The world outside seemed to waken with bird-song. It was
spring, and time for the sitting of the grand jury that was to decide
whether we were, each of us, to be held over for trial by petty jury ...
days of fretful eagerness and discontent ... from the windows the yellow
trusty-girl said she could see lines of buggies driving in to town. It
was the custom of farmers for miles around to drive in to their county
seat during the court assizes ... a week or so of holidays like a
continuous circus for them.
When the sheriff would have occasion to come into the room in which
stood our big cage, the boys would crowd up to the bars, each one hoping
for news favourable to his case ... the prevailing atmosphere was one of
hope.
* * * * *
The negro who had murdered his wife and her sweetheart with a shotgun
had already had his trial. He was--and had been--but waiting the arrival
of the prison contractor, as the latter went from county jail to county
jail, gathering in his flock, and taking them away, chained together, to
the penitentiary and the cane brakes ... "where only a big buck nigger
can live," the little pickpocket had told me, with fear in his voice....
He came ... the contractor ... to our jail at midnight. All of us leaped
from our mattresses to witness the dreary procession of neck-chained and
be-manacled convicted men.
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