Through the Shadows with O'Henry

by Эл Дженнингс

  "Colonel," Porter's face lighted with humorous eagerness, "do you think we stand any chance to collect that $7,000 you paid down on it? I'm a little in need of funds."

  Not many could resist the winning magnetism of Bill Porter if he chose to make himself agreeable. As soon as he had spoken I knew that some secret grief was tugging at him. Porter had labored hard over some story—Billy Raidler had sent it out in the usual way for him. It had come back. He jested about it.

  "The average editor," he said, "never knows a firecracker until he hears the bang of its explosion. Those fellows can't tell a story until some one else takes the risk of setting it off."

  "They're a damn' bunch of ignoramuses!" Porter had read the story to Billy and me and we had sent it off with singing hearts. We werfe sure the world must acknowledge Porter, even as we did.

  "All I'm sorry for is the loss of the stamps, Billy was forced to steal from the State to mail it with. It may damage the reputation of the State board of the Ohio penitentiary," Porter replied, but he was really disappointed. The rejection of his manuscripts did not dull the edge of his self-confidence, but filled him with forebodings as to his future.

  "I should not like to be a beggar, colonel," he often said, "and my pen is the only investment I can make. I am continually paying assessments on it. I would like to collect a few dividends."

  That same story paid its dividends later. Porter revamped it here and there and it made a big hit for him.

  "I'll tell you why I'm not interested in Sally," he swung back to the subject with a suddenness that startled me. "She's better off here than she ever could be outside. I know this place is doom—but what chance has a girl with Sally's past in the world? What are you thinking of, colonel, when you plan to send the girl out there to be trampled in the gutter?"

  Sally said almost the same words to me when I tried to get her a pardon after I was freed. I went back to the pen to see her.

  "Oh, Mr. Jennings!" Her face had grown thin and its transparent whiteness made her seem a thing of unearthly spirituality. "Don't bother about me. I'm lost. You know it. Do you think they would ever let me crawl back? You know I'm a bad woman."

  "I had a baby that I didn't have any right to—do you think the world ever forgives such a crime as that? Leave me alone here. I'm finished. There's no pardon on earth for me."

  CHAPTER XXII.

  Defiance of Foley the Goat; honesty hounded; O. Henry's scorn; disruption of the Recluse Club.

  Sally was right. There was no place for her in the outside world. The ex-convict is thrown against a social and economic boycott that no courage or persistence can effectively break.

  We talked about it often—Bill Porter and I. It was the topic of eternal interest just as the discussion of dress is with women. And yet, for Porter, this talk about the future was an unalloyed torment. It agitated and distressed him. He would come into the post-office of an evening and we would gossip with fluent merriment. Without prelude, one of us would mention a con who had been sent back on another jolt. All the whimsical light that usually played about his large, handsome face would give place to a shadow of heavy gloom. The quick, facile tongue would halt its whispering banter.

  Bill Porter, the wag, became Bill Porter, the cynic. Fear of the future was like a poisonous serpent that had coiled into his heart and lodged there, its fangs striking into the core of his happiness.

  "The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain," he said many a time. "If the world once sees it, you are doomed. It shall not see it on me. I will not become an outcast.

  "The man who tries to hurl himself against the tide of humanity is sure to be sucked down in the undertow. I am going to swim with the current."

  Porter had less than a year more to serve. He was already planning on his re-entrance to the free world. For me the question did not then exist. My sentence was life. But I felt that Porter's position was false. I knew that it would mean an unsheathed sword perpetually hanging over his head. The fear of exposure saddened and almost tragically hounded his life.

  "When I get out, I will bury the name of Bill Porter in the depths of oblivion. No one shall know that the Ohio penitentiary ever furnished me with board and bread.

  "I will not and I could not endure the slanting, doubtful scrutiny of ignorant human dogs!"

  Porter was an enigma to me in those days. There was no accounting for his moods. He was the kindest and most tolerant of men and yet he would sometimes launch into invective against humanity that seemed to come from a heart charged with contemptuous anger for his fellows. I learned to understand him later. He liked men ; he loathed their shams.

  The freemasonry of honest worth was the only carte blanche to his friendship. Porter would pick his companions from the slums as readily as from the drawing-rooms. He was an aristocrat in his culture and his temperament, but it was an aristocracy that paid no tribute to the material credentials of society.

  Money, fine clothes, pose—they could not hoodwink him. He could not abide snobbery or insincerity. He wanted to meet men and to make friends with them—not with their clothes and their bank accounts. He knew an equal even when hidden in rags—and he could scent an inferior underneath a wealth of purple and fine linen.

  Porter dealt with the fundamentals in his human relations. He went down under the skin. And so he scoffed at conventional standards of appraising men and women. He belittled the paltry claims whereon the shallow minded based their supposed prestige.

  "Colonel," he would mock, "I have a proud ancestry. It runs back thousands and thousands of years. Do you know, I can trace it clear back to Adam!

  "The man I would like to meet is the one whose family tree does not take its root in the Garden of Eden. What an oddity he would have to be a sort of spontaneous creation.

  "And, colonel, if the first families only looked far enough back, they would find their poor, miserable progenitors blindly swallowing about in the slime of the sea!"

  That any of these descendants of slime should dare to look down upon him even in thought was intolerable. He knew himself to be the equal of all men. His fierce, honest independence would brook patronage from none.

  "I won't be under an obligation to any one. When I get out from here I'll strike free and bold. No one shall hold the club of ex-convict over me."

  "Other men have said the same." I felt that Forter's attitude lacked courage. "And there is always some one to hunt them down. You can't get away with it."

  "You can't beat the game if any one ever finds out you once were a number," Porter flung back, riled and indignant that he was forced to defend himself.

  "The only way to win is to conceal."

  Every day incidents happened to bear out Porter's argument.

  Men would be sent out and in a few months they were back. The past was their scourge. They could not escape its lash. And just a few weeks after we had talked about the thing—a few weeks after I had told him of Sally—Foley the Goat and the sinister tragedy that followed him threw us all into a hot fury of resentment and rage.

  Foley's misfortune made a tremendous impression on Porter. The incident was directly responsible for the breakup of the Recluse Club.

  After Porter was transferred to the steward's office, three weeks passed and he had not come to one of our Sunday dinners. His absense was as depressing as a cold rain on a May Day fete. The club was lifeless without him. Even Billy Raidler's bubbling raillery simmered down.

  Old man Carnot grew more querrulous when his napkin was carelessly folded and Louisa could not argue the beginning and the end of Creation. When he started in to divide Infinity there was no one to oppose him.

  I took Bill's absence as a personal insult. I felt that a friend had forgotten me.

  We were sitting at the table on the fourth Sunday. We had a wretched meal. No one had been able to bring in the bacon.

  I usually procured the roast. I would take over about two dollars in stamps to the guard at the commissary and this State official wou
ld open the door and allow me to take all that I could carry.

  A new guard had come in. I was afraid to try the old tactics on him. Louisa had been equally unfortunate. We had nothing but some leftover potatoes, some canned string beans and stale doughnuts for the weekly feast.

  "Where is Mr. Bill?" old Carnot complained. "Has the man's promotion inflated his self-esteem? By Jove, does he not realize that the name Carnot is one of the proudest in New Orleans!" He was sputtering and fuming.

  "Mr. Carnot, a name may be your pass-key to the domains of the elite," I tried to taunt him. "But Bill Porter has an inner circle of his own. He doesn't care what your credentials are!"

  I went over to the window and looked across the prison campus, hoping that Bill might be coming along. I was about to give up when I saw his portly figure swinging hurriedly but with calm dignity down the alley.

  "Fellow comrades—the prodigal returns and he brings the fatted calf with him," Porter's full gray eyes gleamed, and he began to empty his pockets. A small dray could not have carried much more. There were French sardines, deviled ham, green peas, canned chicken, jellies and all manner of delicacies.

  We looked on as Lazarus might have when an extra fat crumb fell from Dives' table.

  It was a joyous reunion. It was the last meeting of the Recluse Club. A bitter feud grew up between its members. The case of Foley the Goat and Porter's indignant sympathy brought to its end the one pleasant feature of our prison life.

  There are some men who are conquered only by death. They will not yield even though life is the penalty for rebellion. Men of this type can no more survive in prison than a free-thinking private can in the army.

  They do not fit in with the crushing discipline of penitentiary life. They are marked for a quick finish the moment their heads are shaved and their chests hung with a number. The man who will not bend is broken. It is the inevitable law of prison life.

  The prison guard will not endure defiance. It whips the beast in him to a frenzy. In the Ohio pen they had a way of eliminating the unruly. The trip- hammer at bolt contract was their neat manner of execution.

  Foley the Goat was one of these incorrigibles. He was more hateful to the guards than leprosy. They sent him to the trip-hammer. The man consigned to that labor is doomed. There is no reprieve for him. He cannot endure the terrific grind more than three or four months—then he is carted to the hospital to rack out a few breaths before going to the trough.

  Death was a 'mighty-severe sentence for Foley.

  His capital sin was his fearless independence. He would fling back an angry retort to a guard even though he knew that the flesh would be stripped from his back in payment. He was consistent in his defiance. No one ever heard the Goat send up a yell from the basement. It gave him an odd reputation in the pen. To the other prisoners he seemed a man protected by a sort of witchcraft.

  "He is possessed of the devil," they would whisper in awed admiration. "It ain't in flesh and blood to stand it. He's thrown a spell about himself. He don't feel!"

  "Sure, he's in cohoots with the Old Fellow," another would volunteer. "He had ghosts rifling the purses of Columbus for him after he cleaned out all the pockets in Cincinnati."

  The superstitious believed it, and if ever there was a man about whom the mantle of mystery draped itself with a natural grace it was Foley the Goat. He was almost unbelievably lean- and hollow-looking and his eye was the most compelling and fiery thing I had ever looked upon.

  I never will forget the quivering throb of interest that caught me the first time I saw that smoldering red-brown eye flaming out its defi' at the prison guard.

  I had stopped to give an order from the warden. A tall, angular, unsubstantial fellow came with nervous swiftness toward us. He moved with such rapidity he seemed to be winging across the grass. The breath of an instant that hurried figure paused in its ardent walk and the man lashed upon the guard the burning light of his scornful eye. It was uncanny. It went over the guard like a malignant curse.

  "Damn' Beanpole!" The guard set his teeth. "He'll get his—damn his bewitched eye!"

  "Who is it?"

  "Who? Devil take him the Goat, of course. He murders men with his looks. Who else would dare do it? He's got about three months more to live, damn him !"

  Foley was the master pickpocket of Ohio. His nimble fingers, with their ghostly lightness, had gathered a fortune. A mean and paltry profession it seemed to me until I talked about it to Foley. He had as much pride in his "gift" as a musician, or a poet, or a train-robber has in his. But Foley's art was not in the accepted curriculum. He was sent up for two years.

  They had been two years of relentless punishment for Foley. He was early initiated into the horrors of the basement. The man was neither desperate nor vicious but he did not know how to cringe when a guard demanded groveling obedience. Foley was an indomitable, angry sort. He could not be subdued and so he was all but murdered. He came into the pen weighing 200 pounds. When I saw him he carried but 142 pounds on his six-foot frame.

  He had been two months at the trip-hammer when his term expired. In the bolt contracts this massive instrument was operated by man power. It was a cruel and driving job. For 60 days his arms and legs had been in almost perpetual motion. The big hammers were pedaled by the feet, small ones by the hand. Sixty days had finished the wreck of Foley's constitution.

  The end of his term saved him from death.

  He was but a shadow when he came into the warden's office for his discharge. "I'm finished with the game," there was no surrender in his intrepid red-brown eyes, though his voice was but a hoarse, shocking whisper and his hands were transparent.

  "I'm done in," he said without a trace of self-pity or regret. "I'm going to wind it up peacefully on the hill where I was born. I've got a few thousand. That'll pay for a funeral. I've had 28 years on this planet—that's enough. I'm satisfied—my last breath will be a free one!"

  Foley reckoned without Cal Grim. He reckoned without the boycott. He forgot that he was ligitimate prey to be hunted down as soon as his release became known.

  And so he went about his home city as though he were in truth a free man. At the corner of Fifth and Vine streets he discovered his mistake.

  Foley stood there one night, aimless enough to be sure. It was but a week or so after his discharge. The ex-con was waiting for a little old lady. He was going to take her to a vaudeville show.

  The little old creature was his aunt. She had raised him. When he came out from the pen she took him back to the little house where he was born. Tonight they were going on a glorious lark. She would be coming along in a few moments. So Foley waited.

  A man saw him standing there. He watched and after a while he slouched up from behind and caught Foley by the arm.

  "Hello, Goat, when did you get back?" Cal Crim, a big rough-neck bull in the Cincinnati department, leered at Foley.

  "Hello, Cal," Foley was not suspicious. He had kept his resolution. He had neither the wish nor the need to steal. "I got back last week."

  "Been to headquarters yet?" Crim tightened his clutch on Foley's skeleton arm.

  "Not much. I'm through. I've given up the old game."

  "Don't rib me, you damn' thief. I am a wise guy, I am. Get along, you sntak," he had Foley by the neck and was pushing him forward. "I'll take you to headquarters?"

  The Goat knew what that meant. He wouldn't have a chance at that last free breath. Once at headquarters and conviction was certain.

  "Let go, you skunk, Crim, or I'll kill you!" Foley wrenched himself free and turned on the cop. "Don't bully me, Crim. You got nothin' on me. Drop your damn' hands or I'll finish you." Crim was a hulking giant. He swept out his club.

  "Walk along, you thief, or I'll bring this down on your lying head!"

  Foley squirmed. There was a crack, a thud and a livid welt with the blood bursting through stood out on Foley's cheek. Crim yanked him to his feet, Foley's terrible eyes glared at him. His lightning fingers went to his pocke
ts. An old .44 bulldog pistol went against the bull's stomach. Five shots and the fellow crumpled into a nerveless heap at Foley's feet.

  There was no vaudeville that night for Foley the Goat and his little old aunt. He was nailed. They rustled him off to jail and booked him with "Assault with attempt to kill."

  I don't know where the five shots went, but Cal Crim didn't die. I've hated a bulldog pistol ever since. At the hospital he came to and began screaming in a horrible frenzy —There's Foley"---that shadow—catch it—out with your club, quick—the damn* skeleton, he's so thin there's nothing left to beat."

  No need to nail Foley. He was finished. He had gone out from the pen shrunken to bones—nothing but a hoarse choking cough. The cowardly blow that came smashing down on his face, knocking his rickety body to the ground, took out his last ounce of fight. The longest term the court could give Foley would be a light sentence.

  When the news hit the pen that Foley was up for another jolt, hot suppressed anger, a thousand times more resentful because it had no outlet—the futile champing fury of chained beasts—went in a muttering bitterness from shop to shop.

  Each convict saw in Foley an image of himself. His fate represented their future. They looked upon this fighting, unruly fellow as the devoted venerate, a martyr.

  Men, who longed to "sass" the guards but lacked the nerve felt that Foley's reckless temerity redeemed their independence. He did what they dared only to imagine. Sometimes I would hear the men repeating one-sided insults from the guards.

  "Damn' scoundrels—just wait till I get out of here The bloodhounds, they'll whimper to my lash!"

  Such dreams of vengeance as they cherished. How they would get even for all the raw indignities they had suffered! Like dogs they had fawned under the scourge. Some day they would be free I Foley's doom chilled the hope in every heart.

  We took up a collection for the Goat. Not many of us had any spending money. Billy Raidler and I contributed 50 cents each in stamps. This was a small fortune in the prison. Except for men whose families kept them supplied, like Old Carnot and Louisa, very few of the prisoners had more than a few bits at a time.