_Splukk!_ went the guard's kidney-sock as it landed on the right hinge of my jaw. Soft or not, it nearly dropped me. "I said there _is_ a choice--not _you have_ a choice, shnook. Besides, the steam laundry is for the ladies. Don't forget who's in charge here." "Who _is_ in charge here, then?" I asked, strangely emboldened by the clout on the side of the jaw. _Splukk!_ "That's somethin' you don't need to know, shnook. You ain't gonna sue nobody. You signed a _release_--remember?" I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then, behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. "Stop that! Oh stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about--" "Take it easy lady," said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. "I won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable." I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember with terrible clarity that I felt nothing. "So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?" said the man behind the desk--"the captain," we were instructed to call him. Another gust of wet wind joined his comments. "Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain.'" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes, coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours per week. Fifteen minutes each. The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the edge of the desk with his kidney-sock. "You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?" asked the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause. My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect. * * * * * It must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went gently haywire. I was conducted to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," which turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the larger trees. A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant that his voice did not command the entire scene. "_Hut-ho! hut-ho! Hut-ho HAW!_" he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant.