Nearly every stroke takes off the skin and draws the blood, and a dozen will make the back a ditch of murder.

Then the whipper stops, looks at the lashes, feels them tender like, and out and down it comes again.

When all the back is ridged and scarred, the flesh, that looked clean and beautiful, becomes a bloody mass.

Some men get a hundred lashes, and that's torture and death.
"A man I knew was flogged told me once that the first blow made his flesh quiver in every nerve from his toe-nails to his finger-nails, and stung his heart as if a knife had gone through his body.

There was agony in his lungs, and the time between each stroke was terrible, and yet the next came too soon.