The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  All through this harangue Sherwood stood listening, his face as inexpressive as the walls behind him.

  “Deputy,” said Blackie, turning to him, “we have been told you said you would keep the men in Punishment Hall in the straight jacket until they die, if necessary, to find out who smuggled out the letter complaining about the rotten food. Is that true?”

  “It is,” said Sherwood, who never lied.

  “We make three demands, then,” said Blackie: “first, the release of all the men undergoing punishment; second, your promise that no man concerned in this revolt shall be punished; third, your guarantee that henceforth we get the food for which the State pays, but which the commissary captain steals.”

  “And if I refuse, what then?” asked Sherwood.

  “At noon we will destroy the mill.”

  “Boys,” said the Deputy, “I have listened to your spokesman. You know I can’t grant your demands without consulting the Warden, who is in San Francisco. I will do this, however. I will declare a half-holiday. It is almost dinner time. Come over to the upper yard, have your dinner as usual and we’ll watch a ball game in the afternoon. Before night I will give you your answer.”

  With the thought of the Gatling guns and rifles that covered the upper yard in his mind, Sherwood smiled grimly. The men cheered and made a rush in the direction of the doors, thinking the victory won.

  “Wait,” cried Blackie, barring the way with uplifted arms. “Nobody is going to stir out of this mill until you, Mr. Sherwood, have given us a definite promise all our demands are granted. You would like well enough to get us into the upper yard away from these protecting walls and where we couldn’t do a dollar’s worth of damage, but we’re not going. When the men in Punishment Hall are free and you, who have never been known to lie, have told us we’ll be fed right and no one harmed or punished now or in the future for this morning’s work, we’ll go into the upper yard—not before.”

  “Boys,” said the Deputy, still hoping to urge the men into the trap, “do as I suggest. Why should you let this man”—contemptuously indicating Blackie—“order you around. He’s only a con like yourselves. Come on up to the yard, and I’ll issue an extra ration of tobacco all round. Are you going to go along with me or stay here with him?”

  “We’ll stay,” answered Blackie for the men. “It’s no use, Deputy; the game doesn’t work this time.”

  A shout from the men proved Sherwood’s defeat. He wasn’t a man to delay or lament over a beaten hand.

  “You’re quite a general, Blackie,” said the Deputy slowly, a flicker of admiration in his eyes. “I’ll give you art answer in fifteen minutes. But”—he looked straight into Boston Blackie’s eyes with steely determination—“don’t think you are always going to have all the cards as you have today. The next time you and I clash, I’m going to break you like this.”

  He jerked the straw from his mouth and twisted it apart; then he walked out of the mill.

  A quarter of an hour later ten pain-racked prisoners from the punishment chambers were welcomed back to the mill with an outburst of exultation such as San Gregorio Penitentiary had never seen. With them came the Deputy Warden’s acceptance of Boston Blackie’s terms. The men rioted joyously in an abandonment of happiness. In the midst of the turbulent jollification a half-witted, one-armed boy nicknamed “the Squirrel” climbed to the top of a loom, drew out his one treasure, a mouth-organ, and tried to express his joy in the one way he knew—and his dismal interpretation of “The Star Spangled Banner” floated out over the crowd.

  “Cut out the bum music,” cried a burly convict to whom the spirit of the hour had given a wanton impulse to command. “Where d’you figger in this, you nutty Squirrel?”

  The boy’s eyes filled with tears, and his notes faltered and died in the middle of a bar.

  Boston Blackie, always sensitive to the feelings of others, stopped the lad as he slunk from his perch on the loom and lifted him back.

  “Go ahead. Play, little Squirrel,” he said encouragingly. “Your music is as good as a band. Go to it. You’re one of us, you know, and we’re all happy.”

  Intuitively Blackie had salved the wound caused by the gibe. Radiant now, the Squirrel pressed his mouth-organ to his lips and played on and on with a light in his dull eyes that made Blackie mutter: “Poor kid! A pardon wouldn’t make him any happier.”

  And the convicts, only one degree less childish than the Squirrel, celebrated and sang in their cells that night until at last they settled into silence and care-free sleep. No thought of a tomorrow disturbed them; but Boston Blackie, quiet and wakeful, lay on his cell bunk anxiously probing the future. In his mind he still saw the broken bits of Martin Sherwood’s broom straw fluttering to the mill floor and heard his threat:

  “The next time you and I clash, I’m going to break you like this.”

  CHAPTER XXV

  BOSTON BLACKIE’S MARY

  For Mary the days were the longest and saddest she had known. Her father, Dayton Tom, had done his bit—but this was different. She was a “prison” widow now, who never missed a visiting day at the San Gregorio Penitentiary. Twice each month she crossed the bay from San Francisco to the prison. Twice each month, with others like herself beside her, she rode from the station to the prison gates in the rickety old stage and waited in the reception room aquiver with impatience and longing for the first glimpse of the man she loved. When he came, when he caught her in his arms and kissed her, looking into her face with eyes that answered the love in hers, then for a pitifully short half hour both forgot prisons and the law and separations and were happy.

  Boston Blackie and his Mary reckoned time from visiting day to visiting day. Those half hours together, separated though they were by thirteen long blank days, made life endurable. Neither ever spoke of the long years that must elapse before Blackie would walk out through the gates and go home a free man with Mary. Blackie reckoned them at night in his cell, and Mary checked off each day on a calendar in her rooms, but when they were together, they let no evil thoughts mar their happiness.

  Ever since the strike, Blackie had been apprehensive and watchful. Deputy Warden Sherwood had made no attempt to punish any of the men concerned in the revolt. He was not a man to break his word, but when any of the men involved in it transgressed a prison rule, even in a trifling matter, the punishment that followed proved that Sherwood neither forgave nor forgot.

  On a bright Saturday afternoon Blackie was impatiently pacing the yard, awaiting the summons to the reception room and Mary. It came at last, and he hurried through the gates, pass in hand. She was waiting for him and sprang to his side, hands outstretched and trembling with eagerness, in her fear of losing even one second of their thirty precious minutes. Their kiss was interrupted by the gruff voice of Ellis, the reception room guard. “Wait a minute there, Blackie,” he commanded. “Who is this woman?”

  “Who is she?” repeated the convict in blank amazement. “Why, she is Mary, my wife. You surely know her well enough. She has been here every visiting day.”

  “I know she has managed to slip in here on visiting days,” Ellis said. “But what I ask you is, who and what is she? We’re told she’s an ex-con herself. If so, she can’t visit you. The rules don’t permit it”

  The man turned to Mary.

  “Isn’t this your picture?” he asked sneeringly as he handed her a photograph of a woman with a prison number pinned across the breast.

  It was Mary’s picture. Years before, Mary Dawson, daughter of Dayton Tom, a professional crook, had been sent to the penitentiary because she declined to clear herself at the expense of one of her father’s pals, and her past now had suddenly risen up to deprive her of the single treasure that life held—her half hour visits with Blackie.

  “It’s my photograph,” she said in a voice choked with anguish, for she knew prisons
too well not to realize what the admission meant. “But Mr. Ellis, please, please don’t bar me because of that. I did time—yes; but I wasn’t guilty. For God’s sake, don’t take our visits away from us. They’re—they’re—all we—-have.” The girl’s voice was broken by her sobs.

  “Of course you weren’t guilty! That’s what they all say,” the guard answered. “You better beat it, woman, while you’ve got a chance. You’re lucky the Deputy don’t put the city dicks (detectives) on to you. There’s a bunch of them over here today, too.”

  Boston Blackie, white as a marble image, glared into the guard’s face with eyes that narrowed dangerously. The man’s reference to the Deputy made everything clear. This was Sherwood’s revenge.

  “Did the Deputy tell you to bar Mary from visiting me?” he demanded of the guard.

  “What’s that to you?” the man answered with pointed insolence. “I don’t want her here, and she’s barred—that’s all. She’s got nerve to come here anyway among decent women, the—”

  The word never left his lips. Boston Blackie’s blow caught him on the chin, and Ellis sprawled across the room and toppled to the floor. In a second Blackie was upon him again, grasping his throat in a frenzy of savagery.

  The whole reception room was in an uproar. Women screamed; convicts shouted encouragement. Blackie’s vise-like grip was strangling the all-but-unconscious guard. Mary’s voice, pleading with him frantically, restored the convict to sanity.

  “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!” she begged. “For your sake and mine, let him go, dear. Think what it means to us both!”

  Slowly Blackie’s grip loosened. He dropped the man and took Mary in his arms.

  “Good-by, dear one,” he said. “I’ve tried to get by here without trouble, but Sherwood won’t let me. From now on I’ve just one purpose. I’m going to beat this place. I’m going to escape. Watch and wait for me. It may be a month; it may be a year—but some day I’ll come.”

  Guards summoned by the uproar rushed in, and one struck Blackie over the head with a club, laying him bleeding and senseless.

  Blackie, still unconscious, was carried inside the gates and to the Deputy’s office, where Sherwood was informed that Boston Blackie had committed the most heinous of prison crimes: he had struck an officer.

  “Take him to Punishment Hall and leave him there for tonight. Don’t give him punishment of any kind. I’ll attend to that in the morning,” the Deputy ordered.

  As the guards carried Boston Blackie across the yard toward the punishment chamber, Martin Sherwood took a match from his desk and lighted the cigar he had been chewing.

  Boston Blackie lay on the floor in Punishment Hall trussed up in the straightjacket as tightly as two able-bodied guards could draw the ropes. Great beads of perspiration stood on his forehead. A thin trickle of blood showed on his chin, beneath which his clenched teeth bit into the flesh. The man’s eyes betrayed the torture he was suffering, but no sound came from his lips.

  Martin Sherwood stood above him, looking down at the helpless form in the canvas sack. He was smoking.

  A prison straightjacket on a wall is nothing alarming to the eye, but in operation it is an instrument of most fiendish torture. The victim stands upright, arms straight down before him and hands on the front of each leg. The jacket itself is a heavy canvas contrivance that extends from the neck to the knees with eyelets in the back in which ropes make it possible to cinch it to any degree desired, as a woman’s corset can be tightened. When the jacket is adjusted over the arms and body, the man is laid face downward on the floor and guards tighten the jacket by placing a foot on the small of the convict’s back and drawing in the ropes with their full strength.

  Fully tightened, the jacket shuts off blood circulation throughout the body almost completely. For the first five minutes, oppressed breathing is the only inconvenience felt. Then the stagnating blood commences to cause the most excruciating torture—a thousand pains as if white-hot needles are being passed through the flesh run through the body. The feet and limbs swell and turn black. Irresistible weights seem to be crushing the brain.

  Four hours in the jacket made one convict a paralytic for life. Some men have endured it for a half or three-quarters of an hour without crying out, but only a few.

  Boston Blackie had been in the jack for an hour and five minutes, and as yet Martin Sherwood had waited in vain for groans and pleas for release.

  The prison physician stood nearby looking on anxiously. One man had died after the jacket had been used on him in San Gregorio, and the newspapers made quite a fuss about it. The doctor didn’t want a repetition of that trouble, and yet he knew the man on the floor had been under punishment fully twenty minutes too long. Still the Deputy gave no indication of an intention to release him.

  Five minutes passed. Blackie’s face was a ghastly purple. Blood oozed from his nostrils. He rolled aimlessly to and fro on the floor, but his lips still were clenched, and no sound came from them.

  The doctor grew more and more nervous. At last he called the Deputy Warden aside.

  “He’s had enough—more than enough, Deputy,” he urged. “Hadn’t we better call it off?”

  “Never till he begs,” said Sherwood, biting off his cigar in the middle and tossing it away. Perspiration stood on his brow too.

  Five more minutes passed, and the form on the floor, too horrible now to be described, ceased to roll and toss. The doctor stooped over him quickly.

  “He’s out,” he announced. “You’ve got to quit now, Sherwood. A few more minutes are likely to kill him, and anyway he’s unconscious and you’re not doing any good.”

  “Release him,” said the Deputy Warden curtly. “Take him over to the hospital and bring him round. We’ll try it again tomorrow.”

  Hours later Boston Blackie, slowly and painfully, came back into what seemed a blurred and hideous world.

  “He didn’t break me,” he said over and over to himself. “I’ve beaten him again. I’ll do it just once more, too. Nobody has ever escaped from this place since Martin Sherwood has been deputy, but I will.”

  The relieved doctor gave Blackie a drink that sent him off into an uneasy slumber in which he was climbing an interminable ladder to a garden from which Mary stretched down her arms to him, but when he seized her hands, the fingers shriveled into cigars, and her face changed to Martin Sherwood’s, whose white teeth bit into his flesh until he clenched his lips to keep from crying out.

  “When Blackie gets out of the hospital, put him in charge of the lawn in front of my offices,” said Sherwood to the assignment captain the following morning. “I have decided not to give him any more of the jacket”

  The captain wonderingly obeyed. It was the first time he had ever known the Deputy to deviate from his inflexible rule that a convict once sent to the jacket stayed until he begged for mercy.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  “PLAY FOR ME, LITTLE SQUIRREL”

  Martin Sherwood, from within his office, stood fixedly studying Boston Blackie, who was spraying the courtyard lawn with a hose. The convict was more like a skeleton than a living man. His striped coat hung sack-like across his emaciated shoulders. His cheek bones seemed about to burst through the crinkled, parchment-like skin that covered them. His eyes were dull, deep-set and haggard, his movements slow and languid like a confirmed invalid’s.

  “He’s ill, without a doubt,” mused the Deputy Warden. “The doctor’s evidently right about the stomach trouble. No man could counterfeit his appearance; and yet—” Sherwood’s brow was wrinkled with perplexity as he studied the convict. “Everything may be as it seems. If he were any man but Boston Blackie, I should be wasting my time thinking about it. But because he is Boston Blackie I’m puzzled. It’s three months since I barred his wife from the prison and gave him the jacket—three months in which he has been docile as a
lamb, though I know such a man must have murder in his heart every time he lays eyes on me. Why this calm?”

  The perplexed furrow in the Deputy’s brow deepened. For ten minutes he stood studying Blackie without making a movement or a sound.

  “One of two things is true,” the Deputy concluded. “Either he is just a common con after all and I did break him in the jacket, or else he’s getting ready to cover my king with the ace of trumps. Suppose his plan, whatever it is, requires him to sleep in the hospital. He’d have to be sick to get there, of course—really sick, too.”

  Just then Boston Blackie, unconscious of the Deputy’s scrutiny, turned toward him, and the sunlight fell full on his emaciated face.

  “Gad, he looks like a corpse now,” was Sherwood’s thought. “It’s impossible that this sickness is a trick, and yet nothing is impossible to a man who can stand the jacket without a murmur. I’m going to play safe. I’m going to move him out of the hospital, though there isn’t a surer place to keep a man inside the walls, as far as I can see. I’ll move him, anyway. If he tries to get back there again, I’ll know I’m right.”

  Sherwood turned to his clerk.

  “‘Phone to the doctor to come over,” he said.

  The physician protested strongly against the Deputy Warden’s order to transfer Boston Blackie from his cell in the hospital to one of the dormitories in the cell-house.

  “The man’s nothing but a living corpse now, Deputy,” he argued. “He has a stomach complaint I haven’t been able to diagnose. He isn’t likely to live another three months. He hasn’t eaten a thing but bread crusts for weeks. Let him die in the hospital.”

  “Move him over to C dormitory tomorrow morning,” Sherwood commanded with finality. “I’m going to put him in with Tennessee Red, who’ll keep me informed of what he does nights. I’ve got a hunch, Doctor, that Mr. Boston Blackie is framing another surprise party for us. I’ll find some excuse to move Red’s present cellmate out by tomorrow.”