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where he questioned Guard Jim Humphrey. Humphrey had not seen or heard anything unusual in or about Old Tower Number Three.
Captain Dunlap, as he walked over the wall toward the ghost tower, admitted frankly to himself that he was "scared stiff." Pausing at the door, he glanced nervously through he window.
The yard lights lit up the interior of the tower sufficiently to assure him that no one—or "thing"—was inside. He unlocked the door and entered.
With a flashlight, he thoroughly examined the telephone. Dust had settled on the instrument. The receiver and the transmitter had apparently not been touched since Asa Shores left the tower. Dust had settled on the doorknobs inside. That the knobs had not been touched since Shores' death was obvious. The one chair, the window-sills, the small washstand and wash basin, all were covered with a thin, undisturbed film of fine dust.
There on the telephone battery box reposed Asa's old corncob pipe and, near it, a small box of matches. The window latches were just as Dunlap had left them when he closed and securely locked the tower a month before.
It was a puzzled and nervous prison official that left the tower, relocked the doors and returned to the inside lookout.
Next day Malcom Hulsey, the "lifer" was admitted to the hospital. The doctor's diagnosis was "nervous breakdown."
but Hulsey, though his nerves were all shot to pieces, was still capable of shrewd plotting.
His admittance to the hospital had been hastened by a diet of soap. Hulsey was so anxious to get far away from Granite River Prison, and was so certain of his ability to do so if he could only be admitted to the hospital, that he had resorted to the old but effective expedient of soap eating.
Soap, taken internally in small doses, will produce various baffling and apparently serious physiological changes in the body. Hulsey looked sick and felt sick, but he was not dangerously ill.
