouts die down. There are a few more vague and uncertain sounds--all the more dreadful for being uncertain; somewhere an iron door clangs! Then stillness follows, like that of the grave.” Tom Brown reported this mysterious occurrence to the warden who promised to investigate. Next day the warden “has inquired into it, he says, and found it was only a case of a troublesome fellow sent up from Sing Sing, who was making some little disturbance in the gallery. After they had admonished him he wouldn’t stop, so they had to take him down to the jail. When the officer entered his cell, he threw his bucket at the officer and there was a little row. ‘I’m inclined to think,’ adds the warden, ‘that he may be a little bit crazy, and I’m ed further investigation, telling the warden that, from information which has come to him, he thinks that the officers are “trying to slip one over” on him.’ From his fellow prisoners Tom Brown obtained what he believes to be the correct version of the incident, as follows: “There had lately been sent up from Sing Sing a young prisoner ... pale, thin and undersized; weight about 120 pounds; age 21.” On charge of impertinence to an officer he had been kept in a dark punishment cell five days, on bread and water. (The allowance of water was 3 gills per day). He was sent back to work but was unfit and next day remained in his cell ill, but “in spite of his repeated requests, the doctor was not summoned. The reason probably was that he was in the state known in prison as bughouse--that is to say at least flighty, if not temporarily out of his mind”.... “In the evening, he created some disturbance by calling out remarks which violated the quiet of the cell-block.” “I understand,” Tom Brown says, “something of this sort: ‘If you want to kill me, why don’t you do it at once and not torture me to death?’ He seemed to be possessed with the idea that his life was in danger.” “Now here was a young man, hardly more than a lad, in a sick and nervous condition that had produced temporary derangement of mind. What course did the system take in dealing with that suffering being! Two keepers opened his cell, made a rush for him and knocked him down.... During the brief scuffle in the cell the iron pail and the bucket were overturned. Then, after being handcuffed, the unresisting if not unconscious youth was flung out of his cell with such violence that, if it had not been for a convict trusty who stood by, he would have slipped under the rail of the gallery and fallen to the stone floor of the corridor four stories below, and been either killed or crippled for life. “Then the two keepers, being reinforced by a third, dragged their victim roughly down stairs, partly on his back, kicked and beat him on the way, and carried him before the Principal Keeper, who promptly sent him down to the jail again.” (i.e., the punishment cells).