100%: The Story of a Patriot | Page 7

the "hole," and
the door was opened and Peter shoved inside into utter darkness. The
door banged, and the bolts rattled; and then silence. Peter sank upon a
cold stone floor, a bundle of abject and hideous misery.
These events had happened with such terrifying rapidity that Peter
Gudge had hardly time to keep track of them. But now he had plenty of
time, he had nothing but time. He could think the whole thing out, and
realize the ghastly trick which fate had played upon him. He lay there,
and time passed; he had no way of measuring it, no idea whether it was
hours or days. It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it
the "cooler," and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and
intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there
and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.

And surely no more tormented mind than the mind of Peter Gudge had
ever been put in that black hole. It was the more terrible, because so
utterly undeserved, so preposterous. For such a thing to happen to him,
Peter Gudge, of all people--who took such pains to avoid discomfort in
life, who was always ready to oblige anybody, to do anything he was
told to do, so as to have'an easy time, a sufficiency of food, and a warm
corner to crawl into! What could have persuaded fate to pick him for
the victim of this cruel prank; to put him into this position, where he
could not avoid suffering, no matter what he did? They wanted him to
tell something, and Peter would have been perfectly willing to tell
anything--but how could he tell it when he did not know it?
The more Peter thought about it, the more outraged he became. It was
monstrous! He sat up and glared into the black darkness. He talked to
himself, he talked to the world outside, to the universe which had
forgotten his existence. He stormed, he wept. He got on his feet and
flung himself about the cell, which was six feet square, and barely tall
enough for him to stand erect. He pounded on the door with his one
hand which Guffey had not lamed, he kicked, and he shouted. But there
was no answer, and so far as he could tell, there was no one to hear.
When he had exhausted himself, he sank down, and fell into a haunted
sleep; and then he wakened again, to a reality worse than any nightmare.
That awful man was coming after him again! He was going to torture
him, to make him tell what he did not know! All the ogres and all the
demons that had ever been invented to frighten the imagination of
children were as nothing compared to the image of the man called
Guffey, as Peter thought of him.
Several ages after Peter had been locked up, he heard sounds outside,
and the door was opened. Peter was cowering in the corner, thinking
that Guffey had come. There was a scraping on the floor, and then the
door was banged again, and silence fell. Peter investigated and
discovered that they had put in a chunk of bread and a pan of water.
Then more ages passed, and Peter's impotent ragings were repeated;
then once more they brought bread and water, and Peter wondered, was
it twice a day they brought it, or was this a new day? And how long did

they mean to keep him here? Did they mean to drive him mad? He
asked these questions of the man who brought the bread and water, but
the man made no answer, he never at any time spoke a word. Peter had
no company in that "hole" but his God; and Peter was not well
acquainted with his God, and did not enjoy a tete-a-tete with Him.
What troubled Peter most was the cold; it got into his bones, and his
teeth were chattering all the time. Despite all his moving about, he
could not keep warm. When the man opened the door, he cried out to
him, begging for a blanket; each time the man came, Peter begged more
frantically than ever. He was ill, he had been injured in the explosion,
he needed a doctor, he was going to die! But there was never any
answer. Peter would lie there and shiver and weep, and writhe, and
babble, and lose consciousness for a while, and not know whether he
was awake or asleep, whether he was living or dead. He was becoming
delirious, and the things that were happening to him, the people who
were tormenting him, became monsters and fiends who carried him
away upon far journeys,