“I am dreaming,” he said aloud and the man looked up.
“Hello! Do you want to get up?”
Ballam did not reply. He was still staring, his mouth agape. The man was in uniform, in a dark, tight-fitting uniform. He wore a cap on his head and a badge. Round his waist was a shiny black belt and then Ballam read the letters on the shoulder-strap of the tunic.
“A.W.,” he repeated, dazed. “A.W.”
What did “A.W.” stand for? And then the truth flashed on him.
Assistant Warder! He glared round the room. There was one window, heavily barred and covered with thick glass. On the wall was pasted a sheet of printed paper. He staggered out of bed and read, still open-mouthed:
“Regulations for His Majesty’s Prisons.”
He looked down at himself. He had evidently gone to bed with his breeches and stockings on and his breeches were of coarse yellow material and branded with faded black arrows. He was in prison! How long had he been there?
“Are you going to behave today?” asked the warder curtly. “We don’t want any more of those scenes you gave us yesterday!”
“How long have I been here?” croaked Ballam.
“You know how long you’ve been here. You’ve been here three weeks, yesterday.”
“Three weeks!” gasped Ballam. “What is the charge?”
“Now don’t come that game with me, Ballam,” said the warder, not unkindly. “You know I’m not allowed to have conversations with you. Go back and sleep. Sometimes I think you are as mad as you profess to be.”
“Have I been—bad?” asked Ballam.
“Bad?” The warder jerked up his head. “I wasn’t in the court with you, but they say you behaved in the dock like a man demented, and when the Judge was passing sentence of death—”
“My God!” shrieked Ballam and fell back on the bed, white and haggard. “Sentenced to death!” He could hardly form the words. “What have I done?”
“You killed a young lady, you know that,” said the warder. “I’m surprised at you, trying to come it over me after the good friend I’ve been to you, Ballam. Why don’t you buck up and take your punishment like a man?”
There was a calendar above the place where the warder had been sitting.
“Twelfth of April,” read Ballam and could have shrieked again, for it was the first day of March that he met that mysterious stranger. He remembered it all now. Bal! The drug that drove men mad.
He sprang to his feet.
“I want to see the governor! I want to tell them the truth! I’ve been drugged!”
“Now you’ve told us all that story before,” said the warder with an air of resignation. “When you killed the young lady—”
“What young lady?” shrieked Ballam. “Not Maggiore! Don’t tell me—”
“You know you killed her right enough,” said the warder. “What’s the good of making all this fuss? Now go back to bed, Ballam. You can’t do any good by kicking up a shindy this night of all nights in the world.”
“I want to see the governor! Can I write to him?”
“You can write to him if you like,” and the warder indicated the table.
Ballam staggered up to the table and sat down shakily in a chair. There was half a dozen sheets of blue notepaper headed in black: “H.M. Prison, Wandsworth, SW1.”
He was in Wandsworth prison! He looked round the cell. It did not look like a cell and yet it did. It was so horribly bare and the door was heavy looking. He had never been in a cell before and of course it was different to what he had expected.
A thought struck him.
“When—when am I to be punished?” he said chokingly.
“Tomorrow!”
The word fell like a sentence of doom and the man fell forward, his head upon his arms and wept hysterically. Then of a sudden he began to write with feverish haste, his face red with weeping.
His letter was incoherent. It was about a man who had come to the club and had given him a drug and then he had spent a whole eternity in darkness seeing lights and being chased by people and hearing whispering voices. And he was not guilty. He loved Genee Maggiore. He would not have hurt a hair of her head.
He stopped here to weep again. Perhaps he was dreaming? Perhaps he was under the influence of this drug. He dashed his knuckles against the wall and the shock made him wince.
“Here, none of that,” said the warder sternly. “You get back to bed.”
Ballam looked at his bleeding knuckles. It was true! It was no dream! It was true, true!
He lay on the bed and lost consciousness again and when he awoke the warder was still sitting in his place reading. He seemed to doze again for an hour, although in reality it was only for a few minutes, and every time he woke something within him said: “This morning you die!”
Once he sprang shrieking from the bed and had to be thrown back.
“If you give me any more trouble I’ll get another officer in and we’ll tie you down. Why don’t you take it like a man? It’s no worse for you than it was for her,” said the warder savagely.
After that he lay still and he was falling into what seemed a longer sleep when the warder touched him. When he awoke he found his own clothes laid neatly by the side of the bed upon a chair and he dressed himself hurriedly.
He looked around for something.
“Where’s the collar?” he asked trembling.
“You don’t need a collar,” the warder’s voice had a certain quality of sardonic humour.
“Pull yourself together,” said the man roughly. “Other people have gone through this. From what I’ve heard
