by Max Brand
The heaviness of his conviction daunted her. And yet she still felt that there was something unsavory behind him and about him. She felt something poisonous floating in the air of the place. It was made up of impressions gathered out of the corners of her eyes, and, when she looked down to the carpet, she was not seeing the pattern upon it at all. Instead, she was visualizing again those little illusory images that she had picked up here and there—a sad face, a suspicious, treacherous side glance, a mouth compressed as though by the endurance of cruel pain. These were the things that she, with a troubled brow, was recalling. And, besides, she was remembering the last thing that her mother had said. “Of course you will miss a great deal, but then you may be able to learn a great deal that a committee would never be able to find. You see, they cannot take you seriously. Your visit will be almost a social call. You must smile at the warden and tell him he is a wonderful man. That will put him off his guard. In the meantime, use your eyes. Yes, my dear, whatever you do, when you are around this warden or any other man, young or old, trust to your eyes, and not to your ears. They talk us into anything. They make fools of us with their words. But behind your eyes, my dear, there is a good, grave judge who may be able to record the facts and put aside the nonsense.”
Therefore, Miss Ashton kept thinking to herself: I must not believe what he tells me. I must only pay attention to what he shows me.
Certainly her mother, having been thrice married, should know what she was talking about. Yet she faltered before his vast assurance. “You see,” she managed to say, “I have an instinctive aversion to heavy punishments. When men were hanged for stealing, theft was much more prevalent than it is now. And that’s why dark cells and such things are abhorrent to me. I could never sympathize with your use of them, Mister Tufter.”
The warden groaned aloud. He converted the sound into a clearing of his throat, but, nevertheless, he groaned. He had heard this argument so many times before that the mere repetition of it unnerved him. Did he have to attempt to justify cruelty to this bright-faced, tender-voiced girl? He swung himself forward in his chair, determined to make the attempt.
“Suppose,” he said, “that I were to show you a man who was cured of the most terrible criminal impulses by cruel punishments … that is to say,” he corrected himself quickly, “punishments that will, I am afraid, seem cruel to you.”
The girl started. This was exactly what she wanted. It seemed too good to be true. She wanted this concrete evidence on which to hang her favorable report.
“Can you do that?”
“Yes, if you are willing to believe your eyes and your ears.”
She signaled her eager assent, and the warden rose from his chair.
“Come with me,” he said. “What I’m going to show you isn’t the rule, I’ll admit, but, if punishment can produce one example such as this in the way of a result, there must be some good in punishment, I think you’ll agree.”
He led the way from his office and down a short hall that terminated in a pair of swinging doors, the upper halves of which were glass. Through that glass she could see the thick ranges of books along the walls of the room.
“That’s the library,” the warden explained unnecessarily as they came down the hall. “We’ll stop at the doors, and then I want you to look through the glass and take notice of the man at the desk in the center of the room. That’s the librarian. He’s the man I want you to notice. After you’ve had a look, we’ll go inside.”
She nodded, breathless with her excitement. At the doors she paused, on tiptoe, with stealthy caution. She felt that she was about to peep into the truth about prisons.
What she saw was a great dark room paneled in bookshelves, with partitions built out into the room to accommodate still more volumes. Those volumes had an indescribably battered look, all the reds and yellows and vivid greens of the bindings having been dimmed as with a dust by long time and long usage. For these were the collections from a thousand sources, outworn books for which the owners had no use, and that were sent to the prison rather than to the junk pile.
Just in the middle of this space, where the light from the narrow and distant windows reached so faintly that the electric hanging lamp above the desk was always lighted, sat a great-shouldered man with close-cropped gray hair, an inscrutable face of the prison pallor, and a huge, powerful body encased in the striped suit.
There was something in the picture so overpowering that the girl gave back from the door with a gasp, cast a somewhat frightened glance over her shoulder at the warden, and then peeked again. Her attention concentrated on three things: the pale face, with its deeply carved, strangely attractive features, the book on which he was intent, and the immense hands that supported the volume.
The hands in particular fascinated her, for they were hands suggestive of the most unmeasured power. They were young, mighty hands. They were hands not only of strength, but of agility, for the fingers were not blunt and misshapen from labor, but smooth and shapely. Yet the hands represented animal strength; the face was stamped unutterably with the symbols of pain, and the book in that tremendous grasp was an anomaly. He should have had a battle ax in his fingers, or some skull-shattering mace. Never a book.
“Well?” the warden murmured. “Shall we go inside?”
She hesitated. She was quite pale with excitement. “I … I … don’t know,” she said. “Do … do I look all right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do I look calm?”
“Not very,” admitted the warden with a smile. “But that’s the way he affects people. He’s not a common man.”
“Of course not. And I mustn’t walk in staring at him as though he were an animal.” She took a hasty turn up and down the hall. Then she faced the warden in a calmer mood. “I’m all right now,” she said. “We can go in together.”
He nodded, pressed the door open, then followed in behind her. The man at the desk looked up without putting down his book, and by that, for some reason, she knew how deeply he had been absorbed in his reading.
“Miss Ashton,” the warden said, “this is Tom Keene.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
It seemed to her that he would never finish rising. At length he stood to his full height above her and bowed. She was abashed. If he had been a judge upon his bench, he could not have been more imposing to her. There flooded about her a profound bass voice that was acknowledging the introduction. And then she found that she had to fight herself to keep looking him in the face.
She strove to read in him what her mother had told her to hunt for in the faces of the criminals—malignant secrecy, hardened hatred of society as represented by anyone they encountered. But she found neither of these things in Tom Keene. He seemed much younger, hardly more than early middle aged, now that she was close to him and had heard him speak—this in spite of the solid silver gray of his hair. His glance dwelt upon her as steadily as light dwells on a steel bar. And, although there was about his face a battered and worn look, there was none of the cruel cunning for which her mother had told her to look. But in every respect he impressed her with great size, not only of body, but of spirit. She wanted to draw back and view him in greater perspective, both in a physical and mental sense.
The warden was saying something beside her. She did not hear more than the murmur of the words. Yet it was a jest, it seemed, for now the room was filled and quivering with the great, booming laughter of Tom Keene. It made him seem younger still.
“I wanted to see the library,” she managed to say. “I didn’t dream that it could be so large.”
“Big as it is,” the warden said, “Tom has read about every book that’s in it. Haven’t you, Tom?”
“No, no,” protested the gigantic librarian. “By no means.”
“You ought to have gone through them by this time, though,” said the warden. “You’ve been five years without a boo
k leaving your hand, I might say.”
Then he heeded the signal from the girl and started back for the door, but Miss Ashton, as she turned, let her glance trail down and across the back of the book that Tom had been reading and she saw the name Thucydides stamped in black upon the red leather. She felt it was too much. There must be a fake in this. What if Tom Keene had been simply planted here with book to impose upon her with his melancholy face and his musical voice and his quiet manner?
She and the warden were hardly back in the office again before she made his smile vanish by exclaiming, “Do you really think that he reads Thucydides for his own pleasure?”
“Does he read … which?” the warden asked anxiously. “I don’t know. But I’ll tell you that I’ve never seen a man who wades through books as he does. He’ll make his mark on something when he gets out. Thucydides? I don’t know that writer. But if Tom has tackled him, he knows what’s in the book. The minister used to think it was a bluff and so he started giving Tom examinations. After a while he stopped. He made up his mind that he didn’t know enough to ask the right questions, I guess.” And he laughed heartily at the very thought. “You should have asked some questions yourself,” he said. “If you want to, we can find some sort of excuse for going back … though I don’t like to.”
“Ah?” she cried suspiciously. “You don’t?”
“I’ll tell you why. He has the pride of the very devil. He doesn’t want to be showed off. He prefers to sit by himself in his library and dive through books the way I might dive through water. Not that he ever says anything, and not that anybody can ever read anything more than he wants you to read in his face … but I’ve just guessed at what goes on inside that big head of his. It cuts him up a good deal to be stared at. He’s as sensitive as a girl … under the skin.”
All of this agreed so thoroughly with what she had felt when she first looked at the big man that she began to be ashamed of her doubts.
“And,” said the warden, “suppose I tell you how he came to be the way he is now … and what he was when I got him?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Well, to begin with, he was the White Mask.”
She gasped a little at the mysterious name, but she shook her head. “I never have heard of that person before,” she said.
“Naturally. You wouldn’t have,” said the warden. “Fact is, you were pretty small when he was stirring up the West with doings. He’s been here with me for eight years.”
“Eight years,” she echoed in horror at the thought. “Such a man as that for eight years?”
“Maybe for life. He’s got enough hanging over him.”
She gasped.
“Let me explain. The White Mask was a desperado of the old school. Men are quickly forgotten as a rule. Eight years would be enough to blot out the names of most of us. But the White Mask will be remembered for a long time, and you can depend upon it. Men were killed, trains were robbed, people were held up on the highway … all by the man who wore a white mask.”
“Men were killed by him?” the girl murmured, her cheeks blanching.
“A dozen of ’em,” said the other calmly. “And look at him now.”
“It can’t be,” she answered stubbornly. “No matter what has happened, he couldn’t have changed so much.”
“There’s been no mistake,” said the warden. “Not a bit of it. I tell you, he came in here full of the devil … excuse the expression … and I took the devil out of him.”
Her eyes widened; that was her only comment.
“I’m going to prove to you that sometimes there are bad men who have to be treated in a bad way. Tom Keene was one of them. I’m going to tell you about him in detail. I saw you look at the dark cells. And I know that you’ve heard stories about men who were badly treated in this prison. Well, Miss Ashton, some of those stories are true.” He made the admission with a reckless extravagance of spirit, as one whose case is so good that it can be safely made less good by admitting some points upon the opposite side. “Men have been cruelly treated inside these walls,” he said. “In this very room, seated in this very chair, I have made some men tremble by the sentences I have given them. But I simply warn you of this … every story that you hear is exaggerated tenfold. I’m now going to tell you the truth about Tom Keene.” He lit a cigarette, puffed a blue-brown mist into the air, and talked behind it with the greatest animation.
“When Keene came to me, he was a great, black-bearded brute twenty-seven years old …”
“And he’s been eight years here … Do you mean to say he is only thirty-five now?”
“You think of him as being older, but that’s because of his hair. But you think back to his face, and you’ll see that he’s no older than that. If you could see him stripped for boxing or wrestling … we have games now and then on Saturday night … you’d realize that he’s not so old. He’s still a young athlete. Looks a little bulky and heavy in his clothes, but peel those off, and you get at the kernel of the man. He’s a great tiger. He moves like oil on the top of running water. His grip, when he wrestles, simply turns the flesh of another man into pulp. And when he strikes, he sends the other fellow down for keeps.”
The warden so far forgot himself as to chuckle in soft exultation at the memory and clench his own hard fist. The girl looked upon him as from a great distance, but still she was intensely interested.
“He’s young,” went on the warden, “and you saw his shoulders for yourself. Well, when he came into this prison, he was a madman as well as a giant. At least, he acted like a madman. He kept swearing that he was innocent, though as a matter of fact he had been caught red-handed. He was put into one of the old cells. He tore the bars out as though they were wheat stalks and broke into the yard. He was climbing a wall when the guard shot him …”
“Oh!” cried the girl.
“Would you have had me send some of the guards at him with their bare fists? Madam, he would have wrung their necks as fast as they got up to him and crashed in their skulls like eggshells. I would as soon stand in the path of an elephant as in the path of Tom Keene when he’s angry!”
“I believe it,” said the girl, shuddering as she remembered the size of those hands and the intolerable brightness of the steady eyes.
“He got over the bullet wound quickly,” said the warden. “And by that time he had changed his mood. He didn’t try to tear the prison down with his hands, but he was still vicious. One of the guards disciplined an obstinate prisoner in the shoe shop. Tom Keene took that guard and threw him through the window. And the guard is still only half a man.”
“But what happened to Tom Keene?” asked the girl.
“Dark cell,” snapped the warden.
“Did he have no defense to offer?”
The warden laughed. “Sure. He said that the prisoner the guard was disciplining hadn’t done a thing. The prisoner was sickly, so he said. But he had crazier ideas than that. Seems that when he first came to prison, he thought that he had struck up a bargain with the Lord, and he used to make speeches, telling the Lord that He had fallen down on His share of the contract. That’s about what it amounted to. Used to make me laugh to hear his ravings.”
“Poor man,” she said, and sighed. “How awful.”
“But I gave him the dark cell,” the warden continued, “until he came out raving worse than ever. I had trimmed it down fine. That was a large dose of the silent treatment, but it did a fine job with Tom Keene. It started him thinking that there might be something better than going against authority. That wasn’t the end of the battle. Not by any means. The guards here will tell you how I fought Tom Keene for three years. And he was a handful. Before those three years ended, Tom Keene had white hair … white hair at thirty.”
“White hair at thirty,” repeated the girl. “How can you smile when you tell of such a thing?”
“Because you don’t
know what’s coming. In time he learned his lesson. He decided that there was no use in battering his head against a stone wall. He gave up. And, after he gave up fighting, he came around mighty quick. The first crazy idea he had was that the Lord had broken a promise with him, you see? The second was that not only was he being oppressed, but that all of his fellow prisoners were being oppressed. And he decided that he would fight their battles for them. And when both of these crazy ideas had been worked out of his head, three years had gone by, as I said before, and his hair was white. By the Lord, I’ve lain awake half of a night thinking of new things to do to Tom Keene. I’ve tried things with falling water … drop by drop … that have been forgotten since the days when the Spaniards were working their Inquisition. Because I knew from the first that the way to fight him was with pain. And with pain I broke him.”
“Broke him?” cried the girl. “No, he would rather die than surrender.”
But a malignant light played in the eyes of the warden, and he had to look down for fear that she might see it. “I mean what I said. He told me that he saw the light. He was through with the fight. He gave up!” His voice rose in the exultant memory of that scene. “And the minute he said that, d’you know what I did?”
“What?” asked the girl.
“I shoved my hand through the bars and shook hands with him. Which was taking more of a chance than any guard in the prison would ever have taken, because with that grip of his he could have smashed the bones. But I shook hands with him. ‘Tom,’ I said, ‘as long as you wanted to fight, I fought you. But, now that you’ve come to your senses, you’ll find me different. You’re a man after my own heart … a strong man. And I’ll show you that I know how a strong man ought to be treated.’ And I kept my word.” He leaned back and slapped the fat palm of his hand upon the nearby desk. “In one month he was the librarian … the best post this prison has to offer to a man in stripes.”