The Green Forest tribune., 1909-01-29

| q IclI-CNug tOl HCl Ol tllC ItiI, anu on hands and knees he started to search for it.
 | The sport fascinated him. When he 1 discovered the metal disc he spun it up and again started in pursuit. The leaden hours rolled by slowly but the same continued. Gilfillan blessed the button. He began to feel love for it. He called to it when it hid from hiu in the cracks between the cold stones, and he cried historically over it when he discovered it after a long search. it seemed alive. It became a com panion to him in that horrible, black ! vault into which not one single ray Of l light came to pierece the darkness.
 It was on the evening of the sixth day that Nemesis clinched with Gillian. The prisoner had, up to that moment, thrown the button up a thousand times and found it in each occasion by laboriously searching on hands and knees. But on the evening of the sixth day a peculiar incident hap pened.
 The prisoner threw the button up into the blackness, but it did not come down again.
 Gillian waited with aching ears to hear the tinkle of the metal on the stone, but he heard no sound. The 1 button didn't fall, and the silence that filled the cell as he stood listening, hurt him. He clenched his teeth to strangle a scream of terror that fear pushed to his lips. What was wrong?
 The prisoners trembling knees gave way under him and he sank to the floor. His hands moved out into the darkness and commenced to feel the stone flooring, but every nerve was taut.
 On every other occasion when he had tossed up the button he had heard it fall distinctly, but he was certain that there was not the slightest sound after the last toss. Still, he would search.
 The hot hands crept over the stones eagerly, feverishly. The fingers worked madly but the bare floor mocked their search. There was no button. Again and again and again the prisoner searched Through the cold hours of the night he crawled backwards and forwards till each join ing between those tombstones of Hope seemed familiar to his blind fingers. But there was nothing on the floor. The button had not fallen after he had jerked it into the blackness.
 Gillian tried to think Why had it not returned? he asked himself. What had happened to it? There was nothing above him but bare walls, and yet Where was it? Again and again he whispered the question of the thick black pail that seemed to heave around him. He asked it in a louder tone. He screamed it. Then some thing like a laugh came from one corner of that braindestroying pit of horror and Gillian was panic stricken.
 Imagination, contrary to the opinion of scientific experts, lies in the stom- ach, and the bread and water diet that Gllfillan had been receiving was not sufficiently weighty to keep it down. The prisoner began to see things. The thick waves of curse-incrusted dark ness welled up from the corners and smothered him. Invisible hands Srasped his throat and strangled him. He kicked at the door leading into the dark corridor opening into the main wing, but Warder Tomlinson. of the night watch was S1iphtIv deaf and Gld not hear him. He raced around the cell with Terror-grasping. gibber- Ing Tarror-at his heels, and the stone vault echoed to his wild screams of agony
 When Warder Dunworth opened the eoof on the morning of the seventh day to acquaint Gilfllan of the fact that his term in dark cell was over, the hands of Terror had completed their work. The prisoners face was battered beyond recognition where he had dashed against the walls in his mad race. and he shrieked wildly when the warder attempted to drag him into the light.
 Eleven years afterwards. when an enlightened prison controller did away With the dark cells, the masons. tear ing down the black vault at Enlota found jacket button securely fastened in thick cobweb near the ceiling of the cell. But in the crim- lnal ward of Enlota insane asylum a prisoner still spends his days and nlghts hunting for that button.