The prisoner in the cage to his left was little more than a skeleton when Talib
first entered the prison. He lay huddled up in a corner, with his hands pressed to
his empty stomach and the sharp angles of his bones peeping through his bed-
sores, motionless, miserable, but, let us hope, only half conscious of his misery.
Talib saved a small portion of his own insufficient meal for this man, but the
poor wretch was already too far gone for any such tardy aid to avail to save him.
It was with difficulty that he could swallow the rice which Talib passed to him,
in grudging handfuls, through the bars of his cell. When at last the food, by a
superhuman effort, had been forced down his shrunken gullet, his enfeebled
stomach refused to receive it, and violent spasms and vomiting followed, which
seemed to rend his stricken frame, as a fierce wind rips through the palm-leaf
sail of a native fishing-smack. In a day or two he became wildly delirious, and
Talib then witnessed a terrible sight. A raving maniac in a well-ordered asylum,
where padded walls and careful tendance do much to save the poor disordered
soul from tearing its way through the frail casing of diseased flesh and bone, is a
sight to shudder at, not to see! But in the vile cage in which this poor victim was
confined, nothing prevented the maddened sufferer from doing himself any
injury that it is possible for a demented wretch to do. With the strength of frenzy
he dashed his head and body relentlessly against the unyielding bars of the cage.
He fell back crushed and bleeding, foaming at the mouth with a bloody froth,
and making inarticulate beast noises in his throat. Then, as the madness again
took hold of him, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, he flung himself once
more at the bars, and, after another fearful paroxysm, fell back inert upon the
floor. For hours he lay exhausted, but wildly restless, too spent to struggle and
too demented and tortured to be still. He moaned, he groaned, he cursed with
horrid filthy words and phrases, bit as a dog bites in his madness, strove to gnaw
the loathsome rags which had long ceased to cover his nakedness, and then again
was still, save for the incessant rolling of his restless head, and the wilder motion
of his eyes which glistened and flashed with fever. Just before dawn, when the
chill air was making itself felt even in the fetid atmosphere of the place, his
reason came back to him for a space, and he spoke to Talib in a thin, far-away
voice, and with many gasps and sighs and pauses:
'Little Brother,' he said, 'Dost thou also watch? For not long now shall thy elder
brother bear these pains. Hast thou any water? I thirst sore. No matter, it is the
fate to which I was born. Brother, I stole five dollars from a Chief. I did it
because my wife was very fair, and she abused me, saying that I gave her neither
ornaments nor raiment. Brother, I was detected. I knew not then that it was my
wife who gave the knowledge of my theft to the Chief,—he in whose household