Sometimes a convict will grow so nervous that he will attempt to escape, even when there is no chance, or will sham insanity. An acquaintance of mine, Louis, who had often grafted with me when we were on the outside, told me one day he did not expect to live his bit out. When confined a man generally thinks a lot about his condition, reads a book on medicine and imagines he has every disease the book describes. Louis was in this state, and he consulted me and two others as to whether he ought not to "shoot a bug" (sham insanity); and so get transferred to the hospital. One advised him to attack a keeper and demand his baby back. But as Billy had big, black eyes and a cadaverous face, I told him he'd better shoot the melancholy bug; for he could do that better. Accordingly in the morning when the men were to go to work in the stone yard, Billy appeared in the natural (naked). He had been stalled off by two friends until he had reached the yard. There the keepers saw him, and as they liked him, they gently took him to the hospital. He was pronounced incurably insane by two experts, and transferred to the madhouse. The change of air was so beneficial that Louis speedily recovered his senses. At least, the doctors thought so when he was discovered trying to make his elegant (escape); and he was sent back to stir.
As a rule, however, those who attempted to sham insanity failed. They were usually lacking in originality. At any hour of the day or night the whole prison might be aroused by some convict breaking up house, as it was called when a man tried to shoot the bug. He might break everything in his cell, and yell so loud that the other convicts in the cells near by would join in and make a horrible din. Some would curse, and some laugh or howl. If it was at night and they had been awakened out of an opium sleep, they would damn him a thousand miles deep. His friends, however, who knew that he was acting, would plug his game along by talking about his insanity in the presence of stool-pigeons. These latter would tell the keepers that he was buggy (insane), and, if there was not a blow, he might be sent to the hospital. Before that happened, however, he had generally demolished all his furniture. The guards would go to his cell, and chain him up in the Catholic chapel until he could be examined by the doctor. Warden Sage was a humane man, and used to go to the chapel himself and try to quiet the fake lunatic, and give him dainties from his own table. During the night the fake had historic company, for painted on the walls were, on one side of him, Jesus, and on the other, Judas and Mary Magdalene.