HEARTS OF GOLD

26. THE CONVICT MINES.

226 THE CONVICT MINES. Chapter XXVI. In the midst of a dense woods, flanked on the east by a broken chain of low-lying hills, stood a convict mining camp, operated by a millionaire senator, wined and dined as a social magnate in the capital of the nation. Here, before man came to curse it with his cruelties, Nature exulted in surroundings the most picturesque and beautiful. All day long the pure mountain stream, gushing forth from a perennial spring in the solitudes of the forest, pitched over miniature Niagaras, dodged and frisked between sharp upturned rocks, grew thoughtful and sedate, as it paused for a moment of recreation, in the deep quiet waters shadowed by overhanging oaks and elms. The morning sun as he chased the shadows of night from this sequestered bower, surprised nature in a rude undress more entrancing than any clothing the facile pen or the artist’s brush can depict. Here unmolested, the partridge built her nest, the squirrel cracked nuts and saucily licked his paws, while the timid deer lapped water from the laughing brook and lead through the devious pathways of the unbroken forest her brown-eyed young. Into this natural paradise, like the serpent into Eden, came man. He broke through the forest, tunneled the mountains, bridged and vitiated the stream, killed the game and in place of the song of the bird and the murmur of the stream, brought the whistle of the engine and the weird murmurs of sadness and despair. On the banks of this stream in midwinter, years before the beginning of our story, about forty wretches, handcuffed two and two, with a chain passing through links on the chain that coupled them, were driven from the railway to the spot where they were to form the nucleus of a convict’s camp. The neighboring hills were seamed with a vein of excellent coal and these men were brought to open and work in the new mines. They built a “cell house” first and 227 hearts of gold afterward a number of other outbuildings for the deposit of such stores as are needed about a mine. The “cell house” was built of logs. It was a long, low structure, covered with brush, without windows and having but a single door. In this the prisoners ate and slept. Two platforms, one above the other, gently sloping toward the centre of the building, were erected on either side. When the work of the day was over, the prisoners, men and women, were driven into the cell house; made to take the places assigned them, and after eating required to lie down. Half way between the upper and lower platforms, a chain was stretched, fastening on the outside of the cell house. This chain, called the “building chain,” passing through a link on the end of the “waist chain” of each of the convicts, made escape almost impossible. Suspended from wires, throughout the building, were pine knots. These, when lighted, gave to the strange scene within a grotesque appearance. The front of the cell house was not fastened up as the other sides, but between the logs were spaces, across which strips of wood were nailed perpendicularly, through which the guard that stood without, could always command an excellent view of the interior. The building was surrounded by a palisade. The sanitary conditions of such a place necessarily beggars description. The prisoners, with scarcely clothing enough to cover their nakedness, had no change until the clothes they wore fell apart by their own weight. Working in mud and water fifteen hours a day, with scarcely food enough to keep soul and body from divorcement, sleeping in an atmosphere thick with noxious exhalations, fetid with filth and teeming with vermin, death itself was a welcome relief. Nor was there any distinction of age or sex. Women and men, boys and girls, lived in this foul prison pen utterly regardless of the laws of morality. The guards under a condition where no one was responsible, were cruel and vindictive. No report was given nor was any required. When a new batch of prisoners were driven in they changed their citizen clothes for the convict’s stripes, were numbered and immediately set to work. Each morning the convicts were awakened at four o’clock, treated to a breakfast of salt pork and corn bread hurriedly prepared, and handcuffed in pairs, a squad chain running through links in the chain that bound them together , they...