brutes of the state. It was the forecast to each man of what each man
might expect in inquisition hall.

I have been through most of the red hells of prison life, but, worst of
all, far worse than what they intend to do with me in a short while, was
the particular hell of the dungeons in the days that followed.

Long Bill Hodge, the hard-bitten mountaineer, was the first man
interrogated. He came back two hours later--or, rather, they conveyed
him back, and threw him on the stone of his dungeon floor. They then
took away Luigi Polazzo, a San Francisco hoodlum, the first native
generation of Italian parentage, who jeered and sneered at them and
challenged them to wreak their worst upon him.

It was some time before Long Bill Hodge mastered his pain sufficiently to
be coherent.

"What about this dynamite?" he demanded. "Who knows anything about
dynamite?"

And of course nobody knew, although it had been the burden of the
interrogation put to him.

Luigi Polazzo came back in a little less than two hours, and he came back
a wreck that babbled in delirium and could give no answer to the
questions showered upon him along the echoing corridor of dungeons by the
men who were yet to get what he had got, and who desired greatly to know
what things had been done to him and what interrogations had been put to
him.