The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton

dimly heard the chanting of the crowd: “Oh, my, think I’m going to die!” as he reached the top of the wall, and without hesitation grabbed the bar with its iron spikes. His hands were immediately lacerated.
    From childhood, Clean Willy had had no sensation in his palms, which were thickly covered with calluses and scar tissue. It was the custom of homeowners of the period to keep a hearth burning right to the moment when the chimney sweep and his child assistant arrived to clean the flue, and if the child scorched his hands in hastening up the still-hot chimney, that was not any great concern. If the child didn’t like the work, there were plenty of others to take his place.
    Clean Willy’s hands had been burned again and again, over a period of years. So he felt nothing now as the blood trickled down from his slashed palms, ran in rivulets along his forearms, and dripped and spattered on his face. He paid no attention at all.
    He moved slowly along the revolving spike wheels, down the full length of one wall, then to the second wall, and then to the third. It was exhausting work. He lost all sense of time, and never heard the noise of the crowd that followed the execution. He continued to make his way around the perimeter of the prison yard until he reached the south wall. There he paused and waited while a patrolling guard passed beneath him. The guard never looked up, although Willy later remembered that drops of his own blood landed on the man’s cap and shoulders.
    When the guard was gone, Willy clambered over the spikes—cutting his chest, his knees, and his legs, so that the blood now ran very freely—and jumped fifteen feet down to the roof of the nearest building outside the prison. No one heard the sound of his landing,for the area was deserted; everybody was attending the execution.
    From that roof he jumped to another and then another, leaping six- and eight-foot gaps without hesitation. Once or twice, he lost his grip on the shingles and slates of the roofs, but he always recovered. He had, after all, spent much of his life on rooftops.
    Finally, less than half an hour from the time he began to inch his way up the prison wall, he slipped through a gabled window at the back of Mrs. Molloy’s lodging house, padded down the hallway, and entered the room rented, at considerable expense, by Mr. Pierce and his party.
    Agar recalled that Willy presented “a ghastly aspect, most fearsome,” and he added that “he was bleeding like a stuck saint,” although this blasphemous reference was expunged from the courtroom records.
    Pierce directed the swift treatment of the man, who was barely conscious. He was revived with the vapors of ammonium chloride from a cut-glass inhaler. His clothes were stripped off by the women, who pretended no modesty but worked quickly; his many wounds were staunched with styptic powder and sticking plaster, then bound with surgical bandages. Agar gave him a sip of coca wine for energy, and Burroughs & Wellcome beef-and-iron wine for sustenance. He was forced to down two Carter’s Little Nerve Pills and some tincture of opium for his pain. This combined treatment brought the man to his senses, and enabled the women to clean his face, douse his body with rose water, and bundle him into the waiting dress.
    When he was dressed, he was given a sip of Bromo Caffein for further energy, and told to act faint. A bonnet was placed over his head, and boots laced on his feet; his bloody prison garb was stuffed in the picnic basket.
    No one among the crowd of more than twenty thousand paid the slightest attention when the well-dressed party of hangers-on departed Mrs. Molloy’s boarding house—with one woman of their party so faint that she had to be carried by the men, who hustled her into a waiting cab—and rattled off into the morning light. A faint woman was a common enough sight and, in any case, nothing to compare to a woman turning slowly at the end of the rope, back and forth, back