smug citizen, do these your hang-dogs fear to gaze upon the facial horror
of the horror they perpetrate for you and ours and at your behest?

Please remember that I am not asking this question in the
twelve-hundredth year after Christ, nor in the time of Christ, nor in the
twelve-hundredth year before Christ. I, who am to be hanged this year,
the nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth after Christ, ask these questions of
you who are assumably Christ's followers, of you whose hang-dogs are
going to take me out and hide my face under a black cloth because they
dare not look upon the horror they do to me while I yet live.

And now back to the situation in the dungeons. When the last guard
departed and the outer door clanged shut, all the forty beaten,
disappointed men began to talk and ask questions. But, almost
immediately, roaring like a bull in order to be heard, Skysail Jack, a
giant sailor of a lifer, ordered silence while a census could be taken.
The dungeons were full, and dungeon by dungeon, in order of dungeons,
shouted out its quota to the roll-call. Thus, every dungeon was
accounted for as occupied by trusted convicts, so that there was no
opportunity for a stool to be hidden away and listening.

Of me, only, were the convicts dubious, for I was the one man who had not
been in the plot. They put me through a searching examination. I could
but tell them how I had just emerged from dungeon and jacket in the
morning, and without rhyme or reason, so far as I could discover, had
been put back in the dungeon after being out only several hours. My
record as an incorrigible was in my favour, and soon they began to talk.

As I lay there and listened, for the first time I learned of the break
that had been a-hatching. "Who had squealed?" was their one quest, and