On the outside of the cage in which we were cooped like menagerie animals, a negro girl had her cot. She slept and lived out there by the big stove which heated the place. She was a girl of palish yellow colour. She was a trusty. She had been caught watching outside of a house while two grown-up negro women went within to rob. * * * * * Monday morning "kangaroo court" was called ... that court which prisoners hold, mimicking the legal procedure to which they grow so accustomed during their lives. We were arraigned for trial--the charge against us, that of "Breaking Into Jail." The cotton thief served as prosecuting attorney. The negro youth in for rape of one of his own colour,--the sergeant-at-arms; while the negro preacher in for hog-stealing defended us ... and he did it so well that we were let off with ten blows of the strap a-piece. We had no money to be mulcted of, nor were we able to procure from friends, as the custom is, funds for the buying of whiskey and tobacco. * * * * * In a few days Bud and I had settled down into the routine of jail-life. Every morning we swept our cells, and all the prisoners took turns sweeping the corridor. The fine for spitting on the floor was ten lashes laid on hard. And each day before breakfast we soaked the seams of our clothes in vile-smelling creosote to kill off the lice and nits. We had no chance to bathe, and were given but little water to wash our face and hands. * * * * * "I wonder what they are going to do with us?" "Anything they please," answered Bud gloomily. "From thirty to ninety days on the county farm, I suppose?" "We'll be lucky if we don't get from four to ten years in the pen." "What for?" "Burglary--didn't we break into that warehouse?" * * * * * Our meals were passed in to us through an open space near the level of the floor, at the upper end of the cage, where a bar had been removed for that purpose. We'd line up and the tin plates would be handed in, one after the other ... two meals a day. For breakfast a corn pone of coarse, white corn meal, and a bit of fried sow-belly. For dinner, all the water we could drink. For supper, breakfast all over again, with the addition of a dab of greens. On rare occasions the sheriff's son or the jailer went hunting ... and then we'd have rabbit. The sheriff had the contract, at so much per head, for feeding the prisoners. Each morning I used to ask the jailer for the occasional newspaper with which he covered the basket in which he brought our food to us. One morning my eyes fell upon an interesting item: