I don't know how many more circlings of the clock-hands were measured off before the break came. I lost count of the time by days and was no longer able to think clearly. In perfect physical condition when I was arrested, I began to go to pieces, both mentally and physically, under the strain of suspense. Then insomnia came to add its terrors; I could neither eat nor sleep. I had an ominous foreboding of what the total loss of appetite meant, and kept telling myself over and over that for Polly's sake I must fight to save my sanity.
Under such conditions I was beginning to see things where there was nothing to be seen on the day when I had my first visitor, and the shock of surprise when the cell door was opened to admit Cyrus Whitredge, the lawyer whose bungling defense had done so little to stave off my conviction, was almost like a premonition of further disaster. Before I could rise from my seat on the cot he was shaking hands with me and twisting his dry, leathery face into its nearest approach to a smile.
"Don't bother to get up, Bert," he began effusively. "Just stay right where you are and take it easy. I've been trying for three solid days to get up here, but court is in session and I couldn't break away. You're not looking very well, and they tell me down below that you're off your feed. That won't do, you know--won't do at all. We are going to get you right out of this, one way or another, mighty quick. You've taken your medicine like a man, and we don't propose to let 'em give you a second dose of it--not by a jugful."
All this was so totally unlike the Whitredge I had known that I fairly gasped. Then I reflected--while he was drawing up the single three-legged stool and sitting down--that in all probability the Little Clean-Up was responsible for the change in him. I was no longer a poor bank clerk without money or friends.
"'We,' you say?" I put in, meaning to make him define himself.
"Why, yes, of course I'm including myself; I'm your attorney, and as soon as the news of your arrest came I made preparations to drop everything else, right away, and get into the fight. You got your sentence and served it, and we'll scrap 'em awhile on the proposition of bringing you back for more of it simply because you happened to forget, one day, and step over the State boundaries. I don't know but what we could show that the law is unconstitutional, if we had to. But it won't come to anything like that, I guess."