The reason why Archie had not answered his father’s letter was a simple one. On that spring afternoon while Koerner and Marriott were sitting on the stoop, Archie, stripped to the waist, was hanging by his wrists from the ceiling of a dungeon, called a bull cell, in the cellar under the chapel, his bare feet just touching the floor. He had been hanging there for three days. At night he was let down and given a piece of bread and a cup of water, and allowed to lie on the floor, still handcuffed. At morning guards came, raised Archie, lifted him up, and chained his wrists to the bull rings. Later, Deputy Warden Ball sauntered by with his cane hooked over his arm, peered in through the bars, smiled, and said, in his peculiar soft voice: "Well, Archie, my boy, had enough?" McBride, the contractor, who had picked Archie out of the group of new convicts in the idle house the day after he arrived at the prison, had set him to work in a shop known as "Bolt B." His work was to make iron bolts, and all day long, from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, he stood with one foot on the treadle, sticking little bits of iron into the maw of the machine and snatching them out again. At dinner-time the convicts marched out of the shop, stood in close-locked ranks until the whistle blew, and then marched across the yard to the dining-room for their sky-blue, their bread, their molasses and their boot-leg. Archie had watched the seasons change in this yard, he had seen its grass-plot fade and the leaves of its stunted trees turn yellow, he had seen it piled with snow and ice; now it was turning green with spring, just like the world outside. Sometimes, as they passed, he caught a glimpse of the death-squad--the men who were being kept until they could be killed in the electric chair--taking their daily exercise, curiously enough, for the benefit of their health. This squad varied in numbers. Sometimes there were a dozen, then there would come a night of horror when the floor of the cell-house was deadened with saw-dust. The next day one would be missing; only eleven would be exercising for their health. Then would come other nights of horror, and the squad would decrease until there were but six. But soon it would begin to increase again, and the number would run up to the normal. Sometimes, in summer, the Sunday-school excursionists had an opportunity to see the death-squad. Archie had seen the children, held by a sick, morbid interest, shrink when the men marched by, as if they were something other than mere people.