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or drunkenness. They labored on for twelve hours a day, winter or summer, their hands and faces growing dark and then nearly blackened by the desert sun until eventually the dead skin began to rot and peel away, leaving them with gaping patches of new raw flesh which would become savagely blistered.
    There were other jobs at the prison. Those engaged in work in the tomb of the prison entrails were chalk gray with the ghostly pallor of men who never saw the sunlight at all, but only suffered in its unendurable heat. Cameron discovered early on that there was no doubt about which gang men belonged to because of this difference. Inside laborers, like gaunt skeletons, colorless and thin because of the reduced rations they were given to survive on, contrasted sharply with the sun-blistered, heavy-shouldered laborers on the rock pile.
    Cameron Black was assigned to the boot shop.
    â€˜What are they saving you for?’ his first acquaintance there, a Dutchman named Voorman asked.
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜The inside jobs are only given to those they want to keep alive. For trial, for political favors.’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Cameron told the Dutchman. But he did know, of course. They wanted to keep him alive until he would give up the gold – gold he didn’t have.
    There was no short supply of boots to work on – old boots. Cameron never saw a new pair in his time there. Only old ones, needing restitching, new soles and a cursory shine. These were removed, a pair at a time from those who died on the rockpile. There were hundreds of them needing repair they never got while their last owner was alive.
    â€˜Dead men don’t need boots,’ the Dutchman said as he tossed another dusty, broken pair on the huge pile in the back of the boot shop. No man out of Yuma prison was ever buried with his boots on.
    The gruel became thinner now that Cameron was on the mend. It was of oats in tepid water. The roaches who had stupidly crawled into the cooking pots or come bagged with the oats were the only additional ingredients, although once Cameron did drop his bowl of oatmeal when a still very alive centipede made its way up out of the gray lumpy gruel to crawl over the rim.
    He did not eat the next day, but that was self-defeating and he learned to eat whatever was served with his eyes closed, his nostrils pinched. It made him long for the days past and Stony Harte’s stringy, flavorless Indian pemmican.
    That and the clear flavor of free air. Life!
    He hadn’t forgotten Stony Harte. The man had betrayed his friendship, had tried to murder him, had left Cam to rot in this prison. No, Cameron Black had not forgotten.
    On the morning of his twelfth day in prison, before the sun had truly risen and the cell’s interior was cold enough to freeze a man to the bone, his door was kicked open and Sheriff Barney Yount, accompanied by two blue-uniformed guards, was admitted. Cameron sat up sharply on his rough plank bunk.
    â€˜Hello, Stony,’ Yount said.
    â€˜Sheriff,’ Cam answered warily.
    â€˜They tell me you’re better now.’
    â€˜Some,’ Cameron replied.
    â€˜That’s fine,’ the big sheriff responded. ‘Well enough to stand up to the beating I promised you?’
    â€˜Listen, that’s—’
    As usual, Cameron was unable to get past his first few words with the sadistic lawman. Yount bulked large in the pre-dawn gray; the two guards turned their backs as the sheriff waded in with both fists clenched, his small mouth tight with glee. Cameron couldn’t have fought off the giant lawman before, now with his weight down, his muscles thinning, he had no chance at all. He was as a child before the brutish lawman’s onslaught.
    There is no need to describe the brutality of the beating. Cameron himself could hardly remember enough after the first blow to tell it. He was like a schoolboy being pummeled by a heavyweight fighter, fist after