| Show THREE MONTHS IN A CHINESE PRSON NEW YORK MAN WAS FALSELY ACCUSED OF MURDERING HIS COMPANION BLACK CHOLERA CAUSED DEATH L C Stewart Thrown Into Dungeon That Was Dark Wet and Dirty Food Was Scant and Nauseating Denver Col Homeward bound from China L C Stewart of New York city has reached hero and will i remain for u few weeks in the hope of regaining his health which was broken by three months confinement In n prison In tho celestial kingdom It seems like a nightmare to mo now said Stewart as ho told of his experiences Up hero In Gods country coun-try where tho air Is clean and tho sun Is bright one can scarcely Imagine that this world contains such hellholes hell-holes ns that horrible Chinese dungeon dun-geon As I look back upon my three months living death It almost seems as it I owe my life to some miracle I had been In the British customs service for about eight months It was my duty to go hundreds of miles into the interior nnd collect revenues nt different points My starting placo was Canton and I deposited my collections col-lections at Rangoon It was an awful trip made on foot on horseback by canals and by coolie trains In a little Chinese town whose name I have forgotten far in tho interior in-terior I ran across n young Englishman English-man named Charles Frank I mot him at the house of a French padre Frank was broke and wns anxious to get out of the country Ho begged me to take him along I had a well equipped coolie train and plenty of provisions and as I felt sorry for the poor fellow fel-low I agreed The trip started favorably enough and Frank seemed to bo in good health and overjoyed at tho prospects of getting back into civilization again Wo safely reached the mountain pass between Rangoon and the river front whoso course we had been following nnd were about half way to the summit sum-mit Wo were riding as Is customary l rF 0 A r He Was Fed Once a Day In the mountains In chairs carried on the backs of big coolies Frank and I were chatting together togeth-er when ho suddenly screamed and throwing his arms about me fell The black vomit poured from his mouth upon my white coat and told me instantly in-stantly that he had been stricken by the deadly black cholera The coolies fled panic stricken at the sight but I covered two of them with my revolver and forced them to return Frank was dead within 16 minutes after ho foil We made him a rough pine box and burled him marking the spot with stones Then with my two coolies I started for Rangoon Ran-goon expecting that I myself would be stricken any moment The coolies knew the black vomit had fallen upon me and were afraid to come near tome to-me To my surprise I was not stricken strick-en and reached Rangoon after a terrible ter-rible trip My other coolies had reached there tho day before and when I arrived I was at once arrested and without a hearing thrown Into prison charged with having murdered Frank The officials of-ficials would not accept my explanation explana-tion and I could not get them to make an Investigation Then began three months of the worst torture a man I could endure and still live I was in afoul a-foul dark cell dripping with mildew and decay Once a day a guard would bring me a bowl of some filthy concoction concoc-tion that only nauseated me For days I went without food lying on the damp floor of my dungeon At last I received a call from the British resident and after that was allowed al-lowed to have a lonf of bread and n pint of water a day I became delirious deliri-ous with fever and in my conscious moments was sure I was dying After seemingly endless weeks of suffering suffer-ing an expedition was sent to find Franks body It was at last brought to Rangoon and there an autopsy showed that he had died from cholera as I claimed I was released In almost a dying condition con-dition When I had recovered sufficiently suf-ficiently to travel I went to Sinf < ire gent in my reslgnaton and v to Manila I never care to seet 011111 main |
