O'Brien plays an Irish mine worker, Barney Slaney. Later Barney gets a job as a fireman on the local train for an engineer named Mileaway. He gets married, but finds his wife having an affair with Grover Perkins, a childhood nemesis. Barney loses control and kills them both. He turns himself in and receives a life sentence of hard labor. Barney quickly finds out that the brother of the man he killed, Ed Perkins, will be in charge of his chain gang, and the brother bullies him repeatedly. While the prisoners dig graves, Barney knocks Ed unconscious and drops him into one of the open graves. He then escapes during the ensuing mayhem, in which the warden is killed. He breaks out of the police dragnet, and hides at a farm which recently had a pestilence infection. He meets a woman named Lorraine, and they run away together.[3][4]
What is Barney's sentence?
life sentence of hard labor