Cell 202, Sing Sing

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Books by Lewis E. Lawes MAN’S JUDGMENT

OF DEATH

LIFE AND DEATH IN SING SING 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING CELL

202—SING

SING

|

CELL 202 | | SING SING by WARDEN

LEWIS

E. LAWES

author of 20,000

PARTRARS

YEARS

Se

IN

SING

SING

RINE EAR

INCORPORATED

ON

MURRAY

HILL

NEW

YORK

Tago

COPYRIGHT, PRINTED IN THE BY QUINN & BODEN ALL

1935, BY LEWIS E. LAWES UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. J. RIGHTS RESERVED

TO AND

THE

MEMBERS

GUARDS,

DIFFICULT GENTLY

WHO

TASKS: AND

WITH

OF

MY

STAFF,

DAILY FIRMLY DUE

THEIR

AND _ INTELLIREGARD

HUMANITIES.

Co *

OFFICERS

PERFORM

TO

THE

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/cell202singsingO00O0lewi

GOING

E NELS

PROLOGUE One: ABNER

WILDE—REBEL

Two: EDMUND

ROLPHE—CYNIC

Three: ARNOLD BRANDT—SKEPTIC Four: STEPHEN EPILOGUE

YERKES—MARIONETTE

45S 685

ey el

e 7

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BN LO OG UE

PAVOUEO

Git

T was nearly dark when I reéntered my office. My guests were I already assembled. They were standing by the south window, watching the long line of prisoners trudge uphill to the new

cell blocks for the night lockup. They were so intent on the scene in the prison yard that they did not hear me close the door behind me, nor my footsteps as I approached my desk. I slid into my chair without disturbing them. For several seconds they remained unconscious of my scrutiny. I had never before met any of these gentlemen. In fact, they were strangers to each other. Four men, besides myself—the meeting had been planned a dozen years ago. A lingering impulse, interest, wonder, call it curiosity for lack of an exact description, had taken me back a hundred years to the days when Sing Sing, newly erected and crowned with the name Mount Pleasant, was dedicated to error and folly and mischance. A hundred years—quite a considerable hunk of

time, you may think—through uneven courses with unerring cably knotted in cell number It was the unraveling of life lines, that had prompted

which four life lines threaded their fatality, to converge at last inextri202 of the century-old cell block. these knots, the retracing of those me to issue invitations to the four

gentlemen before me to meet in my office on the afternoon of June 28, 1933.

The benifled camer of tramping feet ccased suddenly. From the gray buildings on the hill, silent till then, came sounds of clanging doors and rattling locks. Then all was quiet. For me it was a daily experience; but the abrupt transition from stirring commotion to inanimate stillness seemed to hold my guests, too, in motionless rigidity. At length we heard the clang of a gong. Simultaneously, the bell of my desk telephone rang. ““Count’s over” and then IJ heard the welcome words, “All men accounted for.”

“Count’s over” at night is the signal for general relaxation on prison grounds. It is the “All’s well” that permits repose to officers, 3

4

GELL:

202—SING

SING

and latitude to their prisoners. Disciplined silence gives way to peaceful quietude. For me, it rounds out the day’s labors with the satisfying feeling of security—and accomplishment. And we do make claim to some accomplishment within these walls. Though with us the word differs somewhat in meaning from the usual notions of dynamic achievement; still, if you on the outside imagine you are the exclusive doers and innovators of the world’s business, you are wrong. As wrong as most theorists—or the hard rationalists and men of action you like to impersonate. What went on behind the walls of Christian monasteries— some of them had cells like ours—is written down in histories, some

of it not pleasant to contemplate. Nevertheless, your scholars and intellectuals are still proclaiming the debt the world owes the early monks and copyists—some of whom were teachers—in reassembling and handing down the far-flung particles of civilization. Our prisoners were also doers—of crime. Yes, the act itself! But what about the other spectacle of crime? The professional show society puts on, with the same old frowsy scenery and a plot dished up out of a badly strung sequence of motivations. You are the entrepreneurs, the developers and builders of society. And they, some of your rubbish, may perhaps do a little of your thinking for you. At least, they have more time for it. I turned from my desk to find my guests looking at me intently. For a few seconds we appraised each other. I could sense the question in each pair of eyes. I smiled and motioned them to chairs facing my desk. Then for the first time since that day twelve years ago, when I conceived this meeting, a doubt came into my mind. As I fingered the cards they had presented on their arrival, I realized that this group personified the complacency, the smugness, the selfsufficiency that mark the average successful American. What I was

about to do would jolt the regularity of their lives and upset their equanimity.

I had often pictured this scene. I had even rehearsed the speech I intended to make to these men . . . “Gentlemen, I hope your nerves are strong, disciplined to strange sounds. For the object of this meeting is to rattle skeletons. And Americans, generally, are notoriously squeamish about such things.” .. .

|

PROLOGUE

5

That speech died unsaid. It came over me as I sat there how utterly unimportant were four skeletons out of a company of a hundred thousand who might be counted on to create a dismaying rattle in millions of American homes. I felt the insignificance of four prisoners—long dead, and except for this meeting forgotten— in the balance against twenty-five hundred living, thinking, feeling human beings who at that moment occupied as many cells within the walls of Sing Sing. Nevertheless, those four prisoners, dead and forgotten, had

taken me back along the highways over which America had traveled, pushing and stampeding, toward unexpected, unchartered goals. Each life starting hopefully in vigor and promise had broken upon its peculiar reef, the victim not alone of its own digression but of tides that finally engulfed it. Obscure as he was, each of those four prisoners reflected in his story the humors of his epoch: the hopes and disillusionments, programs and creeds, the strength and weaknesses that periodically brought prosperity and privation to adolescent America. They paid the price for the passions, the greed, the extravagances and follies that, contemporaneously, filled the hearts and minds of their fellows. It was no quaint fancy that drew my thoughts to the cryptlike cell of stone which had been home for each of the four men,

successively, in their periods of confinement. No archzological quest resulted in discovery of the stones on which each occupant had laboriously and indelibly traced his name, his theme, the dates of his incarceration and release. It was one of those perfectly ordinary circumstances that sometimes produce coincidences, queer juxtapositions that take the form of a disclosure—of, if you like, chance.

The earliest date, 1826, scratched by the first man was coincident with the formal opening of the gallery of Sing Sing’s—or Mount Pleasant’s—stone vaults as one of the “glories” of our early American civilization. The last date,

1911, when the fourth man

came out, witnessed the demolition of that erstwhile “glory” as a monument to blindness and stupidity, even cruelty, in administra-

tion of social justice. No shrouded mummies were discovered in that cell; no orna-

6

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202-——SING?

SING

ments of gold. What appeared to the naked eye were walls of stone surrounding a niche three and a half feet wide, seven feet long, and six feet deep; a stone floor worn smooth over a hundred years of shuffling feet; and the four inscriptions. It was reported that the work of demolition was stayed, quite as if some invisible power had grasped the hands of the laborers. The incident might have been forgotten, except as a memory lingering with those whose minds are stored with the rich tradition of old Sing Sing. The venerable stone building that had become an eyesore and a mark of shame, having been partially razed, some of its stones were distributed among the newer structures erected subsequently in various parts of the prison property. Nine years later a group of prisoners were leveling ground near the foundations that supported the warden’s office. As they dug deeply into the earth, one of them noticed four stones forming a pillar. On each were chiseled words and dates. The workmen called me. And I read: 1826 ABNER WILDE

Rebel 1846 1846 EDMUND ROLPHE Cynic 1866 1866

ARNOLD

BRANDT

Skeptie 1886

1886

STEPHEN YERKES Marionette I9II

Memories were searched, records dug up and carefully gone through. It was revealed that those four men had occupied

PROLOGUE

7

cell number 202 during the entire terms of their confinement. “I recollect,” said one of the old-timers, “they said that cell was haunted. The boys wouldn’t move them stones. They said they was a curse on ’em. Then one night them stones just disappeared. Yes, sirr-ee, walked

off. Vamoosed!

Or somebody’d

moved

’em.

Anyhow, the boys went back to peckin’ on two-o-two after that.” Had I been there, my faculties keyed to the supernatural, I could perhaps have verified the men’s superstition. I could have imagined four figures standing watch, holding out against desecration. I might have divined the rage of four ghosts against destruction of their abode and the legends they had carved in stone. I might even have caught their words as they uttered them, more in foreboding than in remonstrance. “See that . . .” Abner Wilde would have pointed a finger at his stone. ““That’s mine. I was a long time cutting those five words. Twenty years. I did it with a nail. It reads like an epitaph. But this one

doesn’t

tell the span of life; it marks

the period of life in

suspension; I was neither dead nor alive in those years. I was just lost down a crack. “It is more than simply a name and a record I have left you. On that piece of granite you have my philosophy of living, the motivating force that led me to this cell. “Have you the wit for it, you'll be able to trace from those letters the record of my life. It was unimportant as lives go. It boasted no outstanding achievement. Yet because of its very insignificance you will be able to measure the forces that enveloped it and sped it on. “Have you intelligence and Ret aenaay you will be able to balance those forces against others which speed millions of lives in your own century. Are they as unyielding and fatal? It will be for you to answer.” I fancied Abner Wilde’s quiet smile as he stood with his three companions.

“Our experiences were not exactly alike. But they led us to the same crossroads. Here, in this cell, we spent a good portion of our lives. In meditation,

retrospective examination, perhaps in

prayer. “It may be that, by consenting to the vivisection of our life’s

8

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202—SING

SING

story, the force of our example will persuade men to better social planning, to a new social justice which will bear more on the neglected spiritual side of American life. Perhaps out of this cell

may come a call for new standards which will balance more equally the relationship between government and governed, between man and his neighbor.” Abner Wilde ended his talk. Or his ghost did. I faced the waiting men. “You will have to introduce yourselves, gentlemen,” I said.

“Warden, I’m Judge Rolphe.” The man on my right spoke. The man seated on the left of Judge Rolphe said, ‘““My name is Brandt. Captain Arnold Brandt.” “Y’m Thaddeus Ayres,” his neighbor spoke up.

“Then of course,” the fourth of my visitors said, smiling, “you know my name is Wilde.” His smile vanished in a look of worry as he continued, “But I’d like to know—I feel I speak for my friends here—” He interrupted himself, glancing around at the others. “I’m in the dark as to the meaning of this—summons, you know.” “Gentlemen,” I began, “strange as it may seem to you, I do know all of you. Each of you, in the language of the day, is a success. From what I have learned, you are proud of your Americanism. You favor the rule of law and established order—but not in the narrow sense; you do not let it stand in your way. You think well of our institutions. You are proud fathers of maturing children to whom you hope to ee on your possessions, your reputations, your happiness. “You have much in common. I don’t know how much of your material goods you inherited, but however that may have been, you have a common heritage that may not be measured in terms

of wealth. think I am of it. “That of the cell

Your friends, your neighbors, do not know of it. I the only one, barring yourselves, who has knowledge

heritage came into being in cell number 202, in one blocks in old Sing Sing. A mean place. Small, badly

ventilated, cold, damp and lonely. Life was barely possible in that

dank interior. Yet four men managed to live there during the course of a century. Each of you is heir to one of those prisoners.” Judge Rolphe’s cold pinched features seemed to shrink into

PVOowO

GALE

9

his collar. Captain Brandt’s lean face twitched nervously. Thaddeus Ayres’ bald head turned crimson; his forehead dripped beads of sweat. Stout Abner Wilde went white to the end of his nose. I waited. Finally Judge Rolphe recovered his voice. He spoke with a

slight tremor. “Warden, you should not have done this. Why stir up the past? What will my constituents think, hearing me try criminal cases, knowing one of my own forebears was a convict?” His distress was genuine. “Good God!” cried Thaddeus Ayres, the banker. “What will my directors say? A strait-laced crowd, strong on that drivel about the sins of the fathers!” “I see my finish,” complained Captain Brandt. “No promotion’Il come my way. The army is strict about such things.” “My wife and daughters will be ruined,” moaned Abner Wilde.

“Through!

Just about

to make

it, you know, with the

right people—they’ll never forgive me.” “Have no fear, gentlemen,” I said. “No one will know of it unless you wish. Twelve years ago I assumed an obligation, the fulfillment of which brought you here. It was no haphazard choice. “Four men, through roundabout and wholly different paths, found themselves ultimately in a cell in Sing Sing. Not at the same time, but successively. As one man came out, another entered. The process took almost a hundred years. Each man lived in a wholly different cycle. Conditions—social, political, religious—were dissimilar. Yet all led toward the same end. “Each man left his name, and the record of his bondage. He left something more. A word that mirrored his soul—to himself, to me, and to you. “To me it has been a supernatural mirror. It has enabled me to reconstruct each life, to piece together episodes in each life, to see what he saw, what he did, and why. To walk beside him as he blundered on to Sing Sing, and 202. “One of them called himself a rebel; another, a cynic; a third, a skeptic; the fourth, a marionette.

‘These records I shall now pass on to you. It will be interesting to have your judgment.”

One eb el hee WW L119 FoR eB Ea

One ABNER

WILDE—REBEL i

T HAS pleased the Almighty to give to the arms of the United States a signal victory over their enemies on this lake.” The message from Captain Perry electrified the nation. It stiffened its backbone, and infused a new spirit into a theretofore

desultory and disheartening war. Abner Wilde, too, felt the elation. He had fired the first gun

in the Battle of Lake Erie. It was a special dispensation from his captain, grown fond of the sailor boy attached to his personal service.

“So!” Captain Elliot smiled when the boy told him. “It’s your birthday. Methinks, my lad, September tenth will be writ large across the pages of our history. You shall celebrate it properly. You'll fire the first shot.” The ball was well aimed and found its mark... . And now it was over. Abner’s heart exulted in the patriotic feeling and bombast of sixteen. September 10, 1813. It stood in bold type on the leaves of

American history. And in the life of Abner Wilde. He understood little about the war. “Sailors’ rights” and ‘“‘free-

dom of the seas” meant nothing to him. Indians had attacked their clearing. When it was over he found himself with strangers fleeing northward. His father and mother had been left behind. Killed. Perhaps scalped. “It’s the English,” was the talk around the campfires. ‘“They’re settin’ all the Indians against us. Damn ’em!” The boy listened. And his heart was filled with hatred for the English. 13

14

GCELLE202-—S1NiGes

inne

“Abner Wilde did great execution with his musketry,” Captain Elliot reported to his superior. On the night of September roth, Abner lay in his bunk. Thinking. Though the decks were cleared—of the dead and wounded—and the wind was fresh, his nostrils were still filled with

the smell of powder and smoke and the stench of blood. They had been with him all his life. One of his first memories was of an Indian lying dead in his father’s cornfield, and of a burning cabin, the lighted torches dancing around it in the dark. He turned over, aching with the hardness of the bunk. Sick and dizzy. He wanted quiet. Peace. He would fight with his brain. Like his Uncle George in the East, who was rich and lived in a big house, with horses and coaches and servants. He remembered how

his mother’s eyes strayed from the Bible she was reading to him as she spoke of the old life in New

York. In the East was life;

out here only death. He would give up this being a soldier. In the morning he would tell Captain Elliot. He slept. 2

The big white-haired man gazed affectionately at the boy as they stood facing each other, shaking hands. “Yes,” Uncle George Todd repeated for the third time, “it’s Mary’s face. Her very image.” His mouth twitched, then he smiled. “T’m glad to see you, son. Sit down and tell me all about it.” They sat there for hours. Abner Wilde’s muscles ached and his head swam with fatigue. Four months of plains and woods and hills had consumed his strength. It was a long hard trail from Lake Erie to Uncle George in New York. It led him close by the campfires of hostile Indians, and through the settlements of white men that hung tenaciously to the crossroads which would be home for them and their generations. His moccasins were worn, and his buckskin hung in tatters. He talked quietly. The white-haired man listened. They were alone in the office. They did not see the night come on, nor that the log fire burned low. Beyond the windows the snow fell heavier. The newspaper owned and edited by George Todd was a

ABNER

WILDE+REBEL

5

Federalist organ. Todd himself was a man of sound Hamiltonian views. He had been among those who opposed the war, declaring it would ruin the country, put an end to trade and plunge the government into financial chaos. Not only that; provocative as were the circumstances, he considered a break with England uncalled for, a gratuity to Napoleon the antichrist, and downright dangerous to all those principles of soundness and responsibility that he believed resided in the minds of his party alone. He could see in it nothing but a farmers’ war—a stupid gesture of bravado on the part of frontiersmen, and a plot formulated by the agriculturists who joined with them in a sorry attempt to wrest control of Congress from the commercial group, transferring the governmental power to the southern plantation interests. Nevertheless, when the war came—unmindful of his protests —he supported it as a loyal American. Even when the collapse of trade, the financial confusion

and the economic

distress that he

had foretold followed on the heels of it, he did not cry “I told you so!”? He did what he could to steady his own fortunes, counseling others to do the same. He held his tongue and waited, with growing alarm, for the people’s escapade to come to an end. Even Munn, of the opposition paper, was scarcely pleased with the way things were going before the Battle of Lake Erie. So George Todd heard in roundabout fashion, for Munn and he had long since agreed to disagree. But what was one victory? It did not win the war. It grew dark in the room as Uncle George and Abner sat

talking of the Indians, the battle, and the world’s mistakes. Suddenly a heavy tread sounded on the wooden stairs of the old building. The door of the office flew open. A snow-covered figure plunged into the room. The man stood a moment, swaying. Abner and his uncle ran toward him. Together they supported him. His lips moved, but no sound came from them. “What’s happened, man?” the old gentleman cried, as he eased the half-conscious figure to a chair. The man gasped for breath. His eyes were haggard. His lips moved. He uttered in a

hoarse whisper, one word. ie Peacela

“Peace!”” George Todd shouted it. There was an answering cry from the rear of the office. Two

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men ran forward. Lamps were in their hands, and they smelled of printer’s ink. “Peace!” they echoed, while they stared at the stranger dumbly. “Can’t you see the man’s gone?” George Todd yelled. “Give him a hot drink. And let him get his wind!” The man recovered, he told his story. He had just piloted in a British ship that brought the news. He had come straight to the office of the Gazette.

The two men waited no longer. They left their lamps on the table. Each grabbed a torch and dashed out of the door into the ice-toothed night. They plunged down Broadway through the snow that buried the street and laid up great drifts against the window sills, crying their news: i PeacelPeacelyPeicel They stood in Hanover Square, waving their torches. Answering cries came from the darkened houses. Windows flew up. Lights appeared. Men and women and children hurried into the Square, shouting and laughing. Light shone on every side. Candles, lamps, torches. The chimes of Trinity, sharp and silvered, spilled a pzan of thanksgiving. Then, bursting over a sudden hush, came a dull boom from the fort. Cannon shot off the news. In the newspaper office George Todd sat heavily in his chair. There was a sudden look of pain in his eyes, his hand clutched at his heart. Sweat burst out on his forehead, and he looked helplessly at Abner. The boy stared back in terror. Then, as suddenly, the agony passed from the old man. After a while he rose from his chair. “Come along. We'll go home,” he said to Abner. “They’ll be waiting for us.” As his glance moved over the figure of the bedraggled boy, he added, “‘You’ll need some clothes. The boys’ll fix you up.” They threaded their way through the marching throngs. Abner had never seen the like. Girls hanging on men’s arms.

Happy, full of joy. A voice hailed them. A gray-haired gentleman accosted George Todd. “Ts it true?” he asked. “True enough,” Todd answered shortly.

ABNER

WILDEREBEL

17

“Shall we also call it peace, George?” It was strange, the two old men embracing. Then they stood apart. They grasped each other by the arm. “Come along, Thomas. We’re bound for home. We'll do our own celebrating.” It was the first word George Todd and Thomas Munn had spoken to each other in five years. Rival publishers who had carried rivalry in their hearts. “What are the terms of the peace?” Thomas asked. “Who cares?” George said. “It’s peace. That’s enough.”

A thought struck Abner, listening to the two old men. He remembered that tenth day of September, 1813. “Don’t give up the ship!” was the watchword then. “‘Sailors’ rights and free trade.” No one seemed to remember it now. Men wanted peace. It was here. They rejoiced.

3 They walked down Broadway and stopped before a highstooped house. To Abner it seemed palatial; the dwellings he had known were of logs, or of skins stretched over poles. Uncle George’s house loomed several stories high, with light streaming from every window. As they stamped up the steps, knocking the snow from their feet, the front door was thrown open. A huge coal-black negro bowed low, and beckoned them inside. They stepped out of the night and snow into light and warmth that smelled of candles and burning embers. They were greeted with music. A chorus of male voices singing a song that was new to Abner. He caught the words “. . . the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave .. .” They stood a moment, listening. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” whispered Uncle George. “It’s a new song. It ought to be made the national anthem. Listen.”

A girl’s voice, fresh and clear, rose high above the chorus. Abner had never before heard anything so beautiful. “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”’ The song was ended. There was a moment of silence broken by enthusiastic applause. Uncle George stepped into the room, followed by his two guests—his nephew and Munn the editor. For the first time in his life Abner felt shy. Conscious of the

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210: 2—-Sil NGES VUNG

clothes that hung upon him loosely, inches of his bare skin showing through the ruin of his garments, and the moccasins tied to his feet with strips of leather. George Todd grasped his arm, pushed him forward into the room. Four pairs of eyes regarded him with curiosity, and looked questioningly at Uncle George. “This is your Cousin Abner,” his uncle said. “The only sur-

viving backwoodsman our family can boast of. And,” he added impressively, “one of the heroes of Lake Erie. He fought with Rertyin

And so Abner was introduced to his cousins. He stood his ground as they advanced. They were Edward and Robert and Terry. And Jane. They seemed entirely strange, pale-faced boys with closefitting coats and swallowtails. All of them wore soft roll collars and tight black pantaloons. He scarcely heard their words of greeting. The last to approach him was Jane. She was the youngest. Her handclasp was different. “You’re Aunt Mary’s boy, aren’t you?” she was saying. “I

hardly remember her. But Father told me about her. She was a fine woman.”

4 The joy with which the people hailed the news of peace with England in 1815 was not altogether unanimous. Men smiled satisfaction publicly, but in the privacy of their counting rooms on Pearl Street, and down by the water front, they made a hasty survey of their balance sheets. The war had not been unkind to some of them. It had made fortunes. Some of them did not forget

the want and suffering of their fellows, the unfortunate majority whom the business depression, unemployment and high prices had rendered destitute. They never passed the Alms House in City Hall Park without dropping a coin into the hat of a beggar, and they contributed magnificently to soup kitchens where the cold and the hungry might obtain diluted charity. George Todd was not a profiteer. He ran his Gazette on a margin of fair and.not exorbitant profit. It had not enriched him. He disapproved the more strongly of his son Edward on that account.

ABNER

WILDE—REBEL

19

Edward Todd had taken over the direction of his father’s shipping business some time before and had raked in huge profits during the war, as well as previous to the declaration of hostilities, while the embargo was in force against British trade. In common with other American privateers, Edward Todd’s six ships scoured the Atlantic for British shipping. It was a source of bitter quarrel between father and son. “Tt’s piracy,” George Todd insisted. “We have the law on our side,” the younger Todd contended. “That does not make it right,” his father said. “It’s filthy money. I'll have none of it!” It was said that he kept his word. Still it was a way out of the ruin closing in on them with the net of circumstance. Edward saw no reason why they should submit to ruin, when plenty of others were taking that way out. Not while he was managing for Todd & Company. This was not the time for old-fashioned ethics. You had to take a practical view, go with the drift—if you were going to last out. A month after the news of peace, Abner was installed as clerk in the office of the Todd Shipping Company. “Tl buy you a partnership,’ Uncle George had told him, “if you'll warrant it.” Now the war was ended the old man thought, of course, that

Edward’s shady doings would cease. If the Democratic-Republican party stopped short of wrecking completely the financial structure of the country, and the government credit, things eventually would return to normal; a revival of business might be expected to come about gradually through legitimate channels. The Todd Shipping Company might take its place again in the lists of old names founded in honor and standing on principles—of honesty, decency, business acumen; his nephew’s young energies would be of good service to that end. The boy, he thought, had a head for

business; and he was straight as a die. None of Edward’s ships was on the high seas now. All were tied up in port, waiting for business that did not come. Privateering was at an end. Not a cargo in sight. It was rumored that English ships were on the way over, laden with freight. The American

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market would be glutted. Shippers and manufacturers were threatened with disaster. Merchants loaded up with American goods saw their market vanishing over the horizon, themselves ruined;

while Congress delayed and debated over the tariff, and the currency sank lower. They joined with shipowners in complaints that died down the wind because nobody in Washington had ears. Abner in the office discovered boredom. If there is any condition of servitude more trying to the spirit than the compulsion to look busy, to go through the motions of intense occupation with not the remotest trace of a thing to do, he had not experienced it before, but he knew it now. And Edward Todd was often bad-

tempered from worry. They set Abner to copying—letters, old invoices and bills of. lading—to improve the records. His mother had taught him to write a good hand. It was the best he or anyone could do. A strange dull quiet oppressed them as it would an army suffering a long siege. Edward Todd was neither a good commander nor a genuine opportunist. He was nervous. He procrasti-

nated. He hesitated to seize the main chance without some other will to spur him. “Go with the drift,” he said—and that was just what he was, a good drifter; a weakness early discovered by Captain Burgess, who pointed out that his business had to do specifically and fundamentally with the main chance. Captain Burgess was much in the office these days. His ship—the pride of the Todd fleet-—was, like the others, swinging at her moorings, with the rats in full possession of her hold. Abner saw that Uncle George did not like Burgess or his influence with Edward; he barely tolerated him. And Uncle George was not well. Abner knew that something was amiss, something besides the lack of business, among the members of the Housé of Todd. He could not tell what it was. Once, at dinner, he caught an exchange of angry glances between Edward and his father. Edward’s face was pale. The two younger boys sat silent, heads bent over’ their plates. Jane revived the failing conversation a moment, with prattle of fashions and wardrobes. “Father has never even noticed my new

bonnet,” she said,

ABNER

WILDE—REBEL

21

puckering her face into a pout. “It’s the latest thing from Paris!” George Todd smiled at his daughter. Then he said seriously:

“[m

thinking we

are buying too many

of those foreign

things. And we’re not selling enough of our own.” Uncle George came into the office next morning

leaning heavily on a cane. His eyes were tired, but their expression was

resolute, eloquently glowing, as he went slowly into Edward’s private room. Voices were heard in argument. The words were indistinct, but at times Uncle George’s voice rose loud in protest, sharp and insistent. Edward came to the door and called Captain Burgess. The argument inside was resumed, Burgess’ voice added to it. There was a sudden halt in the discussion. The door opened abruptly and Edward, his face contorted, beckoned to Abner.

“Run for a doctor,” he said in a whisper. “Hurry!” But it was too late. Uncle George was dead. “Heart failure,” the doctor said.

The doctor was kneeling on the floor, putting his instruments back into his bag, the others bunched around him. Edward and Robert and Terry. And Abner and Captain Burgess. They gazed, unbelieving, at the body of George Todd. They stared down at the face, almost accusingly, as if they suspected death itself of harboring a motive; as if they felt inclined to reproach the corpse for

having done something too unexpected, too sensational. But the face gave them no clue. The features were relaxed, the conflict waged there a moment ago in the living flesh stricken out in that abrupt and horrifying cancellation. The face now had no expression beyond a kind of shocked surprise. Only the mouth

hung open, as if there had not been time to close it. words had come hurtling forth in anger; and whether emotion accompanying that utterance was for the son projects or against the uprearing wave of annihilation

The last the final and his breaking

over the doomed man, no one in the room, not the son himself,

could say. They followed the doctor out of the room, shoulders bowea,

grief stamped on their faces. But the face of Captain Burgess was smooth and cold as a slab of dark stone.

22

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NG

5 George Todd had not forgotten his youngest sister, Mary. His will contained a codicil that provided for her, the inheritance to pass at her death to her child or children. That provision would have given Abner standing in the world and made life easy. Fate and Uncle George’s carelessness about details of execution willed otherwise. The codicil was unsigned. They heard the will read by old Reuben Nantuck, the lawyer, in his stuffy office over in the Wall Street court. He looked up as he finished, a smirk on his face.

“The law won’t allow it,” he said. “It’s not in legal form. But if you are so minded . . .” He paused and looked them over. They were Edward and Robert and Terry. And Jane. “T’m against it,’ Edward said. “He wouldn’t know what to do with all that money. Besides, he’s too young. And a backwoodsman!” “That’s my thought too,” said Robert. Terry nodded, in absolute agreement. But Jane started to make trouble. She rose from her seat to confront them, her eyes bright with anger and unfallen tears. “Father wanted it. It was his wish. That’s what that paper says. I think you’re ungrateful and mean. All of you. I hate you fori!” Lawyer Nantuck winked at the boys. “You’re too young to understand these things.” He spoke in a soothing voice to Jane. “Let me handle it. P’ll look after the boy.” The next day Abner listened quietly as the lawyer explained the situation. “Of course, my son,” the elderly man of law said in a kindly tone, “if you insist and want to enter a contest, they may offer a settlement.” “There’s no need of that. No need to worry,” Abner said as he rose to take his leave, “I don’t want their money. I’ll make my own!”

He did not speak of it to Jane. She did not mention it. But later when they met he saw that her eyes were red.

ABNER

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He packed his things that night. There was no longer room for him in the House of Todd. “I understand, Abner. Yes, really I do,” Jane said when he told her of his going, the next morning. “But we can still meet at the Battery, Abner. I'll be waiting for you tonight.” So she stood beside him in the moonlight, near the riprap wall of Battery Park. They did not see Edward Todd and Captain Burgess on the walk behind them. Nor the quick and nervous motion with which Burgess nudged Edward as they passed.

6 Abner’s lodging was in Cherry Street, number 121. Just four squares from the river front. Toward the east from his room on

the third floor he could look out on the ships moving up and down the river. And there was the shipyard, from which came sounds of a thousand hammers building the hull of a new ship that was expected to break all records crossing the Atlantic. A run of twenty-two days to Liverpool was the hope of the owners. Abner planned to swing one of those hammers. Perhaps later he would sign on, seek his fortune before the mast. No apprenticeship for him, teaching him to cobble shoes or clerk in a store. In Ohio, the land of his birth, death had driven life and robbed him of his parents. Here in the East, too, life was driven. With dollars. With-

out mercy. But on the sea there was freedom and adventure. He’d be a captain, like Burgess, in a handsome uniform with gold braid. And then one day he’d return and bow low before Jane. She would be proud of him. A captain and a master. Night came. He knew Jane would be waiting at the Battery. He was in his room, preparing to meet her, when a bedlam broke out in the street below. Cries and blows. Something dropped and smashed. Abner dashed downstairs and out the front door, eager to have a look at the excitement. In front of the house a mad, vociferous collection of grog-crazed men, Amazonian women,

ragged urchins, shouted and cursed. A water-front street brawl. No one knew why, or cared.

24

CHLLI202 51 N

GESPNG

Abner stood on the fringe of the crowd, looking on, amused and excited. He felt a sudden pain in his head. Something had hit him. Half consciously he was aware of a figure beside him and a rough voice. “We got him!” Then all was blank. Shooting pains in his head waked him. Or was it the light in his eyes? He opened them on the curious stare of a dozen men. All sailors. He tried to sit up. A voice spoke from the distance. “What’ve you got there, men?”

Abner sat up. He heard the flap of sails. The wind came fresh, and the air was cold. The group of sailors parted. A man in uniform strode into the arc of light from the lanterns two sailors were holding. Directly over his head a yard light burned lonely in the dark, casting weak illumination over a small area of the ship’s deck, cluttered with dark bulks of hawser and capstan. The man in uniform was short and stout. Surprise showed in his eyes. He spoke again.

“How the devil did you come on board?” The captain banged his fist on the table as he listened to Abner’s tale of the street fight. “Shanghaied! By God, that’s just what we fought England for. Now it’s being done in our own cities. But,” he added, pondering, “I guess you must have made some enemies.” He closed his left eye in a sly wink. “A girl, maybe.” Abner shook his head solemnly. The ship had sailed at midnight, bound for Liverpool. Abner was all of eighteen years old. But he looked older and he studied his ship. He was attached to the captain’s personal service. “You stay with me, son,” Captain Maybrick said as they neared port. “You've got the makings of an able seaman. You learn quick. And you’re coolheaded. It'll get you your uniform.”

And it might have if Abner hadn’t fallen in with Six-fingered Pete.

ABNER

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A Liverpool in 1817 was a busy place. Ships from all over the world were tied up at its quays. The taverns that lined its water

front were filled with men of every nationality. Every flag was welcome except the Stars and Stripes. Every uniform was saluted with cordiality except the one from the States. And the pothouse called the “Seven Seas” was the least hospitable of any to the Yanks, besides enjoying the worst reputation for rioting and foul

play. Abner and his three companions should have known better. But they were ignorant of the reputation of the place. It wasn’t long after they came in and stood up to the bar that the fight started. Soon Abner stood alone, battling a howling mob of drinkmad ruffians. The bartender had cleared out. His three friends had dropped. One of them lay on the floor under a table, his legs drawn up, groaning and holding himself around the groin. Glasses and bottles were smashed over the floor. Crashes resounded. The place was a wreck of overturned tables and splintered wood. The trodden glass cut through Abner’s shoes and bit into his flesh. He was being worn down and losing ground. A huge fellow with a jaw like a meat cleaver and terrific muscles stood with his legs apart, on the other side of the room, swinging a chair. In the very instant that he swung his arms up above his head, a voice.roared in the doorway. The man dropped his arms; the chair crashed on the floor. Abner, twenty feet from him, pitched forward and fell in a heap. A ship’s officer in uniform strode through the door. He stared at Abner, lying dimly conscious across the legs of an upset table. The grappling men stood rigid. The officer looked down at the limp boy, then turning around, he yelled: “Get out, every damned one of you!” He stood glaring at them, arms folded over his broad waist,

head sunk between his shoulders on his short neck, as one by one they departed. When they had all gone, he turned back to Abner, helped him to his feet, and laughed a short dry laugh. “You can use your mitts all right, my boy. You'll need some

rest and nourishment. Come on with me!”

26

CELL

Abner’s three friends And so Six-fingered walked into Abner’s life. Six-fingered Pete was headed. His complexion

202—SING

SING

found their feet and got away. Pete, as Captain Peter Keys was called,

bald; otherwise he might have been redshowed reddish under the sallow-black burn of remorseless suns. Almost everything disastrous to beauty had happened to his face, including smallpox. Pete got that somewhere

in the Levant, a bad case which

left his skin thickened

and pitted; salt winds on tropic seas had eaten deep grooves into it. His eyes were deepset, of a light tan color which went dark to smoke and cinders under stress of emotion. His girth seemed nearly equal to his height, which topped six feet four. He wore knee breeches and gold braid and earrings. “See,” he said, as they sat in his room on the top floor of a nondescript boarding house, a stone’s throw from the water front. “Those cannibals took off the wrong finger!” Abner counted six on his right hand and four on his left. “You weren’t born a sailor, son,’ Pete continued. “I can see

that. What was it? A woman? The world never changes, God bless them. Mine promised to marry me—if I lost a finger. But,”

he looked ruefully lost her too.” Abner did not The room in prints and pictures.

at his left hand, “I lost the wrong one. And

answer. which they were sitting was decorated with Abner went round the walls, looking at them. He stopped in front of a plain wooden frame in which was a document in strange script. A diploma from Oxford. Six-fingered Pete was a Doctor of Divinity. Abner turned and stared at his host sitting hunched in his chair, his legs crossed, his eyes fastened on the toe of his boot. Pete raised his head and caught the doubt in Abner’s face. He laughed. “That,” he said, “is how I learned to say my prayers. It helped. I conduct funeral services on board my ships. And I’m pretty good at marrying. I’ve tied knots in every port. My ships never leave scandals behind. I make my boys marry the girls, and what’s more I make room on board for the brides. On our last return to port we had a dozen or more of ’em. From almost every part of the globe. We’d been to China and stopped in Lisbon, the west coast

ABNER

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of Africa, Calcutta, Singapore and the East Indies. Lassies from all those ports.” Pete talked through three bottles of Madeira. Abner gazed at him, awestruck, as he described his cruises around the world. Pete’s

mind had soaked up the color, the life, and the languages of scores of races and peoples. He knew their prayers, their oaths, and their customs. Yet underneath it all one could discern the Oxford of

his youth. Abner liked him. He was carefree, but safe and secure also.

All the world was his home. “The trouble with you young fellows,” Pete went on, “‘is that you fall in love too early in life. It’s fatal. You settle down to one woman, one town, one country, one occupation. Yes, and one God. It’s all too monotonous. There’s no elasticity. One or the other must get tired. When God lets go, you have earthquakes and pestilence and wars. When man or woman lets go, it’s disillusionment and broken hearts—sometimes suicide. Don’t let it get you, boy!” Pete got up and crossed the room to Abner. “Come with me. Come with me, and see the world move and

men live!” Abner was tired from physical exhaustion and wine. Languidly he remembered that Captain Maybrick would be sailing the next morning. He must hurry or he would be left behind. Jane would still be waiting at the Battery. He would watch for her as the ship came sailing up the bay. Then suddenly Lawyer Nantuck was before him. “You’re a backwoodsman,” the lawyer said apologetically, “T’m just repeating what they said!” They—Edward and Robert and Terry. And Jane. One girl. One God... Pete stooped. He lifted the boy easily and carried him to the bed. He stood looking down at the figure relaxed in sleep. A faint thoughtful smile broke over his features. He tiptoed out of the room, locking the door behind him. Next morning at dawn Captain Maybrick paced the deck in anxiety. He stopped every man coming on board. No one had seen the boy since the scrimmage at the Seven Seas. The jail had been searched, and the hospitals. The captain swore. “Damned youngsters. Can’t be trusted out of sight!”

But the wind and the tide would not wait. The captain gave

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the word. Anchors were weighed, canvas spread. The vessel glided from her quay.

An hour later a disheveled boy stood on the shore waving frantically at the sails disappearing into the horizon.

8 Abner was twenty when he returned from his first cruise. Captain Peter Keys had been a kind and thorough teacher. The boy’s vision had widened. They had nosed into far-flung corners and looked on the glamour, the splendor, the starvation and squalor of foreign worlds. Naked African savages and ragged Chinese pirates had trod the decks of their ship. Proud and heavily caparisoned nobles from Ceylon and Burma frequently were guests at Captain Keys’ table, while their retinues screeched their wares in bargains of tea and ivory for English broadcloth. Mohammedans from India spread their prayer carpets on the deck, bowed toward Mecca, and turned

to haggle over comparative values of shawls, laces, handwrought idols inlaid with gold and studded with gems.

Off the east coast of Africa where they had lain becalmed for several days, Abner witnessed a battle to the death between two tribes. A struggle for exclusive privilege of trade with the white man’s boat. He looked on in fascinated horror at the ceremonials of the victory celebration, a frenzied demoniac dance followed by a feast that made even Six-fingered Pete swear copiously. Many times he observed pig-tailed Chinese signaling to the sailors from their flat-bottomed boats, pointing to the gaunt halfstarved girls in their custody, persisting in their exhortations until Captain Pete in disgust rolled out a six-pounder and scared them away. Often he stood all day on the quarter-deck with Captain Pete,

straining his vision over the widening sweep of water that separated them from a pursuing sail. No name was painted on its bowsprit. The hull was black. “‘So is its flag!” the captain said. “You’re a man of the world now,” Captain Pete remarked one day as they tramped the road leading from the quay at Liver-

ABNER

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pool. ““You’ve seen it all. More than I have. For I’ve a squint at the States coming to me yet.” The captain’s commands had always taken him east. He had never crossed the Atlantic. “I hope I'll catch up with you, though,” he said, laughing, as they turned in at his old lodging. But Abner did not meet him with any answering enthusiasm. He had found this side of the world disappointing. It was narrow and close and provincial. And old. It felt cramped to him. His spirit yearned for the heroic distances of the American plains, the

great wide-open sun levels stretching out into the horizon. And the newness of New York. ““These countries are smothered in tradition,” he told Captain

Pete. “America is different. It’s building its own traditions.” “Maybe it is,” the captain said, ‘“‘and mark me, son, it’ll make a bad job of it!” They disagreed continually about the future of America. But there was no mentor-and-pupil element in their discussions. No stiffness of father and son nor distance of age interfered with their relationship. Not even an elder brother’s feeling of responsibility for the younger man’s well-being put any formality between them. It was simply that each saw in the other qualities he himself lacked, admired, and would have liked to possess. Abner, vibrant,

ambitious, plain-spoken and clear-thinking. Pete, wise, languid, disillusioned, yet with a native spontaneous joy in living that needed no argument or creed to justify it. In addition to their fundamental accord, they were a perfect balance on each other. It was natural that they should have come together. Abner did not tell Captain Pete about Lawyer Nantuck, and he did not speak of Jane. Nor of the night when he was shanghaied aboard Captain Maybrick’s outbound vessel. Pete may have suspected something. He wasn’t surprised to find Abner growing fidgety.

“You want to go back, I know,” he said. “I’m thinking you'll find things different. Changes come, they always do. Maybe for the better . . .”” He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows?” The captain looked around for a master’s berth to America.

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He didn’t have to wait long. It came. And with it came an opportunity. Perhaps they would be rich. “Tt’s our chance,” Captain Pete told Abner. “You'll be my mate. And we’ve got the fastest ship afloat. We ought to make New Orleans before they get news, over there, of the rise in cotton. We can fill our hold and light out. We share fifty-fifty in the profits. And if we succeed, our fortune’s made. Then we can go to New York—and your new world will be at your feet.”’ The captain laughed. ‘Maybe we can help build its traditions!” Abner was in a fever to get back. The two intervening years had not dimmed the image of Jane, and his memory dwelled perpetually on that vision of her standing beside him at the Battery wall. He had written, but no letter came from her. Of course not,

he told himself, with him roaming the world over. His share in the adventure with Captain Keys would be three thousand pounds. A lot of money. “I'll make my own!” he had told Lawyer Nantuck. So he put a curb on his impatience to be back in New York, and shipped as mate to New Orleans with Captain Pete. Abner was proud of the Arrow. And Pete was beside himself with joy. He knocked down three bottles of Madeira on his first inspection. His old commands, East Indiamen—stout ships though they were, were full-bodied, slow of sail, and clumsy hulks. The

command of an East Indiaman was like sailing in a warship. Every vessel carried a full complement of guns and ammunition for use against Portuguese and Dutch pirates. At least, the merchantmen of those nationalities got the same treatment as the pirates. The Arrow carried topsails large enough for a vessel double her tonnage, royals, skysails, studdingsails, jib-o’-jib, staysails low and aloft. Even watersails. “She'll steer like a top!” Captain Pete exclaimed. “With fair wind and favorable weather we ought to make it in record time.” They did. Thirty-three days to New Orleans. It was probably the fastest run ever made. It took them a week to load. And Captain Peter Keys was again Six-fingered Pete as he drove his men. Abner watched him with a smile. There was no trace of Oxford or the Doctor of Divinity about Pete now as he tramped the decks shouting and swearing at sailors and blacks. At last the

ABNER

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31

hold was filled, the hatches battened down. They slid away from the dock at sunset, on their way. “Well, the job’s half done,” the captain said that night, as he set the ship’s course for the Florida Strait. “If only we don’t have a run-in with those damned pirates. They’re thick in these waters.” At noon on the third day they sighted the ominous sail. The cry from the mizzenmast, ‘Sail ho!” was like the call to arms. The voice of the man in the crow’s-nest rang out over the sea with a

portent that struck terror to the hearts of all the crew. Though it might not be an enemy sail, they could never tell until she drew near. Pete and Abner rushed on deck. The captain stared through his glass, then he handed it to Abner. “What do you make of her?” It was a square-rigged craft, with a long narrow black hull. No name showed on her bow. No flag flew from her mast. She seemed faster than the Arrow, and bigger. And she steered straight for them. The vessel came nearer, and still she showed no flag. “No use running,” Captain Pete said grimly. “Her heels are faster than ours. We'll see it through.” They were within hailing distance. To Captain Pete’s bellow, “What ship are you?” there was no answer. The stranger maneuvered into position. Then suddenly her portholes opened, black guns were run out. An officer appeared at the rail. ‘““Heave to!” he commanded. “And send your captain over. We'll speak with him!” Captain Pete fumed. “Who are you?” he shouted back. “And what do you want?” There was no immediate response. The officer on the stranger’s deck bent down, as if to consult with someone not visible to the

people in the Arrow. Then he called out again: “Send your captain over!” Simultaneously, the rail was lined with sailors, each holding a

musket in full view. “They don’t look like pirates,” Captain Pete commented, “but they’re armed. We wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance. Not with

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only seventeen men and three guns. We'll go over, son. And we'll go unarmed. I’ll resurrect one of my old doxologies on the way!”

u) No sound came from the stranger as they rowed toward her. They got aboard and were met by two officers on the main deck. At a signal, silently given, they walked aft and down a companionway, conducted by two sailors who walked in front, two more following. The rest of the stranger’s crew stood at attention, holding their muskets; the glint of their watchful eyes, narrow in rigid faces, moving with quick precision as if laying a gun sight on the visitors from the Arrow as they passed down the deck. The air below decks was heavy. It was worse than merely foul. It came at them in a great solid, dull-smiting, and imponderable greasy wave. Abner was struck with a sensation of loathing as if his own naked body had been plunged in a pool of filth. A sickening odor of human

waste,

strong flesh, sweat.

A dark

thick

smell. Captain Pete sniffed. And shot a glance of comprehending cynicism at their escort. “Black ivory,” he whispered to Abner. “Slaves!” They were admitted into a low-ceilinged cabin. Two men sitting at a table littered with charts and papers greeted them perfunctorily. One of them evidently was the master of the ship. The other was in civilian clothes. Captain Pete stepped forward and burst into angry remonstrance. Abner stood just behind him. In the pale glow of a cabin lamp, swung from an overhead beam and oscillating crazily as the

ship pitched in a choppy swell, he could make nothing of the countenances of their hosts. The pair of opaque shadows squatting on the other side of the table appeared a menacing bulk, a watchful dumb inertness from which Six-fingered Pete’s flow of invective rebounded with less effect than wind on rubber. Presently the figure in uniform spoke. “We mean you no harm, captain,” the officer said, in a tone

at once placating and insolent. It was the voice that had spoken the moment before from the ship’s rail, shouting over the water. But now in the close in-

ABNER

WILDE+REBEL

33

terior it had a startling familiarity. Abner craned forward, transfixed. He lifted a faltering hand and pushed it out in front of him. Edward Todd and Captain Burgess stared at him coldly. Neither made any move to take the hand that dangled half an instant and dropped against his thigh. “You left us rather suddenly, Cousin Abner,” Edward was saying, after a silence. “We thought you had gone the long way home.” He laughed and turned to the man beside him. “Captain Burgess, bless my heart—we never thought of looking for him in any of the ships in the harbor!” Captain Burgess’ face wore a thin blade of a smile, but he made no reply. Edward’s

words reéchoed

in Abner’s

brain; and the echoes

went on clanging and multiplying, spreading out like circles made by a stone dropped in a pool of water. ‘““We’ve got him.” Those words that fell upon his ebbing consciousness the night he was knocked down in the street row rose to his mind now, obscurely linked with Edward’s remark, vaguely insincere, a little too insistent in denial. He couldn’t be certain, of course. He could think

of no motive

for their enmity. He hadn’t wanted

any of the

Todd money; he had made no demands. But somehow he felt sure

these two had known of it. “We thought you must have gone back to Ohio,” Edward was saying.

He seemed not to notice that he contradicted himself. “Or drowned in the East River,’ Captain Burgess added, shooting a deadly stabbing look at Edward. Captain Pete was just coming out of the fog of his astonishment. ‘““Abner wanted to go back,” he said, with the fleeting smirk

of a man who has mistaken his bearings. ““He’d have gone, I guess, except for me.” “Good judgment, captain,” Edward said. “It would have been embarrassing!” Abner labor.d a question in his mind. At length he forced it out.

““How is Jane?”

Going red to the ears, he jerked around and hurled the query

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GRSUINIG

at the two men. Edward looked at Burgess. The latter met Abner’s knockdown gaze with a granite stare. “She’s very happy,” he said in an even voice, “and as charming as ever.”

Light broke over Pete’s face. He grunted a short strangled sound, between a gasp and a groan, and kept still. “What’s your cargo, captain?” Edward inquired abruptly. Pete remained silent, his tan eyes going a dark ash color, confronting Edward’s. “No reason to be anxious,” Edward explained. “We're not

pirates. Or buccaneers. We sail under the American flag, and except for certain circumstances we would be showing it. All we want is information. Reliable information. You have just left New Orleans. We are due there. You probably have advance notice of the change in the price of cotton. Give us that information we want, and you can go your way. We can easily pick up a cargo and land it in New York at the new price.” Pete was impatient to get away. He had misgivings, but he trusted these fellows to be on the square if you didn’t interfere with them. It was a damned nasty hole, any way you looked at it. He told them what he knew. . Whether

Captain Burgess got the idea on the spur of the

moment or whether Beelzebub was in the man’s brain all along, not all Pete’s sagacity of a veteran sea dog could unravel. ; “You’re carrying cotton, I suppose?” Burgess began smoothly. Then deferring to Edward, ‘““Why not save time?” he asked, and leaned back to let the idea sink into Edward’s comprehension. “We might buy their cotton. Then when we get rid of—our present cargo—we can set our course for New York. Captain Keys,” he inclined his head in the grim semblance of a bow toward Pete, “Captain Keys will, I am sure, accommodate us. He can return to New Orleans and pick up another cargo.” “You take a devil of a lot for granted,” Pete exploded. “I’m the master of the Arrow—it’s a pretty far jump to make me her owner! By what sort of romantic reasoning do you think I have the right to dispose of her cargo?” Burgess smiled. ‘ “That’s a technicality. You’re splitting hairs, captain. I haven’t

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35

asked to see your papers, but you can produce them if you like.

It makes no real difference.” Little copperish flames spurted from Pete’s eyes; they seemed

to pass over his cheeks ascending to lick the dome of his bald head, giving him a quite extraordinary resemblance to the Mosaic bush. “By God, it does make a difference,” he shouted, leaning over the table, his face apparently close enough to singe Burgess, “if you're not pirates! Suppose I were to consider your offer—I’m not

saying I will, but just as a matter of information—I’d like to know. What are you offering?” “Necessarily” —Burgess was sitting with his back to the bulkhead; he couldn’t retreat to be out of the range of that infuriated, glowering eye not six inches off—‘something below the price you quoted me.” “IT see. Well, you can go plumb to hell!” “T don’t have to be informed of your sentiments, captain. I should have known, it’s to be expected. But let me remind you, what’s fair for you is fair for me too. Naturally, I expect to make a profit out of this. Or why do business?” Burgess paused, his eyes narrowing. “JT think you'll sell,” he said. “You’d rather do that willingly, Im: certain.;’ *We

have

the cash on

board,”

Edward

broke

in. “Not

in

paper, but good gold. You only have to sign the bill of sale. I can have my men

make

the transfer in short order. Think

it over,

gentlemen.” ' Abner and Captain Pete were left alone in the cabin. ““They’ve got us, son,” Pete said. He sat down and heaved a sigh. “There go our profits. And my master’s certificate. ’m done.” The stillness of the cabin was suddenly dreadful. It was not the absence of sounds. The tramp of feet overhead; the clank of metal; a prodigious variety of strange thumpings borne above voices, loud laughter and swearing; a meaningless commotion of

the hoisting and lowering of heavy objects; all that mingled cacophony that goes with the execution of a ship’s routine sounded through her planks, with the beat of the waves, to the ears of

Abner and Captain Pete. Though she was for the moment at rest,

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GASPING

drifting in the sea, these sounds continued; deep in her bowels, the

voice of the vessel spoke in the creaking and straining of her timbers, buffeted by the waves. But to Abner and Pete these sounds,

so familiar, so pleasant in their own ship when they signified that all was well, now became ominous, full of portents to their taut nerves. “That hell-blasted hyena up there,” Pete growled. “Listen to him. He’ll murder somebody. Worst run ferryboat I ever saw!” “We might as well go above,” Abner said, ‘“‘and get it over. I suppose they’ve got a pen and ink they’ll let us use. They’re so God-damn generous! . . . What’s that?” He started, listening. Cries sounded on deck, extraordinary shouts. Running feet surged overhead with a noise as if tons of waters were being splashed over the decks. Then shots. A head appeared at the top of the companionway. Simultaneously, a voice yelled:

“Mutiny!”

“My God! It’s the slaves,’ Pete not have explained; it was one of omniscience. ““There’ll be murder on He burst up the ladder, Abner

cried. How he knew he could those mysteries of seafaring this boat. Let’s get away!” behind him.

Suddenly, without warning, the dark smell in the hold ex-

ploded and blew open the hatches. The slaves had broken loose. From the forward deck came blood-curdling yells. And shots. A hundred blacks, wild-eyed, bare-skinned, were rushing the sailors who fought with muskets, swords, knives, clubs. Dark backs,

streaming with sweat, glistened in the sun. Eyeballs and teeth gleamed out of ebony. The niggers were trying to strip the sailors of their weapons. Some of them waved clubs and swords, and

beat white men over the head with the butts of revolvers they did not know how to use. They prevailed by jungle strength, sheer swarm; when the musket fire plowed into their mass, they were without fear. They reared and plunged, not seeing annihilation. Abner caught a glimpse of a huge fellow with a bulletshaped head and great protruding lips, his legs in faded dungarees, holding a knife in his teeth, and bending over a sailor who had been driven into a corner between the deck rail and a stanchion.

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He had just wrenched the knife from the sailor and was hacking the man’s arms off with a saber.

The women fought with them. They had rushed up the ladders after the men, blocking all the entrances. Some of them stood bunched against the wheelhouse, clutching their offspring, children clinging to their great hanging breasts and bare legs. These spectators screeched guttural encouragement. Others threw themselves on struggling sailors, biting, tearing and mauling. Captain Burgess and Edward were buried somewhere in the black moil. “Lower the boats,” somebody shouted. There was a rush to starboard. “Come on,” Pete yelled, “they’re done for—the blacks’ll kill them all!” Abner, running, slipped and struck the deck with a sudden concussion as if the deck had risen up and put itself in his way. The whirl in his head momentarily obliterated everything, all sensation, sound and feeling but the noise of the world exploding and falling around him. He lay still, while the reverberations rang and abated in diminishing circles. Then he sat up, and perceived through a fog of rising nausea that he was sitting in a lake of blood. Somebody else’s blood. Beside him a small object lay immersed in the sticky red lake, like a stone amongst rapids. A broken tooth. The owner of the tooth, horribly cut and beaten about the head, blood pouring into his eyes from his wounds, had retreated 99

into a corner over against the mainmast. A little pocket of sheltered calm in the hurricane. Abner watched the lake, augmented by the red stream spurting from the man’s mouth. An expression of strange calm, a quiet workmanlike concentration overspreading his mangled features, the man bent over, retching and spitting shattered teeth onto the

deck. Abner was struggling to his feet when Pete’s hand grabbed his shoulder. Pete plunged forward, dragging him across the deck. Abner turned his head. In that instant, looking back, he saw the man by the mast straighten up, fling up his arms and spin around, taking little steps as if he were executing a grotesque dance in some

38

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heathen ceremonial. Then he pitched forward and fell on his face. It was Captain Burgess. In the starboard quarter they came upon Edward Todd lying with his face in the scuppers. He had a wound in the head, and his back was broken. The black giant in dungarees was moving away, holding a club. Abner rushed forward and lifted Edward up on his shoulders. “Ready,” Pete called out. He was standing on the other side of the rail, holding on with one hand. He got Edward into the crotch of his other arm and held him, a dead weight, until Abner climbed over. “Now!” Abner swung down into their own boat. In the swell the boat kept smashing against the side of the ship, almost pitching him out. He braced himself, his legs wide apart. “Let go!” he shouted. He fell on his knees in the bottom of the boat as the inert weight of Edward came against him, bearing him under. Pete jumped. From the deck of the Arrow they watched the fury of the black horde consume its enemies. Not a white man remained on deck. Two boats filled with sailors rowed toward them and signaled. They took the men on board. Captain Burgess was not among them. The late sun, slanting over the clouds, enveloped the ships in a halo of bright mist. The Arrow drew away, leaving the charnel ship a wallowing speck on the horizon. IO

“So,” Captain Pete was saying, “‘this is the new world! Looks to me as though it hasn’t cut its eyeteeth. It’ll need a strong constitution to be able to absorb all this.” Six-fingered Pete had disposed of their cotton cargo and given up his command. He and Abner were returning to America as passengers, a new and fascinating experience to Pete. As he spoke he pointed to the hundreds of men, women and children

lining the rails, every eye fixed on the shore as their ship came up

ABNER

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the harbor. Abner saw a ragged, anonymous rabble which had torn itself away from hearth and kin in the hungry hope of getting its fists into some of the fabulous wealth which rumor said was to be picked up in the streets of the new world. They were a wild lot, recruited from the peat bogs of Ireland and the dunghills of England. To them America meant neither freedom of conscience nor liberty of spirit. No idealism inspired their long journey. Nor any spirit of adventure. They sought food. A respite from hunger and privation. They were the first trickle of that tidal wave of immigration that for a century poured money into the coffers of passenger lines, cast up a rising flood of humanity upon the huge domain of the public lands west of the Alleghenies, and left a gathering sediment in the dark byways and slums of the eastern seaboard cities. “There go your traditions,” Pete mused, looking down on the heads of the immigrants swarming up out of the steerage. “Those people are bringing Europe with them. They’ll crowd you out.”

But Abner was not thinking about ideals or traditions. His eyes hung on the lower city. On Broadway, where Jane lived. His heart was heavy with sorrow for her, at the thought of the grief she would feel when she saw Edward, a broken wreck. Yet his de-

termination to say nothing about the slave ship and Captain Burgess made him exult inwardly. He would do that for her. And still, when he thought of that scoundrel Burgess, he wanted her to be

informed of his own generosity for her sake. Jane was calm. Only the sudden draining of color from her face, the slight tremor of her hands, betrayed her emotion as they lifted Edward up the stone steps, up the front stairs and into his

room. She scarcely granted a nod to Abner. But to Captain Pete she curtsied and extended her hand in grateful greeting. Later, as they sat in the parlor, it seemed to Abner that time had stood still, that those two years of his wandering had not rolled between them, bringing change. For Jane looked no older than on that last day when she stood with him at the Battery wall. Actually, she had on the same dress, a simple pale silk frock, and the velvet ribbon tied around her black hair. But there was this coldness. This baffling, disheartening aloofness.

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She had not been given any of the particulars of the catastrophe that had left Edward an invalid. Abner saw the question clouding her eyes. He glanced in Pete’s direction. And it was Pete who told a rambling story of pirates, and how his boat had intercepted them. How Abner had saved Edward from certain death. She flashed a look at Abner, her eyes glistening, her face flushed.

“But poor Burgess,”’ Pete finished his tale. “He was cut down in the fight. And we couldn’t cross the decks in that howling, bloody inferno to take him off. He must have . . . I’m afraid they got him.” It was Abner who rushed to her side as she fainted. He lifted her gently and carried her up the stairs to her bed. He dashed water over her face. But he was not prepared for her cry of grief. There was in it an anguish and a fury that numbed him. “Go away,” she entreated him, “leave me alone!”

She turned from him, burying her face in the pillow, her body shaking convulsively. Downstairs in the parlor Captain Pete stood by the window,

gazing out at Broadway. His lips moved, he was smiling. “Had we never loved so kindly, Had we never loved so blindly, Never met, or never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.” He turned a solemn face to Abner, coming into the room. “Come on, son. We'll be wanting a bed to sleep in. And a bite to eat. And,” he added, ‘‘a bottle of Madeira!” II

The Todd Shipping Company had for some time been in straits. Its vessels tugged at their anchors a few rods from the shore. But their sails remained furled. And they were unmanned. No cargoes waited on the quays. Newer ships, narrower, trimmer,

with taller spars, outsailed them. A new mania had seized upon America. Speed. The abridgement of an ocean.

ABNER

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Edward Todd had played a desperate hand. In the effort to retrieve his fortune and meet the notes held by his bankers, he had put everything he owned into the Falcon, a ship of the newer type. Captain Burgess had plans for quick and large returns. Edward became a slave trader.

Old George Todd’s heart had been strained by his son’s privateering operations. The new venture, bartering in human flesh and life, broke it utterly, perhaps less from humanitarian scruples, although he did go along with the antislavery group, discounting the heat and hysteria of their fulminations, than from the fact that the importation of slaves had been forbidden by act of Congress. What was against the law was contrary to principle in George Todd’s view, and that was surely the same as against God. He waged a great campaign in his paper, that year of 1808 when the Slavery Act closed the market in chattelmen. . . . “The slavery question in these states is not settled,” he announced in legalistic warning. “But the traffic in flesh of these unhappy creatures has been abolished, henceforth

and for all time, under the

beneficent and wise action of our Federal government. Whosoever seeks to continue in this commerce lends himself to a violation of the sacred law of our land, and so is to be regarded as a criminal in the eyes of God. With strengthening faith in the practical wisdom of the lawmakers in the government, let it be borne in to the public that malefactors under this law are traitors in deed; for their ill-gotten gain is bought at the price of increase, at more than the face value, in the property wealth of southern landowners whose unsound policies threaten the prosperity and the very life of this country.” His father’s death was the first sacrifice in the new enterprise levied upon Edward’s conscience. Jane’s marriage to Captain Burgess, the second. Only Abner’s disappearance had made that

possible. Edward made himself a somewhat reluctant accomplice in Abner’s enforced removal

from the scene. He was, also, des-

perate. Robert and Terry knew little about the affairs of the company and cared less. Both were familiar figures on the fashionable Broadway promenade. Their horses were full-blooded. They were at home in almost every one of New York’s grogshops. With their

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caped box coats, rolled cravats and silk handkerchiefs swathed under their chins, they set the fashions for the younger and idler masculine set. Sparks was the word. Sparks spent lavishly and concerned themselves little with the sources of income. Edward’s homecoming, unsuccessful, and stricken with paralysis from the injuries received in the fight, was a hard blow. They were not businessmen. They sensed ruin, with Bridewell in the distance. News traveled fast. Wall Street was just around the corner. Creditors were, at first, politely concerned. Then firmly insistent. A week after their arrival, Mrs. Mathilda Munn, the landlady,

voluble scandalmonger and newscarrier, shocked her guests. Abner and Pete were sitting in her parlor in the late afternoon. Mrs. Munn came in wearing her bonnet and cloak, her animated, sharpfeatured face aglow with eagerness to impart her news. “The Todds are beggared!” she exclaimed, holding up her hands and tiptoeing across the room. “The sheriff took the boys this morning to the debtors’ prison. Now I tell you the truth, I saw it coming. So did my husband, Mr. Munn—God bless his soul. He was my second, you know—but my first love!” Her eyes rolled toward a painting on the wall, of a thinhaired man with a large, bland, pink face and a nose like a pump handle. “I had him done in oil,” she said softly, ‘so he would keep better. Thomas Munn—that was him. A fine gentleman. He published a paper. Like old George Todd. He was another gentleman. ...” She laughed. “And how they did quarrel! But they respected each other. I remember—” The knocker on the street door sounded. The Todd black servant entered with a note. Dear Abner,

Edward has been very restless all day. He seems to have something on his mind he keeps trying to say. Here by myself my own thoughts frighten me. Can you come? Jane.

Abner put the note in his pocket and found his hat in the hall. One thought emerged from the confusion in his mind and

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shed a quick keen joy on all his recent doubt, dispelling the sorrow he felt on her account. “She depends on me!” “Come

with me, Pete,” he said in the hall. And

they went

out with the negro. Jane herself opened the door. She looked out through the curtains of one of the little side windows as they came up the steps, as if she had been watching. “Has there been any change?” Abner inquired. “No change,” she replied briefly. He saw that she had been weeping. Pete sat down

in the parlor; Abner

followed

Jane up the

stairs. Edward was lying stiff and straight in the bed, on his back, his arms outside the counterpane, extended, unnaturally still. His nose drew Abner’s attention; it had got so much thinner. Edward’s whole figure appeared much wasted, his hair gone white; and his

livid, emaciated countenance in the week past had aged frightfully, although he was not much above thirty. But the nose, of a peculiar bluish color; the nose above all had an exaggerated beaklike sharpness. The tidiness and rigidity of his position in the bed made it seem as though he were already lying in his coffin. But the appearance of his hands, shrunken, inert against his sides, possessed of a

strange artificial unfleshed neatness, and the cleanliness of his fingernails, impressed Abner with a suffocating horror. He suddenly could not remember how Edward had looked before. But he knew he would never lose this image. He remem-

bered the ghastly awe that had made his skin cold over his veins when he saw the Indian lying dead in his father’s cornfield. And the moment evoked a picture of his uncle with his mouth still open over the angry words spoken even as the breath went out of it. But they were already dead. Corpses. The remnants of life still lingered in this shell, whose flame burned to ash too quickly, consumed before its time. And he felt that this look of death before it happens was worse than anything Edward had done. More intolerable and criminal to look like this than all those actions by

ae

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which he had brought disgrace upon himself, and suffering and shame to others. Abner pulled up a chair and sat down by the bed. All the while he was in the room he could not separate the fingernails and the bluish, sharpened nose from the other consequences of Edward’s misdeeds. The thought circled interminably in his mind, If his nose weren’t like that . . . maybe none of it would have happened. ...

Jane stood beside him. She moved so quietly, he was not conscious of her approach until her skirt touched the chair. Her hand came against his shoulder. He reached up and pressed it. In contrast to the absolute stillness of the figure under the bedclothes, Edward’s tongue moved in a ceaseless droning indistinguishable mumble. His breath twisted out in long groans, recurring with a wavelike regularity, that were not wrenched out by pain but were the sounds of his life in the hour of departure.

Abner and Jane remained without speaking. They held each other’s hands. Edward died that night. I2

“T’m aiming to go back,” Captain Pete announced next morning at the breakfast table. “We'll be parting company soon, Abner —at least, it looks like it.”

“Why,” Mrs. Munn exclaimed, getting into a fluster, “you’ve hardly seen anything—you’re not acquainted with the country at all yet!” “Well,” the captain drawled, “if the country’s anything like the city, it won’t break my heart if I never am acquainted with it.” “Hold on there, Pete,” Abner cut in. “What’s turned you against our Yankee town? What have you seen?” “For one thing, I’ve seen pigs. More hogs loose in the streets

of New York than children in the English villages. . . 2’ He bowed toward Mrs. Munn and added, ‘Or Ireland!”

“And Id like to know, Captain Keys,” Mrs. Munn cried indignantly, “if you’ve no objection to give an explanation—would you rob the poor of the companionship of their pork? And it’s

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that useful to them. They don’t have to buy foreign drugs for native ailments. The hog’s dung is their medicine! It’s good for stopping the blood, fine in a scald head and for the scurvy. “And there’s others I could mention. So useful to the poor!” Mrs. Munn repeated, dwelling on the thought of the necessity of unfortunate persons with a vehemence that charged Pete with want of Christian feeling. “And our captain from the other side thinks them too dangerous for our streets! If it’s getting rid of nuisances you’re advocating, I’d start with idlers and drunkards who fill our grogshops and taverns, get themselves into debt and the prison, and ruin their families!” “There now,” Captain Pete said soothingly, “don’t you work yourself into a distemper. Or I'll go out,” he bowed in mock gal-

lantry, “armed with your large knife, and cut off the loin of the first hog I meet, so you can be cured!” Abner laughed. “Mrs. Munn, you’ve forgotten the hog’s greatest deed of usefulness. He keeps our streets clean. For that he should be rewarded and not damned.

No, indeed, we can’t let him go. Now

we’ve

settled that question, Pete—why not really see the city? You can begin with the prison; it’s not far.” “That reminds me,” Captain Pete said, “I’ve seen one of your prisons. The debtors’. I visited the boys. To cheer them up, you know.” Just then the knocker on the street door thudded violently. Mrs. Munn

ran into the hall; in a moment

she returned. Behind

her stood a big black—Jane’s boy Abe. His eyes rolled, and his

face glistened with inky perspiration. “Miss Jane sont me,” he said, addressing Abner, “‘to tell you all she done heard de news. Jes’ now. Master Bob and Master

Terry, dey done bus’ out de jail and gone!” Pete listened, a smile on his heavy-jowled, homely face. Mrs. Munn saw it. She came close and hissed into his ear. “Peter Keys—seems to me, the sooner you clear out of here

the better!” ‘Maybe so,” he answered solemnly.

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The America of the 1820’s was a seething, restless, unstable

land. The ‘Era of Good Feeling” was drawing to a close, and the old political quarrels again dominated the sessions of Congress, resulting in little besides obstruction and deadlock. There was no strong leadership in either of the parties, to take control. No one knew or understood in what direction things were going; but all were convinced beyond the ghost of a doubt that it was the wrong direction. The bitter reaping of wild sowing was at hand; the unpleasant truth had to be faced, that the War of 1812 had been a failure.

Contrary to the oratorical pronouncements of patriotic schoolmasters and preachers, John Bull had not been humbled in the dust; when the peace was signed in London, neither side had

gained a single decisive battle, and Andrew Jackson did not become the hero of New Orleans until three weeks after the war was over. Farmers who had burned to see the annexation of Canada were disappointed; and manufacturers who had foretold the ruin of trade, if war were waged, had their expectations fulfilled tenfold. The national debt mounted to seven times the figure Hamilton had funded with his Federal bank. And still the war, that expensive frolic, had to be paid for. The government finances were in such confusion that the maelstrom of inflation could no longer be avoided. Private individuals discovered in the general disorder a rich opportunity to feather their nests without fear of exposure. Gold was scarce and bills aplenty. Printing presses worked overtime turning out bank promises to pay. These were sold at enormous discounts. Fortunes were built up on usury, lost in gambling. Lotteries were in great vogue. Governments made use of them. In New York a prison was built with the proceeds of a lottery, punishable later on by confinement within its very walls. Moneylenders encouraged debt and punished defaulting debtors with imprisonment. Money panics were frequent and recurrent. There was no loyalty between states or cities, very little among merchants.

ABNER

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Men made laws—and broke them. There was no police force. Only watchmen, leathercaps, bearing the symbol of authority in the shape of long poles. Twenty-five hundred grogshops supplied the city’s hundred thousand inhabitants with hot rum and cold beer. Gentlemen dueled, and the lowly fought with fists. Smoking in public was frowned upon; but men snuffed tobacco, and chewed

and spat. There were treadmills for men and horses: the one plodded through terms of imprisonment in expiation of crimes, the other propelled ferries to neighboring shores. There were soup kitchens, houses of prostitution, resorts of pickpockets and counterfeiters. Crime and vice and filth grew apace with wealth and power and luxury. Five Points was already yielding up its stench, the cesspool of misery and want. Its wretched tenements and hidden tunnels lodged human dregs who spread disease and pestilence. Its carrion smelled to the heavens. And New York was indifferent. Its olfactory sense was numbed. Yet as one sauntered through the streets of the city with its handsome stores, its spacious hotels, and paused before Old Trinity and St. Paul’s with the weeping willows in their churchyards; or stood on the curb at Broadway observing the light and elegant carriages, the constant stream of busy-looking and fast-walking people; or visited factories and quays to watch men toil in honest labor ten hours or more a day, only to buy themselves the right to a dozen cubic feet of sleeping room; or gazed in at windows of shipping offices and counting rooms, regarding the industry of clerks and merchants occupied in checking cargoes; or lingered by the Battery where, as if in official review, the crowd of vessels moved in all directions, up and down, across the bay and far up the Hudson; or if one merely followed the shores of the rivers with their forests of masts

crowded

around

docks

and wharves,

one

could not escape being impressed by the vigor and prodigality of the city’s growth.

14 “T’ll come along,” Mrs. Munn insisted, as Abner and Captain Pete were preparing to go to Jane in response to the message

brought by Abe. ‘Poor thing needs a woman to talk to! You men

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—conceited creatures—flatter yourselves that you know all the tricks of making money. And losing it. But when it comes to understanding a woman’s feelings—you’re good for nothing!” Abner had received enlightenment from no one concerning Jane’s marriage to Captain Burgess. And Jane herself had kept

silent. Not even in that renewal of their intimacy as they watched by the bedside of Edward did she speak. Personal emotions between them were momentarily in abeyance, absorbed into the imminent overshadowing ascendancy of death. Nevertheless, he knew; he had guessed. That day when he faced Edward and Burgess aboard the Falcon, his intuition had given him a hint of some intimate and abominable connection of the latter with Jane. And in the

days following his return that premonitory intelligence had been verified by all the signs. He knew. But the joy in his heart now because of Jane’s need of him drove out bitterness. It made him capable of tremendous magnanimity. He could sympathize with the poor girl. And be sorry for Edward. And in love with himself—hadn’t they found it neces-

sary to get him out of the way? Jane was eighteen. And Captain Burgess was handsome and dashing and strong. His looks may have been no index to his character, but he had them. And the man’s

courage—damned

scoundrel!—was

superhuman.

Jane had been

heartsick and troubled. Of course, she missed him. And how could she know he would come back to her with his love the same, across

all the oceans of the world? And now Burgess was dead, poor devil. After all, Burgess had her only two years. The future, all the years ahead, belonged to him. So mused Abner, rationalizing, forgetting pain and forgiving the past, as he walked down Broadway with Mathilda Munn and Captain Pete. He was alone with himself. He did not hear a word of Mrs. Munn’s

chatter, as she walked

with her arm

in Pete’s.

Abner trod on air. “Thank de Lawd!” Black Abe exclaimed as he opened the door for them. “You all is jes’ in’ time.” He ushered them into the parlor. Jane’s face lighted up with relief when she saw them. Three unknown men were in the room with her. Three florid gentlemen, round and fat and solemn and comfortable. Abner and

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Captain Pete regarded them with curiosity. They scowled. It was Jane who broke the silence.

“These gentlemen,” she began. Her voice broke. She smiled wanly as she tried to continue. “You see, Edward owed them money. He pledged the house and everything in it. I didn’t know.” Her face was white and her hands trembled. ‘““They’ve come to see about it.” “That’s it,” one of the trio spoke in confirmation. “Mr. Todd borrowed the money. Five thousand dollars. He defaulted. We only want what’s due.” His companions nodded. One of them repeated, “Only what’s due!” Abner frowned. “But Mr. Todd is dead. He hasn’t been buried yet. I must say you seem in rather an extreme hurry—I think it’s indecent.” The spokesman looked troubled. “Well, you see, mister,” he said apologetically, ‘there are other creditors.” He glanced quickly at the other two. “And we have to protect ourselves. But we have the law with us. We have the first lien. Here are the papers. The judge signed them this morning.”

Abner spoke calmly. “And what do you gentlemen propose to do?” Captain Pete inclined his head and put a hand up to his ear to hear better. His face was impassive. “There'll be an auction,” the man explained. “It'll be a pretty big affair—there are so many fine things, chattels, here. They’ll bring more than five thousand dollars, of course. And,” he added,

“the young lady can have the balance.” *Oh,” Pete said.

“But suppose the young lady doesn’t want an auction?” Abner asked. The three florid faces registered surprise, then hurt. One of them answered: “We have the law with us!” His intellectual agility seemed not to extend beyond production of that sufficient piece of evidence; he waved the paper in his hand for all to see.

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It happened suddenly. Captain Pete advanced, glowering, upon the representative of the law. He reached for the paper, snatched it out of the man’s hand and tore it to shreds. “That for your law,” he shouted. “And as for you, my good man, there are twenty thousand swine loose in the streets of New York; another

won’t matter!”

A small piece of paper that remained sticking to the man’s thumb fluttered down and lay on the carpet near his feet, a white spot. Captain Pete grabbed him. Clutching him by the collar and the seat of his pantaloons, he lifted the struggling creditor and bore him out of the room into the hall. Black Abe bellowed with laughter, his eyes rolling in his head, his round skull bobbing with a sidewise motion like a monkey on a stick. He held the door wide as the furious captain hurled his quaking victim out and down the stone steps into the street. Six-fingered Pete returned for the other two visitors. But they were no longer in the room. They had bolted through another door. Pete stood panting. Abe in the doorway had screwed his features into a grin that seemed permanent. Jane was weeping; release from the strain of her distress drew tears. But Abner saw that her smile belied them. And Mathilda Munn, her countenance

beaming like the sun at high noon, ran to the captain, reached up on her toes and planted a resonant smack firmly on the side of his leathery cheek. Six-fingered Pete controlled his embarrassment. If he felt any, he did not show it. He looked out the window, humming one

of his regular tunes: “There was a monkey climbed up a tree, When be fell down then down fell he. “What was it your famous captain said?” he inquired, turning from the window. “ ‘The fight has just begun’? They’ll probably come back for more. Let’s prepare for battle.” Then he seemed struck with an idea. “You wait here with the women,

back after a while.” He went out.

Abner,”

he said. “Ill be

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a) Rachel Starr was a buxom, grim-faced woman who had come to the new world from the land of the Tartars. Out there she was the wife of a chieftain, a harsh man with terrific mustaches and a

way of beating his women as a mark of esteem and affection. Or sometimes, aversion. But he was strong and handsome. Taller than any of his subjects. And his voice thundered above the clatter of a hundred horsemen. The husband of Rachel was a remarkable man in all ways; so much so, that at his decease she yearned for a more fitting

souvenir than the broken nose he had given her, to keep his memory alive. She had his likeness taken in wax and colored; and brought it from the East, in haste, to avoid melting in the climate. She

was not a Tartar but a native of Canada and had been more than a couple of times around the globe. Before she reached the States she acquired two more helpmates by way of the altar and doubtless, like Moll Flanders, others whom she did not marry. She kept a grocery store now and made herself obliging in other ways for a consideration. But the men she had married were the loves of her heart; she mourned all three impartially. People said the room where her private life was passed, dining and sleeping, was a gallery of art. When she retired at night, the death masks of her three consorts looked on her as the

originals were wont to do before coming to be housed under glass. They made her feel at home. All the young blades and the old fools came to Rachel’s place. She was good-natured when sweethearts and wives were not loving, and her back room was stored with rum and gin. And Madeira. Where

there was

Madeira,

there sooner

or later came

Six-

fingered Pete. Rachel knew all about Edward Todd and Captain Burgess—they were old customers. Robert and Terry had lain hidden in her room for three days before they started for the western country. But she knew nothing of Mathilda Munn. It was to Rachel Starr’s grocery that Captain Pete came on that afternoon after he had thrown the grasping creditors out of Jane’s house. She welcomed him with her same affable, spreading

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smile. Pete always talked well on three bottles of Madeira. And she sipped a glass with him. She violated her lifelong rule for him; ordinarily, she did not drink with a customer. Captain Pete drank and conversed for an hour. Then Rachel left him. She returned before long with a companion. His nose was red. So was his shirt. He was a big man with powerful muscles and clipped hair. He chewed tobacco, and spat monstrously. “You struck it right,”’ Rachel said, speaking to Pete. “You’re going to get a tap on the head. They’ve got the boys from the Seventh. The Seventh don’t like foreigners. Greenhorns. Like you.

There’s going to be some doings tonight. Zeke, here, is a member of the Tenth.” “And let me tell you, captain,” 99 the tobacco-spitting champion glared over the recollection of ignominy. ““The Tenth never had no use for the Seventh!” The Tenth and the Seventh were rival fire companies. It was near dusk when a score of red-shirted men came out of Rachel Starr’s grocery store. They separated, going in different directions. In groups of two’s and three’s they made their way through the darkening streets toward Broadway.

Captain Peter Keys followed the men out and stood in the shadow of the doorway, watching them scatter up the street. Then he, too, turned his steps in the direction of Broadway, keeping a good distance behind the pair of figures he took for a steering point in his course. It was the supper hour, and few pedestrians were on the streets. There was, however, a good deal of vehicular trafic; people driving out to dine, going home, or going somewhere for sociability. Captain Keys walked with the careless strolling gait of one taking the air in the evening. It was quite dark when he reached the corner of State Street. Except for an occasional whale-oil lamp, no light appeared in the

shadowed

thoroughfares;

the lights of the houses stayed snug

indoors, casting no beam beyond the windowpanes, as if any assault upon that outer darkness were vanity destined to defeat. Captain Pete came on down Broadway and stopped in the middle of the block. He could just make out, in the woolly blackness, the figures of a group of men drawing together in front of

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the house of Jane Todd. The company grew larger as more figures slid into it. Pete stood still, watching. No one made a sound; the silence and the darkness seemed

to unite in a density in which no blade could make the slightest impression. Pete looked up at the sky and observed a solitary greenish star glimmering at the head of the street; it looked unnaturally large, as if its size were exaggerated in the darkness between worlds. Suddenly two men, walking rapidly, approached the Todd house from the State Street corner. They came up to the front steps, and one of them called out: “Where’s that furriner? We wanna say a woid to him!” The man’s voice seemed to open a crack in the night into which yelling figures began to squirm. They closed in in pairs, swarming up the steps. The yells increased in number and volume. The squirming silhouettes began to beat on the door with fists, and with wooden and metal implements. The street became choked with an uproar of blows and shouts.

“Send dat furriner out! Where is he? We got a message fer "im.

The door opened suddenly, and Abner Wilde stepped out on the stoop. “Go at ’im, boys! The big stiff, that’s him.” A volley of stones struck the house. There was a smash of glass, and splinters of glass rattled down on the pavement. Abner staggered back into the vestibule. The door slammed, making a breeze in the faces of the men on the top step. At that moment a gang of running figures appeared at the head of the street. They came on, hurling stones and bricks, and waving clubs. Yells, oaths, groans filled the air as the onrushing assailants fell upon the men on the steps. Heads were cracked and faces bruised. Each side grew in numbers as new recruits joined

the fight. “Rah for the Seventh!” “Damn the Seventh!” The foreigner was forgotten. Three men with long poles and lanterns, wearing leather caps,

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came down the street and stopped at a safe distance. Watchmen of the city. They watched but did not interfere. Then the tumult ceased abruptly. Bells sounded in the distance. A lantern appeared in the sky, swinging from the cupola of the City Hall. It pointed northward. And stopped. Voices in the crowd yelled. OBireleFire! Purelx

Pete, watching on the other side of the street, looked up at the sky and saw a bright glare staining the northern quarter. All around he could hear the din of feet of people running. The combatants left off mauling one another and rushed to the engine houses. The street was suddenly vacant. Almost before he had time to move, he heard the firemen pulling their engines with terrific clatter up the other end of Broadway. Captain Pete crossed the street and ran up the steps of the Todd house. He knocked cautiously and spoke through the door. In the hall he stood still in consternation.

Abner had been struck by a brick in the instant he stood before the mob. He was lying unconscious on the floor, blood oozing from a scalp wound. Jane sat on the floor, holding his head in her lap, panic in her white face. Mathilda Munn was on her knees beside a basin, dressing the wound. She spoke to the captain. He bent down and felt Abner’s pulse. “He'll be all right,” he said to Jane. “I saw him open the door —TI was across the street. But I didn’t know he was hit. He’ll come round in a minute. Let’s get him upstairs.” He lifted Abner in his arms, as he had done once before—

that other time after the fight in the Seven Seas. He carried him up the stairs and laid him on the bed in Jane’s room. They all entered and stood waiting for Abner to open his eyes. Captain Pete, Mathilda Munn, and Jane. And Black Abe. Pete grunted. “Tm getting to like this country,” he said. “I think I’ll stay.” “T never thought otherwise,” said Mathilda Munn. He turned around and noted with astonishment that she was blushing. And this time it was Pete who fetched Mrs. Munn a lusty kiss on the mouth.

“Land sakes,” Mathilda exclaimed, straightening up.

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They were alone together in the hall. “You men don’t know anything! It takes a woman to find out. Jane is going to have a child. Four months gone, I should think. And how in the world she’s going to get along—and it’s an orphan already!” “Maybe it’s no news to me, my dear,” Pete said. And then he

added gloomily, “But I don’t know how the boy’ll take it.” 16

In common forward

with most seafaring rovers Captain Pete looked

to the day when, as a mellowed

and retired master, he

would sit in his garden by the oceanside watching the sails dip back and forth along the horizon, dreaming in retrospect of hard battles with waves and winds and men. Since his Oxford days he had never sat at a desk or spent more than a month at a time in landlubbing ease. He could not imagine himself permanently affixed to dry land except as a gray-haired gentleman waiting in resignation, and in peace, for the final lifting of his earthly anchorage. Abner Wilde was essentially a landsman with an instinctive yearning for permanency of home and hearth. Both had been denied him in his youth. Virgin forests and untrodden plains and dangerous frontiers had transformed his parents into nomads, ever seeking ‘“chome.” It had been a vain search. They had found nothing but will-o’-the-wisp instability, a mirage of the promised land enticing them on toward vanishing horizons and greater distances. Abner longed to find what his parents and his youth had missed. He had felt its nearness the night he first met Uncle George. There had been the hope and joy of final realization in his meeting with Jane. . . . But Uncle George died too soon. And Jane became the unknowing and unsuspecting force that sent him on— a wanderer. Now he was back; and Jane loved him. She was at his bedside, the exquisite and tender embodiment of his yearning. From the moment he had been felled by the fireman’s brick, she nursed him and hovered about his pillow, solicitous and loving. He did not notice the brooding look in her eyes.

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Then one day, as she stood near, she gasped suddenly, clutched at her throat, and fell in a faint. At Abner’s cry Black Abe bounded into the room. Together they revived her. But her face remained pinched and ashen, her whole manner expressing panic. “Call Mrs. Munn,” Abner told Abe.

Mathilda came, with Captain Pete. She coaxed the girl out of the room and persuaded her to go to bed in her own room, next to Abner’s, for the rest of the day. Through the thin walls both men could hear the older woman scolding her patient. Her voice was low, but the words came clearly. Abner listened with a painful shock at his heart. “You must be careful, child, or your baby will be born dead.” “Oh, I wish it were dead!” Jane’s voice wailed, muffled against the commanding bosom of Mrs. Munn. In anguish Abner lay still, conscious of the sound of her sobbing.

Six-fingered Pete, the brine-pickled sea wanderer—notwithstanding those visionary expectations concerning cottage gardens within sound of the waves, that he always imagined as remote in the future—Pete, the enamored of Mrs. Munn, was firmly installed at a desk in the office of the Todd Shipping Company. And Abner Wilde, landsman, was on the high seas, master of the ship Orient,

bound

for Timbuktu

with a cargo of cloth and notions. And

$100,000 in Spanish gold.

It came about after Abner and Pete had talked it over. Both agreed that Jane’s situation was desperate indeed. It was true they had won the first skirmish. The battle of the fire-laddies—the Seventh and the Tenth—had given them a breathing spell. The three usurers would not dare return just yet and could not, by other means, insist upon an immediate auction to satisfy their debt. But there were others. And Jane had no one to look to. Abner, convalescing, was racked with impatience to plunge into action. And while he fretted, Pete accomplished a promising piece of negotiation. Old Nicholas Griswold heard him out, his alert nearsighted

scrutiny, which made one think of an aged terrier reckoning up

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on hoarded bones, flickering with interest. He shook his head, sad-

dened at the mention of Edward Todd’s name. “Too bad!” he murmured. “And George Todd, such a fine Tan. They talked through most of the night. Griswold had a gorgeous stock of fine old Madeira. Captain Pete made himself at home. The Griswolds were a strong firm, eminently well-to-do, of merchant shippers. They traded in China. Their vessels carried ginseng, spelter, and lead iron to the Chinese coast and bought tea. They were one of the few American firms commanding the respect of old-world shippers. Their London office was regarded as a responsible exchange between American and English traders. Old Nicholas had a keen memory. He recollected, without disclosing the fact to his visitor, that Captain Keys at one time had

carried one of his most valuable cargoes. It had yielded the firm immense profits. And Captain Keys’ reputation for honesty and seamanship had preceded him across the Atlantic. “So,” the old king-dog of warehouses and ships commented, musing, “you would rescue the Todd fortunes. Very creditable, captain. But, tell me,” a crafty smile flickered across his pensive face, “have you no personal interest in all of this? Nothing but friendship?”

Pete shook his head. “T love the boy,” he said simply. “Somewhere in the world there’s one of my own. He would be Abner’s age. I never saw him. His mother ran off with a Spaniard while we were tied up at Barcelona. Aye, sir, I’ll tell you something—before that happened I was a plain fool about her! I’d have married her quick enough first time she ever slept with me. I was just waiting for her to say the word. Now here’s another thing—Abner loves Jane Todd.” And so out of Captain Pete’s conference with Nicholas Griswold grew a setup for the Todd Shipping Company. It was to be Jane’s and Abner’s and Pete’s. Each owning a third interest.

Abner’s and Pete’s fifty thousand dollars were to be matched an equal amount from Griswold. The latter would be secured the Todd tangible properties—the six idle ships and the home. And the personal undertakings of Abner and Captain

with by all Todd Pete.

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The mortgages in default were recovered and guaranteed by the reorganized company. Griswold laughed as he outlined the terms. “These notes are not the only thing that matter—it’s the moral risk I’m preferring.”

“I’m beginning to like America,” Captain Pete told Griswold as he said good night. “New York’s not all swine and rowdy fireladdies. There’s honor here, too. And judgment and vision. You'll be making money, Mr. Griswold—even if I have to go to China to get it!”

“Hold on,” Nicholas Griswold stopped him, “that reminds rege Sere fi So the small hours were getting bigger before their business was finally concluded. Pete took leave of Griswold, flushed with

eagerness and wine. He had accepted a commission, to China. It was a joint venture of the new Todd Company and the old Griswold firm. Two hundred thousand dollars were in sight, the profits of a large cargo outward bound, and the return with a shipload of tea and spices. Captain Pete would resume his command. Abner would remain at home to prepare other sailings. Pete tramped home in the thick darkness of New York’s unlighted streets. He was well pleased with his night’s work. He reckoned without Abner. And Mathilda Munn.

17 “How long will it take?” Abner asked the next morning, when the captain told him the plans. Pete thought about nine months. “That’s just right,” Abner said. “Pete, I want to be away for at least that length of time. Let me take the ship out, and you stay here.” Pete hesitated, frowning. “Well, I don’t know—I don’t know what Griswold’d say to that. And I was looking out for’a chance to recover my sea legs, I’ve damned near lost ’em.” Pete was mystified. He spoke of it to Mrs. Munn. “You don’t suppose—is it Jane, do you think?” he suggested, wondering.

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Mrs. Munn looked at him in mock surprise. “Goose that you are, Peter Keys,” she said. “Of course it isn’t

Jane; it’s her baby! He wants to be away until . . .” She smiled knowingly. Abner could see them at the Battery Wall, waving good-by as his ship dropped down the bay. Captain Pete and Mathilda Munn—who never let the captain out of her sight these days. She stuck to him like a poor man’s plaster. Black Abe was there. And Jane. She stood rigid and silent as the sloop got under sail. Abner Was again a wanderer. And this time, Jane knew. He couldn’t stand by and see her bring the child of Captain Burgess into existence. But he would come back to her. And she was glad he was going. In a twelvemonth he was back. Jane had kept a long lonely vigil. From the observatory tower of the house, her eyes strained far out into the bay for a glimpse of the sails she knew, the image of which tilting over the horizon had become the symbol of an anguish that grew greater in her mind with each day added to the term

of Abner’s

absence.

There

had been no word

from

him.

Griswold had begun to fidget. Pete said nothing, but he was worried. And then at last, one day, the Todd emblem whipped aloft. She found it among the barren thicket of masts bestrewing the harbor. There was a stiff sea wind blowing. The ship rode in

steadily. Jane flew downstairs and searched in the hall for her cape. She meant to run and tell Captain Pete. But in the hall she stopped, hearing the wail of an infant. She flung the cape back on its hook and walked slowly up the stairs. It was feeding time... . Black Abe brought the news to Pete. An hour later a happy group stood on the Todd wharf. Captain Pete and Mathilda Munn. Griswold and Jane. The captain beamed and slapped Griswold on the back. Old Nicholas stamped about, his face a wrinkle of animated parchment; his small faded eyes smiling. Mrs. Munn’s eyes were misty. Jane stood breathlessly

quiet, unheeding, as she watched the ship glide closer inshore, on. her face an expression of mingled excitement and anxiety, as if she feared some catastrophe might yet send the vessel to the bottom

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before she covered that swiftly diminishing distance which remained. Her eyes were fixed on the afterdeck. Abner cut a fine’ figure in his captain’s uniform. He carried himself with an alert and well-knit grace that made the seamen conscious of the authority in his gestures and orders. He was thinner and more deeply bronzed. He shouted his greetings. When he had warped his ship alongside and made fast, as soon as he could get away out of the intricate hubbub of docking he came ashore and met them on the wharf. With his quick stride he reached Jane first. To her he bowed low in mock servility. He was indeed the captain greeting his lady. He shook hands with Griswold. Pete nearly bashed in his shoulder blades. After some tacking and maneuvering in the onslaught of welcome, he was able to get Jane in the lee of a mound of cotton bales. They forgot everything in the bliss of their embrace. Black Abe surpassed all standards of his art that night. The table was stocked with food, and Madeira. There was laughter and joy. Captain Pete’s voice boomed, while Mathilda Munn kept their plates filled. Nicholas Griswold relaxed in intimate fellowship. He told stories that made them all laugh; and he seemed more than ever like a knowing and disillusioned old dog, naively soft under an exterior of skepticism and caution, absurdly anxious to make everyone understand his amiability. Abner had much to tell. Jane was glowing with happiness. While they were still at table, a faint whimper sounded above. Jane sat tense, her eyes on the tablecloth, a slow red stealing up from her throat. There was a sudden silence in which everyone became deeply absorbed in his plate. They could not go on talking, because each one felt a private remorse that made him horribly afraid of his neighbor. Abner felt his breath cut off. The cry came again. Jane hurried out of the room. Abner pushed back his chair,

and followed. The others in the dining room heard him running up the stairs. She was bending over the child. He went up to the crib, and stopped just behind her. Peering over her shoulder he studied the small, sticky, moist-smelling creature squirming under the blanket. The baby stopped crying. A pair of infant eyes looked roundly and elementallvy into his. They were blue eyes, with the cloudy

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opaque look of the newborn creature, as of a membrane remaining from birth that the consciousness must absorb in course of time,

a lingering veil dividing the sharp-edged world of being from the not-being. The baby blinked and squinted, and screwed its face into a smile. “She wants to be friends,” Jane said softly. Abner reached his arm around her and drew her to him. “Tt’s your child,” he said, “I shall love it. And she’ll be mine, too. Ours.”

He put out his hand and touched the baby’s forehead, feel-

ing the contour of the soft skull under his fingers. They held each other close. 18

In the early decades of the nineteenth century the United States government dealt liberally with its importers. The high tariffs encouraged shipping and created profitable home markets. And that was not all. The government did not exact immediate payment of excises and duties. Merchants were permitted to sell their goods and pay the government import tariffs in notes of six, twelve and eighteen months. Cargoes, moreover, were sold for cash

or notes redeemable at the banks. Thus it was made possible for

the importer to carry on business in currency notes rather than specie. If the exchange fell, the importer got the advantage. The arrangement worked for the benefit of shippers and stimulated large ventures. Fortunes came into being through that beneficent medium. John Jacob Astor was one of those to take advan-

tage of such liberality in laying the basis of his immense wealth. Nicholas Griswold was also of the number. Abner’s voyage had been entirely successful. He had bartered his cargo of American products for Chinese tea. And he had bought more. He returned with a hold filled with sacks of tea which sold in the New York market for upwards of four hundred thousand dollars. The tax was nearly one hundred and fifty thousand. Griswold promptly arranged to pay that sum to the Collector in notes maturing eighteen months later. The actual profit to the Todd Company and Griswold was one hundred thousand

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dollars. A quarter of a million in cash on hand. Griswold literally burned with enthusiasm. So did Captain Pete, and Abner. Rainbows hung in the heavens. A month later the Todd home was ablaze with festivities. Black Abe was the master of ceremonies. In a new swallowtail coat with silver buttons, he was equal to his responsibility. Captain Pete was resplendent in a new uniform, a handsome gold watch dangling from a heavy chain stretched across his abdomen. He had bowed to fate, personalized in the admonitions of Mathilda Munn, and had sacrificed his earrings. Abner, too, wore a new uniform. Jane was flushed and beautiful in a bride’s dress of cream silk that

Abner had brought from China. “T never thought I could be so happy!” she exclaimed to Mrs. Munn. “Nor I,” Mathilda sighed in blissful abandon. “Even though it is my third!” Jane hardly thought of it as her second. Abner was her first love. There was a double wedding. Abner laughed with Pete later on in the evening, as they sat over a bottle of Madeira. “How about that ‘one girl,” he said, joking. “Your philosophy won’t hold now!” “Maybe not,” Pete admitted, grinning. “I’m hoping the one God will hold on, though. I’d hate to be around when He lets go!” Nicholas Griswold was impatient. “We have all that cash doing nothing,” he complained. “It ought to be put to work. Why not another sailing to China?” Abner was too happy to think of undertaking a voyage anywhere. Pete was finding his land legs remarkably comfortable. Nevertheless, old Nicholas wouldn’t be silenced. He found fault

with Pete, accusing him of going soft. Mathilda scolded and threatened and finally swore. But Pete agreed with Griswold; they would be fools not to try once more. Mathilda cried. “Tl leave you a competence,” Pete assured her. “You won’t have to worry.”

-

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She looked at him with flashing eyes. “I don’t want your money,” she said tearfully. “If that’s what you think! J—oh—” She ran out of the room and slammed the door behind her. Pete looked perplexed, dismay on his face. “God bless em,” he muttered, “‘they’re all alike!”

Pete sailed his ship. He stood on the forward deck, waving. When they had cleared the‘harbor, his hand slipped into his pocket. He drew it out, smiling, and opened his palm. In it were the gold earrings Mathilda had made him stop wearing. He put them on, greatly pleased. And then as soon as he felt them in his ears once more he reverted to his old character—he was again Six-fingered Pete. “Aft there, every sail to the wind!” he shouted, catching sight of a knot of sailors who worked no faster than they should. “And no idling on the job!” Twelve months to the day he was back in New York. Again it was Jane who sighted the Todd emblem among the sails, swarming over the bay like butterflies. Again there was the welcome at the wharf. This time Mathilda was the chatelaine receiving back her knight. Pete kissed his hand to her and then kissed herself. His eyes lost their gleam when he greeted Abner. They clouded momentarily with worry. Then he laughed and pinched Jane’s cheek.

The hold of the ship was filled with tea. A valuable cargo. Business was fine. Old Nicholas Griswold thumped happily along the quay. Abner was delighted. But Pete, as he walked up the street beside Mathilda, was silent. Sensing his mood, Mathilda asked, “Aren’t you glad to be back?” “Sure, you know that, I guess,”’ he said, looking at her fondly.

“But I’m afraid. I’m afraid God’s letting go.” She looked at him, astonished.

And

then he told her...

after he had made her promise to be silent. They were tied up at the same quay in Canton. Captain Pete’s

vessel and the stranger. “It’s the ship from nowhere,” the coolies and dock hands said of her. Her portholes were painted green; they looked venomous against the black hull. The ship from nowhere . . . it might have

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been the ship from everywhere. Sprinkled over her decks were sailors from every clime, jabbering and covering the yards with their washing. Blacks and tans and yellows and all degrees of white. Pete and this rainbow heathen outfit were neighbors for a week. In all that time he did not once lay eyes on her captain. Then surprisingly, one day after Pete had finished loading and was preparing to sail, they met, in the tavern at the head of the quay. Captain Pete was savoring his first bottle of Madeira. The stranger walked up to his table and said bluntly: “[’m your neighbor.” Pete shoved out his hand and invited the stranger to drink with him. “My name is Storm,” the man said. He laughed. ‘“‘They tell me I’ve raised a typhoon!” Pete didn’t exactly warm up to his manner, or his appearance. He was a tall fellow, the lower part of his face hidden behind a thick beard dyed black and cut square. There was about him, whiskers and all, an objectionable kind of swagger that imposed itself on Pete’s plain imagination as indecent. Those dyed whiskers gave him an odd resemblance to a Greek archbishop on a holiday or the villain of a melodrama—Pete wasn’t sure which. But one thing he’d lay a bet on—that chin decoration hid something. Later, when he got a good look, he perceived the outline of a horrible scar underneath the beard. There wasn’t any jowl on that side! Half the chin seemed to be gone. “The jawbone of an ass,” Pete reflected. “I wonder how many slaughters that bird’s had a finger in.”

The man gave no information about himself. He asked questions concerning the States. And New York. He appeared to be

familiar with the American setting. As he discoursed, Pete began to think. The voice stirred his memory, familiar inflections, echoes of an utterance that woke ghastly and shuddering reminiscences. The man leaned forward, and smiled.

“The most positively evil and repulsive twist of a human phiz I ever saw,” Pete said to Mathilda, in telling about it. “It wasn’t human—it was diabolical! Like the heathen idols you stub your toes on in that part of the world every time you try to do business

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with a native. As a skipper and a man of honor, I give you my

word—it was just as if the blooming gazabo handed me a covered basket with one of those Indian cobras inside, and polite instruc-

tions to let it bite me—do it like a gentleman, by heaven—or take the consequences!”’ “You carry the flag of Todd,” the fellow said next. And

then, of course, daylight struck in, lifting the fog in

Pete’s recollection. He pushed back his stool and stood up. “Captain Storm,” he said slowly, fixing a steady eye on him, “you ’re—”

“Burgess. That’s right. But don’t holler so loud.” The man laughed, and went on. “Burgess has gone to the bottom with Davy Jones. He was a pirate. Captain Storm is a hero!” He indulged in another of his frightful grins. “Those blacks took my jawbone, but they left me my neck. They discovered they weren’t up on navigation—couldn’t handle the ship. I was lying on the deck all that time in full reach of the sun, with a thirst that would have floored a dromedary. Pretending I was dead and wondering why in creation I wasn’t! “One of them—that fellow in dungarees, he was their leader —brought me some water after a while. And then they got busy with a few of their women and sewed up my wound. It was a few days before I made it up the ladder and heaved myself up on my pins. ‘All that time the ship was just drifting. They made me understand, of course, they had something up. I was being rewarded

with the privilege of remaining alive for a purpose—to take command. A pretty smart blow came up about that time—one of those Gulf storms. The niggers were scared out of seven years’ growth! I showed ’em what seamanship is. And they baptized me with an

honorary title—Captain Storm!” He finished his tale. The man listened without apparent interest to the narration of Edward’s rescue and his death, subsequently, in New York. Pete paused. Both men were silent a while. Captain Storm filled his glass and held it aloft. “A toast, captain,” he said, his false teeth gleaming artificially white through the dyed beard, in a sort of macabre leer.

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“Let’s drink to my wife. Jane, God bless her ! “Blasphemy,” Pete growled between his teeth. “Burgess and God can’t mix!” >

He refused the toast. Captain Storm drank alone. ‘“Nevertheless,” he said, “here goes!” He set the glass down on the table, half full. Then, his eyes on

Pete, glittering with malice, he added: “And the baby—it’s a girl, I'll take my oath. I always wanted a girl. To look like Jane.” He emptied the glass, and wiped his beard with a handkerchief. Pete rose. Captain Storm stood up. They confronted each other, both grim. , “You’re dead!” Pete said, with a pointed emphasis that carried a threat. “And the dead live!”” Captain Storm laughed. Then he turned and walked away. “Glory be!” Mathilda exclaimed in shocked tones, when Pete ended his recital. “And with the poor girl going to have another baby. There’s good reason to be afraid!”

19 People said the fire was the work of an incendiary. And if that was the truth—and it had all the appearance of truth—it may be supposed the villain who did the deed knew what he was about. But the watchmen of the city did not know. The clang of bells, New York’s most dreaded sound, broke

the peace of the early morning hours. Abner jumped out of his bed and rushed out to join the throngs in the streets. He did not need the light on the City Hall to announce the disaster. The eastern sky was aflame. Men were running, red-shirted men, and citizens half dressed, harried out of their sound sleep, streamers and

tails of imperfectly donned garments flapping from them and getting caught in their heels. A score of fire companies dashed by, each group dragging a dinky engine toward the water front. When Abner got there, Captain Pete was already on the ground. He might as well have been in China. They stood in silence, watching the flames eat away the Todd quays.

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“Save the ship!” Pete yelled, when he began to see what direction the fire was moving in. The wind was shifting. Abner jumped aboard. Pete hacked away at the hawsers, Abner helping him. But the ship was already burning. Flames were belching out of her portholes and flaring up through the hatches.

Rachel Starr stood on the flat roof of her house watching the flames leap and rebound, stretching higher and driving their forked corrosive tongues into the morning-glory ceiling of the sky. Her face was grim, stripped of its customary good-natured pudgy smile. She chewed tobacco. And spat. “That,” she exclaimed, snapping her fingers, ‘for the fat captain and his lady!” Beside her stood a tall man in a sailor’s blue uniform. His face was heavily bearded. He looked at her with coarse affection and

desire in his glance. “That’s only the beginning, my sweet.” He moved nearer, to allow his hand to pinch her blowsy breasts through the gingham dress. “Keep your hand in your pocket,” she said, striking him. “I don’t want you—you make my flesh crawl. I keep thinking of that jawbone. What I’m doing isn’t for you, see? It’s Mathilda Munn. And for him, the son of a bitch. The buzzards pick his carcass!” The bearded man laughed. >

Abner and Captain Pete stood in the crowd of onlookers until the last flame had flickered down. Then they blundered homeward, on dragging feet. They did not speak, or look at each other. They kept their eyes averted, unseeing,

screwed

to the cobbles

over

which they trudged up from the water front. At intervals they had to stop and wait to control the fits of blind shivering that seized them. They walked unsteadily, like men in liquor. They were simply worn out, completely spent, and chilled to the bone in the gray dawn. Rachel Starr was standing in the doorway of her place as they came up the street. She noticed their stumbling gait, their hollow, gray faces. Her eyes rested on Pete a second, with something like melancholy. “Come in,” she said, “and Ill get a bottle for you. It'll warm

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you up. If you haven’t got your death anyhow, it’s a wonder!” They followed her into the back room. A nasty black drizzle had begun outside, and in the room it was quite dark. The dirty, sodden, sour-stinking dawn was thick over everything. Abner bumped into a chair which fell over with a crash. A trumpeting yawn sounded from a corner of the shadowfilled room, unexpected and startling. Rachel, walking in front, stopped and bent over a table at which a gangling figure slouched on its elbows. She shook him by the arm and spat words of fury into his ear. “Keep still, you! If you try any tricks, Pll...” The last words were uttered in a whisper, but the others knew by the man’s snorting, evil laughter that they were such words as are scrawled on fences and privy walls. Rachel laughed, too. The man ignored Rachel. He got to his feet, swaying, and came stumbling over and halted in front of Pete, his head lowered, his neck thrust forward in a bullish menacing way. “So,” he mumbled thickly, “Captain Keys, we meet again. The dead live!” Abner knew at once. That voice! As the snarling, mocking tones tore through him, hatred diffused like a poison through the channels of his being and drew in again to compacted fury; and as if his stunned consciousness yet registered some shrewd forewarning of what his concentrated madness was about to do in action, it fled in panic to the innermost chamber of his brain. “You’re dead,” he said dully. And repeated in the same flat voice, ““You’re dead.”

The man uttered his remark again in a stupid swaggering tone. “The dead live!” Then he stretched out his arm and stuck a long, thick, insulting forefinger against Abner’s breastbone.

“I want what’s mine—Mister Wilde. My daughter. And my. wife.” ) They burned each other with their eyes. “You fool!” Rachel exclaimed. She ran up and pounded the man’s thighs with her fists, trying to force him off. He brushed her away, muttering:

“T only want what’s mine. The law is with me. It’ll give them

ABNER

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to me. The law or . . .” He reached a hand in his coat pocket, and kept it there suggestively while he went on speaking. “Or we can fix it up, maybe, for a little—a consideration. And I'll go back to Davy Jones’s locker!” Pete, sweating from nervousness, his eyes glued on Captain Storm’s coat pocket, slid a furtive hand to his waist and eased a pistol out of its holster. Abner caught one flashing glimpse of the pistol in Pete’s hand. He felt a quick, sharp joy at sight of it. Still hearing the words . “my wife, fix it up, a consideration” ... he leaped forward and wrenched the pistol from Pete’s loose grip. A spot of fire, a bursting roar, and a stench of sulphur filled

the room. Captain’ Storm sagged to the floor. “You’re dead!”? Abner shouted, leaping up and flourishing the

still smoking pistol above his head. “A drunken fight,” Rachel Starr explained to the sheriff. “T’d ’a’ never let °em come in here if I’d known they had pistols. I don’t yet know what it was about. It’s the God’s truth. There’s never been anybody hurt in my place.” Abner went willingly. They took him to Bridewell, charged with murder. Abner’s baby was born that night. A son. Jane could not understand. She had never known Abner to be uncontrollably drunk. Certainly not fighting drunk. Despite the seriousness of the charge, she was inclined to take it lightly. The fire, the excitement, the disappointment—all might have contributed to his temper. The victim was a mysterious stranger. So the newspapers said. Captain Pete denied any knowledge of him. So did Mathilda. Jane was confident Abner would get off. It was merely a question of submitting to the formalities of proving his innocence. That innocence could not be in doubt, since his character was

widely known; whereas the reputation of ‘the unfortunate man was scarcely a bouquet of violets, from all accounts. And what was the sordid and bespotted life of one unidentified individual beside that of a man of upright principles and known abilities? What brief could justice hold for the preservation of such a life, if the other were condemned to perish by its ruling?

70

CELAN202=siIN Gi sUNG It was Black Abe who came to her a month later, in doubt

and shocked surprise. “Miss Jane,” he said, his eyes rolling, his features stretched

with woe, “I’se heard something.” Jane smiled wanly, seeing his trouble. Abe was her main source of information having to do with local gossip. He registered every rumor. And was an eloquent transmitter. But now she perceived in his countenance something out of the ordinary, some terrible stress of emotion. “What is it, Abe?” she asked, leaning forward in her agita-

tion. “What have you heard?” He swallowed hard. Then coming nearer, as if afraid of the sound of what he was going to say, he whispered the words. “De man Mistah Abner killed—dey say he was Cap’n Burgess!” The blood drained from her face. Her hands clutched the arms of the chair. Her eyes closed, then opened unnaturally and stared at the terror-stricken colored man. She laughed. A dull burst of sound that carried no emotion. “And you believed that?” she said. “Don’t you know that Captain Burgess is dead?” “Yes, ma’am,

Miss Jane. Sho is. Deader’n

a carved co’pse.”

And he added, as though stating a truth of unrecognized importance, ““Mistah Abner’s a good shot!” Abe became garrulous. He repeated every word and every gesture that preceded the shooting. He had tracked down the rumor which came from the back parlor of Rachel Starr’s grocery store. Jane in her house dress, with no bonnet, rushed down the street to Mathilda’s house. And then to the office of Captain Pete. She listened calmly to the hard-wrung statement confirming the

vague report brought by Abe. Jane had lived all of her twenty-one years in New York. Her world was bounded by the horizon that lay upon the waters around the wall of Battery Park. What went on beyond that horizon was to her a jumble of mystery and distant echoes, lacking substance. Her mother had been intolerantly pious, a strict observer of minutiz in the ritual of her church. Her father had been

ABNER

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at once more tolerant and more worldly, but impatient and unsympathetic toward human shortcomings that brought misery to men. He abhorred dishonesty. From her mother Jane had inherited her intense love of purity —cleanliness of soul and body going to extremes of self-restraint. She participated deeply in her father’s righteousness and virtue. What struck her with acutest pain when she heard the facts corroborating Abe’s rambling account was that she had been defiled. She, a married

woman

and a mother, had given herself to an-

other man. Her mind recoiled in horror. Perhaps her love for Abner might have overcome it. She might have been reconciled to the longings of her heart. But as she sat facing Captain Pete and Mathilda her body stiffened. An accusing look crept into her eyes. Her voice was cold, without emotion. “You knew,” she told Captain Pete. “You knew. And,” she

said after a pause, “‘so did Abner.” In vain Captain Pete protested. And raged. And swore. Mathilda blabbered incoherently. And cried. But something dreadful and bitter had crystallized in Jane’s heart. Finally she rose and without a word swept from the room. 20

Did

Abner

Wilde

know

about

the survival

of Captain

Burgess? The question was debated at every dinner table. New York buzzed with it. Society matrons found it an absorbing topic for hushed conversation. The fact of the murder faded into in-

significance before the spicy bit of scandal. When Captain Pete denied it belligerently, people listened to him with an outward show of respect and a pretense of credulity. In the privacy of their homes they reasoned otherwise. It was two months after the murder before Jane decided to visit Abner. The usual clamor of Bridewell Prison was silenced, and a hundred bloated, diseased and curious faces watched her

ascend the stairway to the entrance. Abner stood before her with eyes heavy and bloodshot. Foulness and filth seemed to cling to his clothes. A week’s sojourn amid the dregs of humanity that was

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Bridewell’s population had left a mark on his soul. He stood apart from her. She was pure and clean. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said, though his heart was glad. He ached to know about her, about the child, and Captain

Pete and Mathilda. But her mind was set upon one theme. She would know from his own lips. There was a tremor in her voice as she asked him the question. “T must know, Abner,” she said, “and you must be truthful

with me. Did you know he wasn’t—dead?”’ Her eyes searched into his. Her heart beat with hope. She waited for life and happiness and love. She would believe him. She wanted to, so deeply.

Abner stepped away from her. He did not understand her need to know the truth. He heard only the words that implied mistrust and doubt. A dull, thudding pain shot through his head. It was gone, then returned with hammer strokes. They beat in his brain. He swayed, and steadied himself. Time seemed endless, Actually it was but a moment. But he was a changed man in that moment, gazing at Jane. She had loved Captain Burgess. That thought left him numb. He did not offer to answer her question. It did not seem to matter. “J did not know . . .” he said. “I didn’t know,” he repeated, “that you cared so much.” He turned away to rejoin the throng of inmates awaiting him in the large prison room. She watched him go. A sympathetic murmur buzzed through the room as the other prisoners made way for him. He sank down on the cold stone

floor. They formed a circle around him. His tired eyes and dulled brain saw them in fogged relief, a mass of shapeless heads and faces without light. Then his vision cleared. Each head was a man, and

each face something that was called, in the language of religion, a soul. They were a grim, unsmiling, solemn group. Two figures detached themselves from the others and approached him. One was a boy not over sixteen. He came and stood

close to Abner, smiling. Another stood beside him, a gray-haired man with a soft face and broad shoulders. Abner looked at them, and turned from them to gaze at their comrades. One, at the

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threshold of life, carried hope in his countenance. The other, nearing the end, appeared calm and resigned. In all the others he saw wretchedness, disappointment, misery. And bitterness. With these

two he felt kinship and understanding. Judge, jury, and spectators followed with gaping interest the story unfolded by Captain Keys on the witness stand. His meeting with Abner in Liverpool, their fast cruise to New Orleans. Their encounter with the Falcon, and Edward Todd and Captain Burgess. And the mutiny of the slaves and their own escape. It was a most palatable yarn. Pete was a good storyteller; his huge bulk towered

in the crowded courtroom. He ended by telling of his meeting with Captain Burgess in Canton. The prosecutor broke the tension, pointing a long, lean finger at Captain Pete as he inquired, “You saved Edward Todd?” “No. I did not,” the witness answered.

‘““Abner saved him.”

“Why then,” continued the prosecutor, “did you not try to

do something for Captain Burgess?” “T saw him fall. A club swung by one of the black men got him. I was sure he was dead.” “Then you ran,” insisted the cross-examiner. “So would you, if you had been there,” Pete replied.

The crowd laughed. It was the only light touch during the trial. Captain Pete finished his testimony and lumbered from the stand, followed by the interested glances of the audience. Mathilda looked at him with pride. The jury smiled indulgently. Captain Pete grumbled audibly when Rachel Starr was called as a witness. She nodded as the oath was administered, and kissed

the Bible in affirmation. Her voice was low and hoarse. “Sounds like a sepulcher,” Mathilda whispered Petes

to Captain

‘More like a voice from the dead,” Pete answered.

And drama of detail his “He

so it was, or seemed to be. For she told with exaggerated her meeting with Captain Burgess. She repeated in great

story of the mutiny of the slaves. told me,” she said, her vindictive eyes fixed on the prosecutor who prompted her, “how wounded as he was he begged Abner Wilde and Captain Peter Keys to wait for him. But they wouldn’t.”’

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Abner listened and flushed. Captain Pete struggled to rise from his chair, anger in his eyes and murder in his heart. ‘*That’s not true,” he shouted.

The judge rapped with his gavel, calling, “Order! Order in the courtroom!” Mathilda stared at the witness. Her eyes held Rachel’s in a fleeting glance, in which were reflected hate and venom. The jurors looked toward the witness and then at the defendant. “Dames from spiders learn to warp their looms,’ Captain Pete muttered, scowling. : “Guilty,” the jury said. Manslaughter. “Saved by a neck!” a humorist in the rear of the courtroom shouted out. There would be no hanging. Men looked disappointed. Women sighed. And Jane fainted. It was Mathilda who ran to her. Captain Pete sat limp in his chair. After a moment he stood up, and lurched toward Abner, as if to protect him from the iron chains that already locked his arms. But Abner was leaving the courtroom by a side door, under guard. “Twenty years,” the droning voice of the judge pronounced. “Hard labor in the State Prison.” Jane moaned herself to sleep that night. Mathilda and Captain Pete watched over her. So did Black Abe. Pah

Four sad columns and a yellow facade. That was Abner’s recollection of the prison in Greenwich Village. Newgate, men called it. Legally, it was the New York State Prison. It stood on the shore of the Hudson River, a little over two miles from the

City Hall. “One of the most imposing buildings the city has yet seen,” an enthusiast said of it. ‘“The handsomest prison,” a knowing

penologist wrote. It had Doric columns, and a fine cupola surmounting them. And it was built for spaciousness and strength. Four acres of ground, enclosed by stone walls fourteen feet high on the side flanking the street and twenty-three on the river front. Abner rode in state in a barouche drawn by two prancing

ABNER horses.

Two

WILDE—REBEL

sheriffs escorted

him. Across

Chambers

75 Street to

Greenwich Lane. Then up the lane, through ever-receding homes and shops and stores and life, to the great door of the prison. He did not speak during the long ride. But his two companions gabbled incessantly. And chewed tobacco and spat. “How about a quid?” one of them suggested, offering his pouch. “It’s the last ye’ll get for some time. It’s not in the rations up there.”

But Abner’s mind was not on quids. He felt utterly insensible to surroundings. He was being transported to his new home, yet it seemed that only his body was seated between these two men. His physical self. A mere senseless and sensationless hulk. The real Abner Wilde, the thinking, feeling Abner, capable of love and

life, had been left behind. It roamed through the house that was his and Jane’s down there on Broadway. It built ships and sailed them. It was brave and ambitious. It was devoted to a wife and

child—his son!—laughed with Mathilda, quarreled good-naturedly with Pete, and planned with old Nicholas Griswold. He knew that Abner. And life was full and round. But this one—the Abner who was being hurtled up Greenwich Lane—was a stranger. A sullen fellow, capable of hate and bitterness. Wanting to be alone, and insensible to pain. A creature without memory or reverence. A rebel. That was the Abner who entered the gates of Newgate Prison. The Abner who answered to his pedigree, shed his clothes, washed his body and donned the prison uniform. And it was that Abner he did not know who was admitted into a large room, barred and ironed, and gazed with sullen indifference at the seven men who turned toward him with curious and friendly gesture. ““What’s yer name?” one of them called out. Abner did not reply. The seven waited. Then they moved toward him. And one of them observed, with a grunt, “High and mighty. We'll put him in his place.” But another of the men, a medium-sized, stocky, black-haired fellow with a mole on his left cheek, restrained them.

“Easy, boys,” he said. “Can’t you see the man’s groggy! Let him alone; until morning, anyhow. There’s time enough.” Carl’s voice was gruff, but kindly. He stuttered, and he walked with a limp. It was he who unfolded the wooden box,

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adjusted the straw-stuffed tow cloth, and helped Abner to his bed for the night. ‘Easy, man,” Carl said. “Try to sleep. You must not think. It’s bad if you think in prison. Not backward or forward. It gets you here and here.” He pointed first to his heart, then to his head. “In prison you live every day by itself. Five, ten, twenty years. It’s all the same. Day by day.” He limped away, cautioning the others to silence. Abner slept, a heavy, dreamless sleep. But Carl didn’t. He was awake half the night—thinking. Abner was in a new world. A walled world. A world in miniature. A microcosm of stone. At sunrise, on the 16th day of August, 1826, he was awak-

ened from his deep sleep in the large barred room he occupied with

the seven other prisoners. His companions were already astir. They stood around a pail of water, washing. A common towel was passed from hand to hand. Abner was the last. When he had done with it,

he looked around and surveyed his neighbors. They were an impassive lot, all except Carl, who grinned. Abner held out his hand to him in greeting. “My name is Wilde,” he said. “Abner Wilde.” “And mine is Carl,” the other answered in warm response. “Just Carl. Dutchy, they call me. The other name don’t count. Not here.” He laughed. “Besides, I got so many I can’t remember the right one. I was born in Germany and grew up in the States. But all the world’s my home.” Abner liked him. The others greeted him, and each revealed his name. They were

Peter, and Albert,

and Benjamin,

Jonah, John,

and...

“Just call him Hog,” Carl interrupted the last man. And he added, laughing, “It’s the way he eats.” Hog laughed, too, a full-blast, honest guffaw. Albert was the youngest. A mere lad. Jonah was a dark-faced Jew. “Hog and me,” he said, as he shook Abner’s hand, “are great

pals!” An unholy combination, Abner thought. Abner was not called before the principal keeper until the next day. The P.K. was a tall, cadaverous man, gray-haired and

ABNER

WILDE—REBEL

77

sharp-eyed. He looked Abner over slowly and keenly. Finally he spoke. “So you are Abner Wilde. You will be staying with us a long time.” He shook his head sadly. “We bear the brunt of their errors!’? He waved his arm eastward, toward New York. “Their

law is cold, and their justice blind. I know your case. And I knew Burgess. I was his mate once. Only once. You did the thing that God should have done. Rid the world of a viper. But they send you up tort.” He gazed hard at Abner. “Tm the keeper. I have my sworn duty. Men of all conditions are forced into prison, as all the rivers run into the sea. That’s what a wise man said. And it’s true. They send me these men without reason or purpose. The good turn bad. The bad stay bad.I wish

they could live here with me and watch hope fade into despair. You may be different. You are a strong man, and young. Hold on to yourself. Even a prisoner can be in the service of God and man. You can help to rescue minds. And make them at peace with themselves.” He paused. “But I must put you to work, Abner. What can you do?” the keeper asked. “TI am a sailor,” Abner replied. The principal keeper laughed. “J shall have to keep you away from the wharf,” he said. “It’s too tempting for sailors. We'll send you to the boot and shoe

shop.” Abner became a cobbler. He cobbled well. Principal Keeper Willis watched him work. Abner seldom raised his eyes from his table. His sharp blade sliced leather neatly, and his hammer

rose

and fell with steady thud. Dutchy and Jonah were his neighbors. He sat between them, and was as unresponsive to the former’s hushed and running comment as he was indifferent to the latter’s sly but friendly quips. Silent Ab, they called him, a name that was to be his for twenty years. From his raised platform, the guard followed Abner’s deft hands running rapidly through his allotted task. The shop foreman, a prisoner, paused beside him and examined the finished shoe. He seemed pleased. “Put him on the beer squad,” he whispered to the guard. “A

jugful.”

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CELL42.07-=SUN

GHotNG

The beer squad on Sunday was the prison’s honor roll. It was Newgate’s peculiar standard. But while Abner’s hands worked with the speed and regularity of an automaton,

his mind

was

not idle. Thoughts,

unbidden,

harassing, welled up in his brain and settled on his heart in heavy foreboding. “You must not think,” Dutchy had warned. Dutchy knew. His own nights were sleepless. There was the constant something gnawing him inside, and Dutchy was fighting it. Had been fighting for ten years. Outwardly calmer and more serene than ever, he was fully cognizant of the weakened shreds that held him together, conscious of the imminence of a break between mind and body. “It will get you,” Dutchy had told Abner. He knew. Visions came tumbling in endless and tumultuous riot.

There was no holding them back. They were without sequence or relation to any time order. He saw himself swinging at the drink-crazed sailors in the tavern called the Seven Seas, the burly, towering form of Captain Pete looming in the doorway. Lighted torches danced in the night around a burning cabin in the forest clearing. Thousands of people danced in the Square, all carrying lanterns, candles, torches. They laughed, whooped, and cried out

Beeacela

Lawyer

Nantuck’s

little, calculating,

wolfish

eyes.

The

African victory dance at the edge of the jungle. Uncle George’s voice saying, “Her very image. . . . Pll buy you a partnership, if you'll warrant it.” Uncle George dead. And Captain Burgess looking on. Burgess had killed Uncle George. Not with a pistol, or by physical violence, but with words. Slave trading, commerce in human flesh. Uncle George’s heart recoiled, loathed, swelled in anger—and burst. “I must know, Abner, and you must be truth-

ful with me. Did you know he wasn’t—dead?” And the night when she had held him close, with the baby gurgling in the crib. “Did you know he wasn’t dead?” That was Bridewell. Two Janes. A thousand memories. They came and went and reinhabited his brain. Not for a moment, nor for an hour, but for always. All

day, every day, and perpetually into the night. He lived in the

past. He was barely conscious of the present, or of the physical surroundings in which his body drifted. He could not lift his mind to the future.

ABNER

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79

And then Pete came to see him, three months after his ad-

mission to Newgate, the first visit allowed under the rules. “I wouldn’t let her come,” Captain Pete said, sensing the question in Abner’s eyes. “She wanted to.” He spoke of the child. “Cute little beggar!” Pete seemed older. His clothes hung loosely and his hair was streaked with gray. His leathery face had as many lines and seams and withered wrinkles as the face of a monkey of enormous age. They didn’t say much. They conversed with their eyes, and understood the things that were in their hearts. The guard stood by, made curious by their silence. “Only five minutes more,” he warned, and moved away. Captain Pete fidgeted in his chair. His lips twitched nervously. “Tam going away,” he said suddenly. Abner looked up, in fear. “Back to Liverpool?” He breathed hard. His hands groped and clutched the big man’s knees. ““Alone?’’ he asked. Captain Pete laughed. “No. I’ve done with England, and ships. ’'m an American. Married. We are going west. I'll help build your damn country! Robert and Terry have settled down on a big tract out in Ohio. They’ve hardened up and improved, those youngsters. They’re farming and trading now.” Captain Pete spoke with enthusiasm. “They want Jane to come out. Mathilda and I are going, too. [ll help the boys grow.” He paused, his voice husky. “It came sooner than I thought. Perhaps,” his eyes softened, “maybe you, too, can find a home out there.” Captain Pete did not tell Abner about Jane. Her long illness, and that she was still unable to walk. And with what unconscious and unknowing tenderness she had murmured his name! The guard approached again. The time was up. They rose from their stools, and clasped hands with a firm grip. “Be brave,” the older man said. “We'll be waiting for you—

all of us.” Captain Pete spoke in a whisper. “Remember the old Abner—him of the Bible. It was said of him, ‘Thy hands were not bound, nor thy feet put into fetters.’ ” Pete was gone. Abner returned to his cobbling.

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Not the same Abner. His face was more grim, his eyes were harder. His hammer rose and fell as steadily, but with new vigor. And Dutchy, surveying him out of the corner of his eye, guessed that his mind was no longer burdened with memories and visions. “Hands unbound and feet unfettered!” Abner understood the meaning of Captain Pete’s quotation. “We'll be waiting for you— all of us.” Captain Pete had said it. And Abner would find a way. Pape

Eight men in a room twelve feet long and eight feet wide. From sunset to sunrise these men lived together. At first, Abner’s natural modesty and regard for human decencies kept him aloof, but it was not long before he began to know and understand his neighbors. Close physical intimacy brought revelations. He had wondered about the nicknames bestowed on his fellow prisoners. Gradually he understood why the pockmarks and reptilian bloat had transformed Peter into Toad; the almost inhuman indifference

and ice that made Benjamin into Fish; and the throatiness that developed the Frog in John. “Keep away from Jonah,” Dutchy advised, “She always sinks the ship. He’s the original Joner!” Only Albert had no nickname. He was the youngest. Not over eighteen. Abner wondered about the haunted look in Albert’s eyes, and his sick cringing before Frog’s eye and Toad’s touch. | It came over him like a blast the morning Albert was found dead in his bunk, strangled by his own belt, a suicide. Dutchy and

Joner were busy about the body. Frog and Toad sat in their corners, fright in their faces. Joner wiped his eyes as Albert was lugged out like a gunny sack by two guards; and Dutchy’s head was bowed. Then Dutchy approached the two figures crouching on the floor, and stood glowering down at them. His left fist caught Frog’s chin and jerked his head up. “I warned you,” Dutchy hissed. His right fist swung. Frog fell back on his bunk, stunned by the blow.

“And

you,

too,” Dutchy

said, addressing Toad.

Another

whack. . . . The bell sounded. Six o’clock. The call to work. They walked silently out of the cell, and joined the throng of men hurrying to the shops. But Abner, Dutchy, and Joner

ABNER

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81

walked together, in silence. Day was breaking, and from the east ‘ame rays of gold; the river wall was bathed in the glow. The ang of salt was in the air. Abner breathed deeply of air that felt lean and pure. His upward straying glance came abruptly against he boundary. Twenty-three feet of brick, and then the top. Sudlenly he stopped and stared. It seemed close to the shore, just »ver the wall; and it pointed into the blue sky, straight and sure ind firm. It glided quietly, without sound, the sails bulged out with he wind. Abner did not move until it had slipped beyond the wall. Down the river, into the bay and out into the world. “You’re a nan of the world now,” Captain Pete had said in Liverpool. Very oon he found the world disappointing, narrow, close, provincial. 3ut how wide it seemed now. Endless stretches and receding horions. With its myriad lives... . The yard was almost emptied. Only the three men stood rooted o the ground, their eyes fixed aloft. Then as the sails disappeared rom sight, they lowered their heads and turned back to the routine vork and to each other. A flame swept over their hearts, uniting hem. “Hands unbound and feet unfettered.” The words sang rough Abner’s mind... . The bell sounded the final call to work. Two hours at the ench before breakfast, two hours of cobbling, two hours of slicing nd hammering. “Let’s run for it,” Joner yelled. “We're late.” The guard scowled at their entrance. And Dutchy growled s they arranged their tools, ““No beer for us this Sunday.” Newgate, like all other prisons, was rich in rumor. With more han six hundred prisoners confined within three and a half acres f land, men trod each other’s toes and crossed each other’s paths.

dle whispers of the most inconsequential moment quickly assumed smiofficial status. The prison atmosphere was continually tense rith reports of impending changes in official personnel, and intimaions of plots. “You can’t think in this place,” Dutchy complained to Abner, but what someone knows about it the next minute.” “Yeah,” Hog joined in, “and you can’t reach for an extra elping of rations, but what a hundred eyes pipe you off.”

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“Tt’s curiosity,” Joner laughed. “They wonder where you put Ltralhie “The old man’s days are numbered,” Dutchy announced one night, after they had settled themselves for sleep. “They’re going to give him the skids.” It was the most recent rumor. And Dutchy added, ‘‘Hell’ll break loose when he goes.” It was the latest piece of gossip in the yard; men were nervous about it, and with good cause. Principal Keeper Willis, like the prison itself, was an experiment in the penology of the day, a step ahead of the old Bridewell that had stood for decades on the City’s Common, adjoining the City Hall. Bridewell, with its filth and depravity and degradation, was one of the old-world traditions that even the American Revolution had failed to dislodge. To the visitor from foreign shores the sight of Bridewell with its gaunt, starved, ragged, hollow-eyed crew of ghouls looking down on them through the windows of the shabby structure was indeed a breath from home. If he felt especially vigorous and walked northward to the Potter’s Field at Washington Square, on the edge of town, and watched the public hanging, his heart would have warmed with hope for the new world, and might even have been filled with a happy conviction that it was following in the traditions of the old. By the Law of February, 1788, sixteen crimes were made capital offenses. Second offenders of all other crimes were also subject to the death penalty. The law in those early days of the nation was stern. But slow

of motion. It had no vigor and no sense of direction. It concerned itself with liberty and life, and yet within a few yards of the cradle of its fostered beginning it was developing a notorious center of crime and viciousness. From the Five Points there descended upon the city a horde of pickpockets and common thieves, and all manner of desperadoes, spewing degeneracy, filth, and prostitution. Its obnoxious power was felt in administrative halls and in courts of justice. Decency and respectability quailed before this fastspreading evil. They begged for protection and were given— Bridewell. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, public-spirited and high-minded citizens began to realize that Bridewell Prison

ABNER

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was not the answer to prevailing crime; that maintaining men in idleness during confinement, with complete indifference to their health and sanity, offered no possible opportunity for their redemption; that catapulting a hundred and more prisoners, drawn from all walks of life and of all ages, into one large room, where ordinary human privacies and decencies were impossible, destroyed every vestige of humanity and vision, and turned men into jungle beasts. There arose a demand for a new prison and a new method of treatment. One by which “fixing a just proportion between crimes and punishments, afforded room for the exercise of benevolence in the work of reformation.” The first step was the law of March 26, 1796, which abrogated the death penalty except for treason and murder. The second was the erection of a new State Prison on the eastern shore of the Hudson River in what was then known as Greenwich Village, two and one-half miles from the City Hall of Manhattan. A prison where “convicts should be kept sufficiently close to their work, so as to fulfill the end of their punishment, which subjects them to hard labor.” A notable innovation, which many citizens regarded with doubt and diffidence, was the abolition of corporal punishment. The period that witnessed the construction of the “model

prison” saw also the planning of the new and ornate City Hall that was to become the pride of New York. Both buildings were in the latest architectural style, things of pride to the eve. One symbolized the strength and wealth and glory of New York, the other stood as a monument to its stupidity. Both were built for endurance. One still stands—a tribute to the sturdy growth and material development of a great community. The other is gone— only its faint and almost invisible landmarks remain. It fell, not because its walls were insecure and its foundations unsound, but because of its inadequacy in the face of the rising tide of crime. In the crumbling process, its walls bulged, not outward, breached by prisoners eager to make their way out, but inward, through pressure of men and women committed to penal servitude, a condi-

tion made possible only through indifferent methods of law administration and an utter lack of vision as to the social and spiritual requirements of the community. And so it came to pass, in the third decade of Newgate’s

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became alarmed. “Our streets are not safe,”

they exclaimed, “and our people are insecure. Pickpockets stalk our thoroughfares in countless numbers, and prowlers disregard the privacy of our homes. Grogshops have become the curse of our city and brothels ply their trade unhindered. Verily, we must put our house in order.” These good men set about their task with determination. They made Newgate Prison their first stop. “Something must be radically wrong with our prisons,” they said, “that such conditions can exist in our city.”” What they saw within the walls of the prison left them aghast. They were soon convinced that Newgate being what it was, there could be no hope for a cleaner and better and safer city. “The paramount evil in the management of the prison,”’ wrote one of the Commissioners appointed to examine it, “is the utter want of vigorous and effective discipline.” And he elaborated upon this theme by pointing out that “in the morning, when cells are unlocked, prisoners flock confusedly into the yard and at the sound of the bell for meals they move like an undisciplined mob to the messroom.” Small wonder the streets of New York were steeped in crime!

“We found men sleeping at their work benches,” the report continues, “‘and others sitting in perfect idleness.”’ Criminals outside the walls apparently relished the prospect of sitting in idleness or sleeping at their tasks, or at any rate, the gentlemen were convinced there would be no safety and security for honest citizens until these conditions were remedied. Of course, it was a hind-end view of a serious social problem. These investigators found too close an association between conditions at Newgate Prison and the foul-smelling Five Points. It might have been that the men who dozed at their tables in the prison workshops were too exhausted in spirit and body to ply their tools,

and that the idle had no work to do. But the Commissioners did not delve below the surface. So began the perverted theory of penology, that the sole cure of crime lies within prison walls. “Be rough, and firm, and tough

with our convicts,” became the demand of these investigators. Apparently it was their thought that by such means slums would

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cease to exist, grogshops would close their doors, and brothels darken their windows! The plan of punishments within the prison was altogether too mild, it was thought. So these gentlemen protested. Diet of bread and water, even the ball and chain was not severe enough. What they would have was the whipping post, longer sentences, life terms wherever possible. Their recommendations were accepted. In a short time nearly twenty-five per cent of Newgate’s prisoners were doing life sentences. Newgate was overcrowded. It became increasingly difficult to maintain peace and order within the walls. The unwillingness of Principal Keeper Willis to use the lash hastened his fall. A new keeper was appointed. Dutchy’s prophecy was fulfilled. Hell broke loose. It happened suddenly. Dutchy started it. And he was the first victim. “Contractors bribe men to work fast. Tobacco, snuff, and spirits are the bait.” That, too, was one of the criticisms of the investigating Commission. There was naturally no objection to the prisoners working diligently and fast. There was, however, the wrong incentive, a condition fraught with grave danger. Even the new regime seemed to be unable to avoid the disastrous

consequences. In the early days of the nineteenth century, the policy of prison labor had not yet been definitely fixed. The prison undertook jobs for individuals, and also manufactured articles for the open market. Announcements in the daily papers frequently offered prison goods for sale at auctions. But there was as yet no direct contact between the prisoners and the contractors. The latter did not yet own the services of convicts. Their relations were with officers, with shop foremen, and with guards. Prisoners were not hired out. Contractors, however, were anxious for capacity production and heard with satisfaction about the imminent reforms that were to transform the prison into a driving and driven factory, with the prisoners pushed at full speed. The boot and shoe shop was the most important prison industry. Large contracts were handled and contractors were accustomed to supervisory contact with the prison. They would come

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into the shop, examine the manufactured articles and check up on the quantity production. It was to their interest that the tasks of prisoners be heavy, and rapidly completed.

23 One day in April, 1828, the contractor, the shop foreman

and the guard held a long and whispered conversation in the presence of the prisoners working at the tables. It may be that Dutchy noticed the surreptitious passing of contraband. The prisoner-foreman’s source of supply of tobacco-snuff and spirits was well known to his fellow prisoners. These were commonly accepted perquisites that went with the job. They were prohibited, but condoned. Prisoners smiled when they witnessed the group in animated conversation. Those in the know, who stood in well with

the foreman, would soon have their lockers replenished. Others were indifferent. The incident, like all previous whisperings, would have passed unheeded if it had not been for the new guard who, in person and spirit, represented the new regime. For the first time within the memory of prisoners at Newgate, the guard carried, as the symbol of his authority, a short leather whip such as jockeys use to urge their mounts to greater speed. Tasks had already been assigned, and material for the day’s work distributed among the prisoners. Abner’s hammer tapped on steadily. Dutchy and Joner were intent upon completing their work in the usual time. All three stood first in good and rapid

workmanship. They would have their extra hour of recreation, a reward to which they looked forward eagerly. They could walk in the open air and talk. And plan. The foreman and the guard approached Abner’s table. In the foreman’s arms was a quantity of leather. He dumped it beside Abner. The guard touched Abner with his whip. “You'll do these today. You don’t have enough work.”

Abner turned around, a protest on his lips. But the foreman and the guard had already moved on. Dutchy grimaced, his eyes. burning. In a few moments they were back. This time they stopped

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beside Dutchy. Again the guard spoke, and his whip stroked Dutchy’s back. “More work for you. You can do it easily.” Dutchy breathed hard. Once. Then something seemed to snap inside him. He rose from his stool. Foam frothed from his mouth,

his body trembled. He snatched a shoe from his table and hurled it at the guard. “You stealing bastard,” he yelled, “you can’t drive me!” Hammers remained suspended. In the sudden silence of the shop prisoners got up from their stools, amazed. The foreman cringed, the guard stepped back. Then, his face red, he raised his arm high. The whip whistled through the air and caught Dutchy’s cheek with a loud crack. A crimson welt curdled on the broken skin. Abner and Joner exchanged quick glances. They jumped to their feet and grappled with the guard. Dutchy joined them, his eyes wild, froth upon his lips. Dutchy jerked the whip from the hands of the struggling guard, and lashed it furiously over the man’s head and shoulders. The hundred prisoners became a yelling mob. They shouted encouragement to Dutchy, and some ran in to pommel the helpless guard. They laughed and swore and cried. But Abner acted quickly. His hand grasped Dutchy’s and held it. Dutchy subsided, panting, and yielded the whip to Abner. Dropping his hands, he stood gaping at the mob of frenzied men. In the prison yard a loud bell sounded. The shop door opened and a dozen guards trooped in, each carrying a whip. The yells ceased. For a moment guards and prisoners stood looking at one another. Then the prisoners moved, away from the door and the guards. They drew together at the far end of the shop, silent and sullen. The guards advanced. There was a sudden stir in the rear ranks of the prisoners, then a shout. “Let ’em have it, fellahs!”

A score or more of heavy shoes hurtled through the air. Yells broke out anew. The mob advanced, following a barrage of flying shoes. The guards retreated. They stood at the door, uncertain and wavering.

The clamor ceased as suddenly as it began. The men stood fixed in their places, staring, listening. A bugle sounded in the yard. A sharp command was heard through the open doorway. “The

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soldiers,” a voice whispered. ‘““The soldiers!” The special military

squad stationed outside the walls was coming on the run. The militiamen were armed. Accompanying them was the new principal keeper, and one of the State Prison inspectors.

Abner and Dutchy and Joner had taken no part in the riot. After his struggle with the guard, Dutchy had sunk into a stupor. His eyes had lost their wild look, he stood staring dully at the shouting mob. He seemed to have lost all interest, and submitted tamely to the promptings of Abner who led him to a stool, away from the turmoil. Abner and Joner stood by him. Abner talked soothingly, and bent down to look into Dutchy’s eyes. Sometimes his lips moved, but Dutchy remained completely unresponsive, his eyes fixed and vacant. Abner and Joner were worried about him, and in their anxiety they heard none of the tumult around them. The sudden hush brought them to their feet. A voice spoke out of the abrupt silence. “T won’t harm you men,” the principal keeper was saying, “JT only want those that started this.” There was no reply from the prisoners, who remained stolid. The principal keeper waited. “Otherwise you will all suffer the consequences,” he added menacingly. The ranks broke. Abner stepped out and faced the officer. “Tt was my fault, sir,” he said quietly. “I can explain.” Just then the wounded guard regained his speech. His whispering, snarling accusation brought Dutchy and Joner beside Abner. The keeper looked at the trio, then turned to confer with the inspector standing beside him. Both were grim, determined. The order was given; all the prisoners were formed in line and marched through the door, out into the prison yard. The twenty>

four soldiers marched

behind

them, each with a loaded

musket

ready for instant use, bayonets fixed. They halted at the whipping post. Abner and Dutchy and Joner were pulled from the ranks of prisoners. Abner was ordered to strip to the waist. The keeper’s arm moved methodically, and the long snakelike whip descended on his bare back, the inspector announcing each stroke in a loud

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and clear voice. Thirty-nine times the lash descended. Thirty-nine stripes. Abner uttered no sound, while the hundred men looked on and watched thirty-nine welts grow and darken on the smooth white flesh of his passive back. Joner was the next. And then came Dutchy. He wore the same dull expression until the first stroke of the lash, then he began to writhe. He yelled and cursed. “Stealing bastards!” he shouted. The keeper did not stop at the thirty-ninth. “Fifty,” the inspector counted. The swishing whip subsided. Dutchy hung limply at the post, his back a welter of scars and blood. The procession was ordered to move on. The prisoners marched back to the shop. Abner and Joner were escorted to the lockup. But Dutchy was carried to the hospital.

24 Abner sat motionless in his cell. His back was sore. But he was insensible to physical pain. A horrible loneliness crushed him, the solitude that comes to dissenters and warriors of the spirit in the presence of mankind’s savagery. And he wept for Dutchy. His mind had snapped after twelve years in prison. Abner wondered about himself—eighteen long years ahead. He was afraid. He was in the punishment cell, alone for the first time in two years. A slice of bread and a gill of water were his twenty-fourhour diet, the stone floor his bunk. But he felt neither hunger nor the desire to sleep. A nervous urge kept him moving. Walking from wall to wall. Eight feet stretched into countless miles. He felt himself being drawn down into a vortex of years, into unknown abysmal depths where light would fade into darkness, reason give way to madness. Like Dutchy, who had waited and hoped for the chance that would not come. Like Dutchy ... He shivered through the cold night. Then as the window above his head took shape in the approach of graying dawn, he stopped his march, and turned himself about to face the sun he was sure was then rising

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out there, somewhere, beyond reach of his eyes. His face was grim, rigid, and he clenched his hands. “T won’t wait,” he muttered, “I won’t be like Dutchy!”

Through the window high above, gray and cold as a burnedout cinder in the break of day, he visioned forests where trees bowed to whistling winds, and vast plains trackless in their virginity. Unpeopled and untrammeled, except for a small cabin. A song in the cabin. Jane’s voice. .. . “T won’t wait! . . . ‘Hands unbound and feet unfettered.’ ” Still facing the window he stepped back, and with his hands

felt over the stone wall of the cell. His feet, heavy with fatigue, slid under him. The prison awoke and rumbled to its work. But Abner slept. Three weeks of solitary confinement and a diet of bread and water sapped Abner’s strength. His eyes sunk back in their sockets,

his skin took on a yellowish hue. Hollow-cheeked and listless, he would sit for hours on the stone floor, his elbows on his knees, with head buried in his hands, a huddled figure in which life seemed to be flickering with an ever-weakening spark. But he sat always

with his face toward the window. The early morning hours found him watching eagerly for the dawn. A fleeting spark would flame in his eyes at the first streak of light. It seemed as though that momentary gleam was the vivifying force that enabled him to live and wait, for always after daybreak his sleep was quiet and his heartbeats more even. . But though Abner was hardly aware of the passing days, every hour brought him nearer to the most crucial period of his life, a time when, dragged down to the uttermost depths of despair by the relentless forces of brutality, social stupidity, and ignorance, he would have to battle with destiny and with himself. A period void of memories,

in which he would

learn to hate, when

bitterness

would soothe, and pain, physical pain, would freeze his heart to insensibility against faith and love and kinship with other men. It began on the morning of the fifteenth of May, 1828, just as the window above him was taking shape, acquiring the somber hue of cold ashes in the breaking dawn. Abner rose to his feet at the sound of voices outside the cell

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door. A key grated in the lock. The door opened to admit two guards. “Come

along, Wilde,” one of them commanded,

‘“‘you head

theslist.” They led him to the blacksmith shop. While he stood’ there, wondering, shackles were riveted to his feet and chains to his arms. And in that ungainly device of medieval iron he was escorted actoss the prison yard to the chapel. In a few minutes the clink of chains heralded the approach of another bound and shackled prisoner. The second on the list. Abner saw Joner for the first time since that day at the whipping post. They sat together on a bench in the chapel, but did not speak. A guard stood over them. Then came more jangling irons, and Dutchy entered the hall. The next was Hog. All four exchanged momentary glances. None of them spoke. Abner, Joner, and Hog continued looking at Dutchy who sat immobile, inattentive, his eyes staring ahead, fixed on something they could not see. Other prisoners arrived, jangling and scraping. Presently, two hundred men in irons were sitting on the benches of the hall that on Sundays was the House of God. They sat in silence, a question on every face. Guards with loaded muskets stood in the aisles. The rattle of chains, mingled with the grating of iron bands, gave eloquent evidence of the nervousness of the prisoners. Abner’s eyes strayed toward the platform and rested on the pulpit whence came the chaplain’s weekly message of light . . . words of admonition, of appeal for charity among men, and gratitude to an all-seeing Providence for the mercy of life. But now, instead of

the chaplain, another figure climbed on the platform and stood beside the pulpit, the principal keeper. Eying his audience cynically and contemptuously, he spoke in cold incisive tones. “Men,” he said, “you are going on a short journey. A steam-

boat will take you up the Hudson to the new State Prison at Mount Pleasant. It is up there in the country away from cities and crowds. There are hills,” a dry smile hung on his lips, “granite hills. You will like them. You are the advance guard. The others will follow

shortly. What I ask of you, and expect, is that you will go quietly. Good-by and good luck. Most of you will need it.” He finished. Not a man

moved, not a chain rattled in the

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heavy quiet drowning the hall. Two hundred pairs of eyes were fixed on the speaker, whose glance in turn swept the audience, apparently searching. Presently, his gaze traveled to the front row and rested on Abner, Joner, and Dutchy seated at the far end. Abne? stared back at the keeper. A hard, fighting stare. At a command the two hundred shackled men rose from their benches, and to the accompaniment of their clinking chains shuffled from the hall, out into the yard. The prison gate slid open. The line of men passed through and stood on the wharf. A steamboat spouting black smoke from a single funnel lay alongside. Abner’s eyes softened as he beheld the deck of the vessel, tears welling up to blur his vision. He let them glide down his cheeks, The prisoners sat on the deck in rows of six, armed guards surrounding them. They had begun their journey to the new prison. To Sing Sing. The funnel belched smoke and flame, the water churned. The prisoners gazed at the receding walls of Newgate, and turning, stared out at the broad river ahead. Thirty-three miles northward lay their new home. The same Hudson washed its shores. The same sun broke on its horizon, perhaps the same wind cleansed its air. But none of them knew what it was like. “Granite hills,” the keeper had said. Hills hold echoes. They absorb cries and yells and oaths and song, and roll them on in reverberating sound. The hills at Mount Pleasant rang with echoes. Hot cinders from the belching funnel rained on the shackled prisoners. No one stirred. Breakfast time. The ship’s crew of six went among the men and gave each one a dish of mush and a tankard of burnt rye water, Newgate’s substitute for coffee. From his station at the wheel the captain of the steamboat looked on, and by his side stood a small boy not over six years old. He was the ship’s only passenger. The proud son of the captain, making his long-promised holiday trip; the child’s face was tense

with curiosity. Men chained and tied with irons. His whispered questions were heard clear across the deck in the prisoners’ quarters. “Those are all bad men, aren’t they, father?”

The captain tightened his grip on the wheel, gazed dead ahead, and made no reply. But the child would not be put off; again his shrill voice rose above the churning of the paddle wheels.

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“Father,” he asked, awestruck and a little ee

93 “did they

kill people?” “Some did,” the father answered, with an evasive gesture of

impatience. The child squeezed closer to his father’s side, and turning around, gazed large-eyed at the prisoners. His eyes fastened on Abner, sitting in the front row. Abner looked sallow, his chin was unshaven, and his hair hung in wisps and tufts like a rusty cornshock. “Is he the baddest man?” the boy asked, pointing a finger at the dull and dirty-looking figure. The captain’s keen eyes followed his son’s gesture. He looked at Abner. And shook his head. “No, son,” he said, “he’s not the baddest. He seems the decent

sort.”

“But, father,” the child insisted, ‘tare decent people convicts?” The captain did not answer. Slowly, slyly the child left his father’s side. He sidled along the deck rail and stopped beside Abner. His hand touched the prisoner’s sleeve, exploring. Abner turned and looked at him, and the little boy, smiling into Abner’s eyes, whispered, ‘My father said you are a decent man!” Abner reached out his hand impulsively, rattling his chain. A guard approached and hauled the child away. He kicked Abner. “Be careful, fellow,” he growled, “or you'll rate the lash. The

likes of you can’t talk to children.” The little boy backed away. In his eyes was a very large wonder. The funnel fumed. Flames, smoke, cinders, becoming power, tore into the placid current of the Hudson and pushed the steamboat upstream toward its destination. Abner had neither sandglass nor timepiece. But he gauged the passage of time. And now it was

the end of the third hour. The boat nosed across bays, wide languid sweeps of blue water, and deep narrow swirling channels. On the west was the stark and naked wall of the Palisades, capped by a continuous line of forest and foliage; on the east, rolling hills and

distant farm lands. Somewhere among the hills was Sing Sing. Abner’s eyes searched the shore. The blast of the ship’s steam whistle, the sudden hush of the

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paddles, and the captain’s tug on the wheel proclaimed the end of the journey. The ship’s bow pointed in to shore. There ahead lay a gray, stone building. It appeared small and squat, topped by huge hills of rock, its wall pierced by rows of small oblong openings.

It looked cold and inaccessible. Two buildings reached down from either side of the gray prison to the shore, and in the hollow square between figures moved to and fro. No one looked up at the approaching boat. They lay alongside a long pier. A gangplank was swung aboard, held by six men in stripes, stolid and impassive. An officer in a dark blue uniform climbed on board and was met by the captain. Presently one of the keepers approached and handed him a sheaf of papers, which he examined slowly, nodding his head. He was a tall man, narrow waisted, with a flaming red scar across his

left cheek. “We are ready when you are, Captain Lynds,” the guard said. Captain Lynds nodded again. “Get them off,” he said, ‘“‘and stand them on the wharf.”

He spoke quietly, with cold sternness. Chains clinked, iron scraped against iron. Two hundred men lined up, finally, in silence on the wharf, and Captain Lynds surveyed them from the rear. Six uniformed guards, grim, carrying long whips, guided them in formation. A few minutes of silence. Then one of the guards raised his whip. Its tongue came down quickly, with a sharp crack, like a shot. Then in quick succession, five more shots. Answering signals from five other whips. It was the language of Sing Sing. The

two hundred shackled men understood. They waited. And then came the command. “Single line, men,” one of the guards called out. ‘Follow me.”

Chains clinked again, irons grated, and the single line shuffled across the yard to the blacksmith shop. Abner was the first in line. A silent, muscular man clad in stripes beckoned to him. He winced at the weight of the blow, as the shackles dropped from his feet, the chains from his hands. He felt free again. “Hands unbound and feet unfettered.”

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2) Sing Sing Prison was the last word in the penology of the early nineteenth century. Captain Lynds was its prophet. It was the practical application of the theory of isolation as the one hope for suppression and reformation. It might have been effective and accomplished the desired purpose, but there was one elementary principle of administration that undermined the system and dissipated any possible advantage of common labor and nightly isolation. The philosophy of the period could not conceive of prisoners as the wards of the state, and as such entitled to beneficent influences accorded by the stronger to the deficient, whether in physique, mentality or spirit. The prisoner was a subject of the state who had forfeited every right to normal existence. Reformation was not sought by any standards of positive effort. It depended entirely upon the negative theory of isolation. “Give the convict a chance to meditate on his sins,” was the argument

of well-minded enthusiasts, ‘‘and he will see the error of his ways.” It was natural, therefore, that legislators should be concerned

with the financial independence of prisons. They must be selfsupporting. Taxpayers must not be called upon to “keep” these fellows who, whatever the cause, have broken with the law. The

very choice of Sing Sing, as the ideal location for a state prison, was prompted by that motive. Its granite hills provided a commodity, its proximity to New York a ready market, and its accessibility on the shores of the Hudson a cheap means of transportation. It was natural, too, that Captain Lynds, or any other

administrator imbued with the spirit of the age, should regard with complaisance any increase in the numbers of his prisoners. Large prison populations meant increased output, larger returns, and a better chance for balanced budgets.

However, in the light of later developments we may view the personal integrity of Captain Lynds, or his plan of administration, we must at least accord him the grace of being human. He had promised his superiors and the Legislature at Albany that he would

build Sing Sing at little cost to the state and would run it en-

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tirely without expense to the public. It would maintain itself by prison labor. He was given a free hand. In all the utterances of Captain Lynds one does not find a single word about reformation. He did not regard that as within his province. He had no patience with the newly organized prison associations who put forth peculiar notions about remaking men, mending broken lives, reshaping character. Hospitals were necessary because sick prisoners were a liability. He suffered a chaplain, but insisted that religion must not interfere with the routine of the prison. Food was essential, but only enough to sustain life and enable prisoners to perform their tasks. In such an environment and with such an objective there was no room for emotionalism. Sing Sing’s prisoners became Cap-

tain Lynds’ peculiar property. His relation to them was not that of keeper and ward, but rather that of master and servant. To accentuate that relationship, and as a disciplinary measure, he permitted no contact with the outside world. No visits from relatives and no correspondence. For the term of their confinement, which in reality was an apprenticeship to Captain Lynds, they belonged to him and he would brook no interference. It is doubtful whether the captain entertained any extraordinary antipathy toward his prisoners. Or that he was actuated, in the early years of his administration, by anything more than a driving power to make the convicts “work hard, at all times,” so as to increase production and create an institution wholly independent of the public treasury. That, to his mind, presupposed the subjection of unruly minds. It meant the breaking of wills and the submergence of personality. An iron hand was his sole method. He not only punished severely any infractions of the rules, regardless of their triviality, but he anticipated breaches of discipline. The prisoner suspected of any independence of thought or action was made to feel the weight of the captain’s authority at the earliest possible moment, as a warning against possible insubordination. Commitment papers accompanying newly arrived prisoners were

carefully scrutinized. If they branded the subject as recalcitrant or indicated a tendency toward willfulness or resentment of authority, he was singled out for immediate treatment. The whipping post stood ready to do its admonitory part. Abner’s record at Newgate

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made him eligible for that special treatment. So did Dutchy’s. And Joner’s.

Two hundred prisoners were ordered to bathe. Their hair was clipped, they were shaved, and marched to the clothes room where they received striped prison uniforms. The stripes were black and white. “We find these very useful,” the storekeeper said grimly, as he handed out the coats and trousers, “‘we can see you fellows in the bushes and against the background of trees if you ever decide to ooze away from our hotel.” It was already late in the day, with the sun dipping into the horizon across the river, when the company of men was led into the large building to the south of the main prison. They were marched single file to the kitchen window where each prisoner received a wooden kid filled with a mixture of cold mush and a

small slice of tough beef. The line then moved on, through the yard and into the prison. Its path lay through the west hall, close by the whipping post which stood there in all its threatening mien. Two iron rings and staples were fastened in the wall; a number of “cats,” gags, and several rawhides were in readiness near by. It was a significant sight. Newly arrived prisoners never missed it. The guards saw to that. The line stopped. The prisoners stood on the stone floor of the main prison. It was only two years old, but its air was heavy as if weighed down by centuries. The thick stone walls effectively shut out the fresh winds from the river. But they were no protection against dampness. Abner shivered with cold.

Each prisoner faced a closed door. The lower half was solid, the upper part latticed with strips of iron. A guard passed rapidly in front of the column of men and turned an endless line of locks. The doors swung open. Abner was at the very end. He peered into the cell. It was dark, and it smelled foul and clammy. “Everybody inside!” The guard yelled the command. Each man stepped across the threshold. The heavy iron door closed behind him. The guard passed rapidly down the gallery

again. A key grated noisily in an endless line of locks. A moment’s pause. Then a loud voice was heard throughout the building. “Silence! There must be no talk, no whispering. That’s the first rule of Sing Sing.”

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In the gathering dusk Abner could not see his new home. But he could feel the dank walls. Three treads backward,

one tread

sideways. Stone on every side. He felt over the plank, and the straw pallet that was to be his bed. He felt the iron pail in the corner,

that was to answer

his intimate needs. He felt the low

wooden stool. And sat down on it, hunched over, silent and staring. He knew that Dutchy was in the next cell. And Joner in the third. And Hog in the fourth. They, too, were silent.

Abner felt as though he had traveled far away from all that had been familiar. Captain Pete, Mathilda, Black Abe—all had receded into an obscure dimness. Their figures, their voices, their gestures—all faint in the blur of waning vision. Jane, too, seemed a

figure that had appeared only in a dream. And the boy, his son. He had never known him. He sat on the low stool and stared out into the gallery. Impenetrable darkness within. Outside, the glimmer of a distant light from the guard’s lantern deepened the shadows. Exhaustion overpowered him. He rose stumblingly from his stool and flung himself on the plank bed. Abner slept. 26

A yell broke the quiet of the early morning. A piercing, unearthly shriek. Abner opened his eyes in confused awakening. The torrential outpouring of words seemed very close. He sat up on his bed, listening, fully awake and alert. The shouting ceased suddenly. Then came hammering against an iron door, followed by another series of yells and shrieks. “Let me out,” somebody bellowed, “‘they’re murdering me!” Abner’s blood ran cold, his nerves tingling, his muscles twitching. He recognized Dutchy’s voice. Hurrying steps approached down the gallery. A guard, lantern in hand, stood at the crazed man’s cell. “Let me out,” Dutchy shouted. ““They’re murdering me, I tell you!” Abner heard the guard’s answering laugh. “There’s

no murder,

man.

Not

yet,” the guard said. “But

there will be in the morning if you don’t keep quiet.” Abner slid from his bed and stood by his cell door. The din in

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the next cell increased in volume. Dutchy screamed and hammered,

and then his voice died down into a hoarse and begging whisper. “Let me out,” he whined.

The guard laughed again. Abner burned with fury. “Can’t you see,” he shouted, “the man’s gone crazy? Why don’t you do something for him?” The guard’s only answer was a scowl. He walked away. It seemed hours before Dutchy was quiet. His voice died down into a whimper, and then was silent. Abner could hear his heavy breathing. Day broke. And with it came the heavy treads of arriving guards. Keys grated in their locks; cell doors were opened. All except those of Abner and Dutchy and Joner. “You wait,” they were told, as the other prisoners were marched away. Abner waited and wondered. A half hour later two guards stood before his door. It was opened, and he stepped out. Then Dutchy’s door was opened, too. And Joner’s. All three stood waiting. Abner looked at Dutchy, whose eyes were red and tired. He seemed dull, and his lips moved nervously. It was a short march to the whipping post. Captain Lynds was waiting. He eyed them as they approached and fingered a long rawhide. Abner was the first in line, then Dutchy. Joner was the last. There was an ominous coldness about the captain. The three prisoners gazed at him with varying emotions. Joner looked plead-

ingly at the man with the whip, then with fear at the two iron rings overhead. Dutchy was utterly indifferent. Abner’s face was flushed and defiant. The captain broke the silence. “Tast night there was a disturbance in that man’s cell.” He nodded toward Dutchy, and pointed his whip at Abner. “And you broke the rule of silence by addressing a guard impertinently.” He paused a moment, then continued. “I might have overlooked it and put it down to your ignorance, but I find that you three were the leaders in a disturbance down in the old prison. What went on there cannot be permitted here. We must have discipline. We have our own way of treating ringleaders and fractious prisoners.” He motioned to one of the guards. Joner was the first to be

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stripped and tied to the rings. Sweat poured down his face, and his back was wet and glistening. Captain Lynds swung the whip. A guard counted the strokes. Ten times the whip cracked. Ten stripes showed on Joner’s sweating skin. Then they untied him. Dutchy took his place. His hands, too, were tied to the rings above him.

But before the whip could be raised, Dutchy’s body slumped, hung inert, straining at the hands. Abner noticed it and stepped forward, a protest on his lips. A guard grasped his hands and held him. The whip descended on the back of the limp figure, ten times. Ten streaks of red stood out on Dutchy’s back. He was released, and they stretched him on the floor. Abner. took his place. Abner did not attempt to count the strokes that fell on his back. His mind was filled with thoughts that made him nearly insensible to pain. Those strokes stifled the old Abner who had known

Captain

Pete, and loved Jane, and dreamed

of a small

cabin at the edge of the forest. In his place was a new Abner, hanging by his hands, his back bared to the whistling whip, an Abner who swore inwardly to avenge Dutchy and Joner, and all the other dog-faced and hopeless-looking men who toiled in the quarries of Sing Sing. These men were cowed, their spirit broken. Sing Sing had drained their life blood and dulled their minds. The specter of the lash brought fear into their hearts. They needed someone

to lead them, to stiffen their backbones, to make them

whole again. It would be his mission. It might take ration. There would be suffering and pain. But he until he stood on that spot where, surrounded by uniforms, he would wield the lash and count the

years of prepawould not rest men in striped strokes as they

descended on the bare back of Captain Lynds. He did not feel the hot blood trickle down his raw-fleshed back, or hear the guard count “twenty” as the last stroke broke his skin. “I know my man,” Captain Lynds muttered, as he dropped the whip. “He will be needing more before long.” Abner and Joner were marched back to their cells. Dutchy was half dragged, half carried by the two guards. They held the limp, unconscious figure while a third guard opened his cell door. Then they laid him out on the plank bed and turned the key on him. Abner watched, his fists clenched. He looked curiously at his own cell door, solid and strong and painted black. Numerals in

MeN ERI Willis Be RE BEL

rol

white were spread across the center. They fixed themselves in his mind. The number was 202.

27, In all that grim and scowling company of men who guarded and guided Sing Sing Prison, one man stood out as the embodiment of kindliness and cheer. His was the only smiling face. He was the chaplain. His name was Gerrish Barrett. He was the first in the long line of chaplains who have striven so valiantly and unselfishly to assuage pain, and to iron out mental kinks among prisoners. Barrett was young and sympathetic, a tireless and energetic teacher and preacher. Barrett came to Sing Sing while it was still an inchoate mass of rock and sand. He watched it take form, and realized with mis-

giving the sinister shadows in which the prisoners labored on the granite cliffs of the prison. He understood at the very beginning that physical labor alone could not make men think right. There must be an appeal to the imagination, an awakening of the soul. His first proposal was to teach the illiterate to read. Captain Lynds opposed it. “We have no convenient room,” he said in answer to Barrett’s plea. But the chaplain persisted. “Dll teach them through the grated iron doors of their cells,” he said. “But we have no spelling books,’ Captain Lynds countered. “Pll do without the books,” was Barrett’s answer. “I'll use the Bible.” And so it was.

Bibles were distributed to all prisoners. And on Sundays the chaplain would go from cell to cell, read with the men who knew their letters, and teach the illiterate.

The chaplain’s custom was to visit the cell of every newly admitted prisoner on the first day of his arrival. He would talk to the man, and appraise him. It was in the line of this self-imposed duty that he stopped at Abner’s cell an hour after his return from the whipping post. Abner did not immediately acknowledge his greeting. He sat on his stool, mutely staring. But Barrett would not be denied. “Brother,”’ he said, his voice quiet and his tone soothing, “you

can be of great help to me here.” Abner roused himself and looked keenly at the speaker. He

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rose and stepped close to the iron door, but still he did not venture a reply. The chaplain continued: “T once taught a black man, a prisoner, to read. He learned from his Bible. When I first knew him he was in this very cell. Then they transferred him. In doing so he came into possession of a new Bible. In passing his cell one day, he asked me if his new Bible was like the old one. When

I told him it was, he said he

supposed so, but he had been looking to find the place where it said, ‘Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened,’ which he had seen in his old Bible, but which he could not find in the new

one. When I found the place for him, his eyes sparkled with joy. He read a few words and said, ‘This is the place,’ thanked me, and

very carefully turned down a corner of the leaf.” Gerrish Barrett paused. Then he said: “You are among the intelligent men here, one of the few men who can think. I have read your record. You can help me ‘knock at these men’s hearts, and help me open them.’ You can help me make them feel human. Won’t you?”

Abner heard him in silence. There was sincerity in the young face, and feeling in the eyes. His words were soothing. Abner’s icecrusted bitterness yielded. He was about to speak when a groan sounded in Dutchy’s cell, forced out by suffering which even an unconscious mind

could not endure. Abner’s mind stiffened, his

eyes grew hard. “Knock and it shall be opened,” he sneered. “Why don’t you try it on the keeper and his guards? Knock at their hearts. Open them. Put a little kindness in them. That’s a labor worthy of your hire. Let the prisoners alone!” He paused for breath. “When I knock, it will be at these doors.” He pounded on the iron lattice. “I aim to open them, for me and for the others.” He turned and retreated into the darkness of his cell. Barrett stood gazing at the.hostile figure. His face was sad, and he shook his head in a helpless gesture. He passed on. Joner in

the third cell called to him. “Father,” he said, ‘tare you the priest?” “I am the chaplain,’ Gerrish Barrett replied, and paused expectantly. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

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“T want a rabbi,” Joner answered. Sing Sing had no Jewish chaplain. “Perhaps I can help you,” Barrett suggested. Joner hesitated. “Well, you see, Mr. Chaplain,” he said finally, “IT am a Jew, and today is the day when I have to say a prayer for the soul of my dead father. And I have no prayer book.” Gerrish Barrett smiled. “Tl say it with you,” he said. “Repeat after me.” And while Joner stood in astonished humility, the chaplain began the prayer in Hebrew.

“, . . Yisgadal, v’yiskadash, Sh’me Raboh.” Joner, much affected, mumbled his thanks.

Abner had heard. He started to call to Barrett. But the latter had gone. 28

Few of us look back retrospectively upon bygone years with our eyes fixed on the calendar. Milestones along the path of life do not always indicate the mere passing of time. They mark, rather, the emotional cycles in which all life abounds. So, too, it was with Abner Wilde. In his later years, when in the serenity of home and freedom his mellowed mind recast the period of his confinement, it was not in terms of days or nights or years. The lapse of time, endless though it had seemed, had left an impress upon his heart which grew less and less awesome with the receding years. His heart warmed as he recalled Gerrish Barrett. He remem-

bered how the youthful, pale-faced, ascetic chaplain had stood on the stone floor of the east gallery on the Sunday morning following their first interview, reading from his Bible. It was his weekly service. His voice resounded through the cold corridor, and into the dark and narrow cells against the latticed doors of which were framed the faces of his congregation. Cadence and music were in his words. And as he closed the Bible and raised his head,

his eyes traveled over the galleries and seemed to rest for a moment before each barred door. Not a prisoner stirred in his place. The soft, keen eyes held them. Even Dutchy stopped his foamy blitherings. It was all strange to Abner, and disquieting. “Let us pray,” the chaplain said. He led them and a mufiled

104

GELLI202=-50N

chorus

broke

out of the cells. “Give

GUSING

us this day our

daily

bread . . .” The “Amen” came in a thunderous response. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Those men meant it literally. They were hungry. Food in Sing Sing was scarce and foul. The men did not dare complain or beg for more; they were whipped for the asking. Hog had been an unknowing victim. Huge, infantile Hog who lived to eat. He was a carpenter by trade and had been assigned to the carpenter shop. He worked hard and fast. A peculiar habit had won for him, from the guards, the name of “nail-eating swine.” He would fill his mouth with a large quantity of long nails, and remove them one by one to hammer into the wood he was working on. The supply of nails in his mouth seemed inexhaustible. His capacity was without measure. Hog was always hungry, starved. His wooden bow] was always scraped clean to whiteness. In the shop he chewed on wood. In the yard he would gather strands of stray grass. An eyewitness swore that he had seen Hog bite into a handful of wet clay, an incident that had been cited as one of the examples of Captain Lynds’ maladministration. Hog always walked eagerly toward the kitchen window whence came the kid containing his ration. Invariably, when he beheld its meager contents, he would look ruefully and sorrowfully at the kitchen keeper. One day the soup was particularly thin, the meat almost nonexistent. Hog planted himself before the window and halted the whole line of waiting prisoners. He shoved the bowl back at the keeper. ‘'Looka here,” he shouted angrily, “is this what you call eats?” The keeper gazed at Hog in amazement. The like of that had never before happened in Sing Sing. “You swine,” he roared, “you nail-eating swine!”’ He snatched

the bowl from Hog’s hand. ‘Food, eh?” the keeper bellowed. “It’s nails you’ll eat now.”

“T won’t eat them nails,” Hog retorted, “I'll save em for your coffin!” A suppressed titter swept the long line of listening prisoners. Hog lost his dinner and gained a lashing. Two keepers approached

rapidly. They stripped him to the waist; and there, in the presence of the waiting prisoners, Hog received his lesson in Sing Sing

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etiquette. Twenty strokes. Hog took them standing, and without a whimper. But he lost his nails. He was taken from the carpenter shop, and as further punishment was transferred to the quarries. That was where Abner worked. And Dutchy and Joner. How clearly Abner recalled the granite hills overlooking the main prison! They rose high above the river, a seemingly insurmountable barrier between the toiling prisoners and the life beyond. In the hills men struggled. They fought ennui and despair. They bled there. They were maimed. Some died. Dutchy found final and everlasting relief from the weight of years that had given him no peace. Dutchy’s death had been a shock. It had happened suddenly, during one of the blasting operations. Blasting was crude in those days. A hole was bored into the rock from the top by a long drill, called a chuen drill. This drill was a round bar of iron, seven feet long and one and a half inches in diameter. Two men were employed in this service. Holding the drill near the middle, they raised it up and forced it down after the manner of churning milk, striking constantly in one place. The operation continued until a hole was made. Powder was deposited in the hole, then a tube made of straws filled with powder and tied together was inserted to connect with the powder below, and finally a piece of match paper was applied to the straw and set afire. Abner and Dutchy had drilled the hole in the hard granite. Abner had inserted the powder. Then at a signal from the keeper, Dutchy had set fire to the straw tube. “Run, Dutchy,” Abner yelled. Dutchy did not seem to hear; if he heard, the warning

went unheeded. There was a blasting roar. And a horrified gasp from the watching prisoners. Abner turned. Through the cloud of black smoke he saw Dutchy fall. In a moment, heedless of the rain of stone and sand, he was by the side of the stricken man. Blood flowed from an open wound in his side. There was a deep gash in his forehead. Abner stared down helplessly at the prostrate form. The keeper approached. One look was enough.

“The man’s gone,” he said. He turned to look at the prisoners. He saw the pity in their eyes, but Sing Sing’s discipline knew no compassion. His whip cracked. “Clear away, men,” he shouted. And in sight of Dutchy’s unseeing eyes, Abner and the rest of the

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company bent their backs to the rocks that had been loosened by the blast. Through the intervening years Abner had been unable to determine for himself whether Dutchy’s death had been an accident or whether a tired and befogged mind had deliberately chosen a way out to ultimate freedom and peace. Two keepers lifted the dead body upon the stone cart, and a dozen prisoners dragged it down the hill and into the prison yard. On the way, another cart passed them. It was being dragged uphill, to load up with stone from the recent blast. A dozen striped men pulled it. Six on either side of a long shaft. Each man wore a harness attached to the shaft. A keeper carrying a long whip walked alongside and urged them on. It whistled through the air, cracking like musket fire. The men strained at the ropes. Abner remembered how Joner had bent his head close and whispered the question, “Will they bury him? I wish they would give him a funeral.” But they never knew what happened to the body. It was rumored, in the way rumors spread in prisons, that a hospital in New York had first claim on the bodies of all dead prisoners.

There had been a mite of consolation in Dutchy’s death. It brought Abner to better understanding of Gerrish Barrett. The night of Dutchy’s death, Barrett came to Abner’s cell door. Abner’s heart was sore, and he felt tired and ill. The chaplain called to him. “You were Dutchy’s friend,” he said. Abner nodded. “Shall we pray for him?” the chaplain suggested. He opened a book and recited the prayer for the dead. Abner listened. A glimmer of light flashed through his heart. “Dust to dust,” the chaplain read. It spoke of the dead. And yet Abner felt that Barrett was praying for him. Life to life. And peace. The understanding came too, late. Gerrish Barrett, the ascetic and zealot, did not fit in with the scheme of things in Sing Sing. He was too insistent in consoling the living and in demanding decent burial for the dead. He criticized Captain Lynds for the undue haste with which Dutchy’s body was shipped to its unknown destination. Their altercation ended in the chaplain’s dis-

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missal. Abner lived over and over again his farewell to Barrett. There was genuine sorrow in the chaplain’s face and voice. “We'll miss you,” Abner told him. Sing Sing did, indeed, miss his healing power and influence during the terrible days of the cholera. For forty-five days death stalked unhindered through the galleries and in the shops. Hog was called in from the quarries. He was needed in the carpenter shop to build coffins.

29 Abner’s back, grown brittle with the years, still tingled at the thought of the tattoos played upon it by the many-tongued “cat” in the cause of discipline. He smiled indulgently, and perhaps not a little pridefully, at his acquired reputation as the most whipped prisoner in Sing Sing. He recalled vividly the incident in the clothes shop, presided over by an august personage in the human shape and form of Marshall, a nearsighted keeper, one of Captain Lynds’ eloquent aides. Abner had obtained leave to apply for a clean shirt. The smoke and fumes and flying dirt in the quarries made frequent changes necessary. Marshall heard Abner’s request, but made no move to grant it. Instead, he stared hard at Abner’s shirt and then referred to his

record. “Look here,” he drawled, “tyou had your last clean shirt only three days ago.” “But it’s filthy, sir,’ Abner replied. “I work in the quarries. Shirts don’t last very long out there.” “You should be more careful,’’ Keeper Marshall admonished.

Then he stretched himself and rose from his high stool. “I think T’ll teach you how,” he added. His hand reached for the waiting whip. “Strip,” he ordered. Abner remonstrated. “Strip,” the keeper repeated. There was nothing else to be done. Abner stripped. Twenty lashes. And no clean shirt. It was mild when compared to the other whipping on the dock, in the presence of the crew of a ship that lay alongside the wharf.

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A sailor had dropped a quid of tobacco. It might have been a gesture of good sportsmanship. Nevertheless, it brought pain to Abner, who stooped to pick it up. The eagle eye of the keeper intercepted him. “Drop it,” he ordered.

Abner complied. But there was the sequel. The keeper fondled the whip in his hand. Abner understood, and without waiting for the command, unbuttoned his shirt. Sixty-eight was the count. When it was over, Abner’s shirt stuck fast, glued by his blood. But he did not falter. He took his place at the harnessed stone cart and pulled away. His comrades gazed at him in silent admiration. It was after that whipping that Abner began to chisel into

the stone in his cell wall. He worked slowly and secretly. He had long years ahead. Captain Lynds was carving his name and his record in human flesh. Abner Wilde would leave his name in stone. Captain Lynds, like the victims he tortured, would crumble. Abner Wilde’s name would remain as long as Sing Sing lived. And longer. A nail did the trick, a scratch a day. The days were many, and Abner made progress. Much has been written about the resilience of the human body in the face of intense suffering. Some minds and bodies succumb early. Others seem to thrive upon hardship and pain. The more Abner endured, the harder he became. Always there was the memory of Dutchy who had fallen, unable to bear the pressure of time and circumstance. But what really saved Abner was his ability to forget time. He had steeled himself to regard each day as sufficient unto itself, a state of mind that brought him undisturbed sleep at night and renewed energy at daybreak. He was able to do his tasks as well, if not better, than the others. He wielded the pick more steadily, heaved at the slabs of granite with greater vigor, pulled the harnessed cart more effectively than other prisoners in his squad. Keepers and guards mistook his endurance for bravado, and employed every pretext to make him strip. At times, the flesh on his back stood out in folds, battered and creviced from the scars

of a hundred lashings. Yet his mind had not been stagnant. He was hardly aware of it at the time, but as he looked back on his experience he won-

ABNER dered whether

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there had not been in his heart the unconscious,

perhaps unexpressed, urge to sustain the courage of his fellow prisoners by the example of his own powers of endurance and resistance. Suppressed as were the thousand men toiling in the silence of Sing Sing, rigid and inflexible as were the rules, no power known to Captain Lynds and his associates could halt the waves of emotionalism carried by the unseen but effective “grapevine,” a line of communication peculiar to all prisons. Sensitive and irreducible transmitter of rumors, the grapevine likewise made known to the other inmates the acts of intelligence, running counter to the system, that drew upon Abner Wilde the punishment of the prison; and he began to be noticed, looked to, for those qualities of discernment and daring that make leaders of men. On occasion, he was their spokesman. The prison inspectors would sometimes come to him for information about routine matters. And it was on his testimony that Samuel M. Hopkins, a discriminating and keenwitted inspector, based his recommendation early in 1830 for the removal of Captain Lynds, as agent and keeper of the prison. An undefined rumor, which seemed untraceable, had quoted

Abner as threatening Captain Lynds with violence, and set him up as the moving figure in an impending revolt among the prisoners. The rumor was not confined to the men in stripes, it somehow reached the ears of Captain Lynds. Whatever else may be said of the captain’s mentality, he was not lacking in personal bravery. He sent for Abner. The keeper and the prisoner charged with stirring up insurrection were alone together. Captain Lynds was in his shirt sleeves. Abner stood before him, waiting. The captain looked him in the eye, a long, direct, calculating stare, not a muscle of his face moving. Finally, he stood up, his hand brushing his chin. It was unkempt with several days’ growth of beard. “JT sent for you, Wilde,” he said, “to shave me. Think you can handle me?” Abner hesitated. Then he assured Captain Lynds that he thought he could do the job.

“TI am the company barber,” he said.

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The captain nodded, handed him the tools, and submitted himself to be shaved. Captain Lynds kept his eyes closed. the whole of the time Abner worked over him. There was not a tremor in his face. Abner admired such fearlessness and his respect for Lynds soared in that one moment. The job done, Captain Lynds got out of the chair and remained standing. “I suppose you are wondering why I sent for you to shave me?” he said, smiling grimly. Abner waited for him to continue. “It has come to me,” the captain went on, “that you threatened to get me. I called you to give you your chance.” He paused. “But you wouldn’t take it.” Abner stood his ground, returning the other’s stare. Then he shook his head. “You are wrong, captain,” he said. “It isn’t you. Not your person. It’s the system that you represent. If your death would cure it...” He shrugged his shoulders. “But that wouldn’t change conditions.” An instant the captain’s eyes wavered, his face softened a little. Then the ice and the hardness returned. He turned away. “It’s the only way,” he said. “The only safe way to deal with those fellows.” With a sweeping gesture that seemed to have in it both the habit of authority and the sudden desperate knowledge of defeat, he lifted his arm toward the prison. “You may go now,” he said in dismissal.

The keeper who was waiting outside the door escorted Abner back to the quarries on the hill. That night he slept fitfully, tossing on the plank bed. It had never seemed so uncomfortable. The air was close, unbearably hot

and foul. It made his skin dry, and he felt as if his whole body were burning with a fever. Daybreak came, accompanied by strange sounds. Prisoners shouting and hammering on the cell doors. The din was terrific. Standing at his own door, but taking no part in the racket, Abner heard the keys turning in all the locks. His door was opened, but

not by the guard in blue uniform. A prisoner in stripes beckoned to him.

|

|

ABNER

WILDE—REBEL

III

“It’s our day now!” he shouted. Abner stepped out into the gallery, which was filled with a boisterous mob of men in stripes. They hailed him with a loud yell. Hog and Joner were leading the crowd, and between them stood Captain Lynds, his hands chained, his feet in shackles. He looked

bewildered, a flush on his face and his eyes rolling back in his head. “To the Bloody Hall!” the mob yelled. They surged. out into the galleries, heading toward the whipPing post.

“We've got the keepers and guards locked up on the top gallery,” Joner managed to bellow in Abner’s ear. The tumult increased. Then all at once, capriciously as such things happen, a quiet fell on the galleries, and a voice cried out, “Abner Wilde, take the whip!” A hand reached out, thrusting the whip into his nerveless grasp. He took it. He watched the prisoners tie the hands of Captain Lynds high above his head, to the iron rings of the whipping post. Then the shirt was torn from his back. The crowd waited in silence. “One hundred stripes!” a prisoner shouted. Abner raised his whip. And then as Captain Lynds turned his head Abner saw his eyes, cool, steady, as they had been in the interview when he allowed himself to be shaved, and on his face a

scornful grin. Abner hesitated, remembering the first whipping Captain Lynds had given him on this very spot; the crack of the whip, the grim impersonal stare of the keeper as he wielded the lash. And he remembered his vow to hang Captain Lynds on this very post and return the lashing, stripe by stripe. “Tet ’er go!” a man yelled from the crowd. Suddenly the scornful grin on Captain Lynds’ face began to spread, widening till it stretched from ear to ear and covered his features in a frightful obscene leer; obliterated them as completely as melted wax and nothing remained but his terrific smile, his whole countenance a caricature. And somehow Abner, gazing in stupefied horror and fascination, felt the smile of Captain Lynds seizing on his own face, taking hold, drawing up his skin in an awful vacuum pull like one of those sucker fish that attach them-

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selves to foreign bodies. He dropped the whip, crying out, “I can’t do it, men! It isn’t him. It’s the system!” Pandemonium

broke loose. The prisoners yelled and whistled,

cursing Abner. A big, broad man broke out of the crowd, his face black with hate and frustrated fury. He stooped to pick up the whip. “Pll give it to him,” he yelled. “And you, too!” He grabbed Abner, tore off his shirt, and dragged him up beside Captain Lynds. And while the mob recorded the count in a savage, yelling chant, the lash whipped both streaming backs. One, two, three . . . one hundred! Abner could feel the hot blood running down his back. And the eyes of Captain Lynds, ever cool, mocking, gloating, fixed on him. He woke, in his ears loud hammering on the cell door. The terrors of that awful dream had exhausted him. The flesh on his back burned. He was unable to rise. The keeper stood there scowling. “Hey, there, Wilde. You’re late. I'll have to report you to Captain Lynds. I’m afraid you’re in for another lashing.” But he did not get the lashing. For that was the thirty-first of October, the day Captain Lynds resigned his post. They made it a holiday in the prison. And because it was a holiday, he found time to chisel on his stone. This was 1830, and Abner Wilde was thirty-three years old. 30

With the passing of Captain Lynds the government of Sing Sing Prison was overhauled. It had been the captain’s objective to make the prison entirely self-supporting by employing his prisoners in the quarries. He planned to dispose of the quarried stone.

The plan was effective for a time. Contracts were entered into with the City of New York for stonecutting for the local penitentiary; stone for the courthouse in Troy, cut stone for the State House

in New

Haven;

cut stone

for the City Hall in Albany;

coping stone for Fort Adams in Rhode Island; and for an iron

steamboiler to be sent to Mexico. The quarries at Sing Sing were

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extended. A new one was opened, some distance from the prison, and a road cutthrough to it. But the value of the new quarry, as well as of the older ones,

was diminished by the immense amount of labor necessary to remove the “superincumbent” earth and rubbish, and by the excess of inferior stone. This lessened the productiveness of Sing Sing’s labor. Captain Lynds’ ambition for a self-supporting prison was

doomed. The State of New York was called upon to foot an annual deficit, a condition that aroused general indignation. “Tt is a great evil,” was the comment of an eminent authority, “not only to the State of New York, but to the country at large, to have this new prison, under its improved construction, and the new system of prison discipline, bringing the state in debt $30,000 annually.” It was a deficit most grudgingly made up. The State of New York had failed as a contractor. And so it modified the method of operation. Instead of selling the product, it determined to sell labor. Prisoners were to be hired out. Outside contractors were invited to bid for them. For fifty years subsequently, the government of the prison was dual in form. Uniformed keepers policed Sing Sing. And contractors, through their agents, regulated the prisoners’ labor. The state owned the bare walls of the prison—the contractors owned the machinery, the fixtures, the manufactured articles, and the prisoners. Robert Wiltsie, Lynds’ successor, looked on passively and perhaps indifferently as the new system took hold, and bowed submissively to the demands of the contractors for full-time labor. Prisoners were allowed no recreation, no hours for study, and, except for the short service on Sunday morning, no instruction in

religion. Contractors were allowed to pick their men. They examined the prisoners and vied with each other for the choice of brawn and, occasionally, intelligence. It was in the course of this sorting process that Hog and Abner and Joner were called in from the quarries and assigned to the carpenter shop. 1826

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It had taken Abner ten years to inscribe these lines. He worked steadily, patiently. A nail had done the trick. When he finished the last line, he sat back on his plank bed and scrutinized the work. A rebel. He did not quite recognize himself. And he did not clearly understand the nature of his rebellion. Was it against Edward Todd? Or Captain Pete? Or Captain Burgess? Or Rachel

Starr? Or—his heart beat faster—was it Jane? Or was it against Uncle George Todd who forgot to sign his will? All of them, the events and the people, had helped to shape the uneven course of his life. But yet, the years having worn away the edge of bitterness, he could not find it in his heart to despise Captain Burgess, evil as he was, for his love for Jane. He could not hate Edward

for his weakness. Or Rachel Starr for the bitterness of her heart. Somehow he did not feel so generous about Captain Pete. Or Jane. She had wanted to go away, to forget. And Captain Pete had encouraged her, he had confessed it, the day of his visit to Newgate. And still he could not bring himself to hate. Only there was the disappointment. Yes, he was a rebel. Against love. Against life. Love and life had given him moments of happiness. He had known joy. But he looked back on those years as something apart, that time ended when the gates of Newgate closed on him. 1826. He would mark it on his record of stone. It was the dividing line between two lives, and one life could not flow into the other.

As he scratched and chiseled night after night in the darkness

of his cell, the thought grew upon him that he had not lived all of life or found real love. Maybe it was out there waiting for him. “Hands unbound and feet unfettered.” A REBEL. To be a rebel meant to be free. Of chains, irons, walls. It meant more than that, it indicated the severance of ties

with all the influences that had edged him into Sing Sing. Not merely with personalities. That already had been accomplished. Captain Pete, Mathilda Munn, Jane, they now were of another world, their forms and faces made dim by time and circumstance. His revolt was broader than individuals, it would strike at estab-

lished order, at institutions created by man and conceived in utter disregard of human emotions. The mad dance of the victorious, naked savages on the jungle coast of Africa; the drone of the judge in the courtroom: “twenty years at hard labor”; the whip of Cap-

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tain Lynds; the stone cart with harnessed prisoners—were they not all of the same pattern? The world needed rebels. He, Abner Wilde, would lead them! He could not remember exactly how the plan originated. Hog whispered to him one day, “Only one year more for me, boy. And then—the world will be mine.” It was nearing the end of Hog’s fifteen years’ term. Joner heard the whisper, and sighed. ‘‘Four years more for me!” Abner had eight to do. During the past several years Abner’s attitude toward the prison, the prisoners, and the keepers had changed profoundly. The fact that men toiled like slaves, urged on by the hovering lash, had ceased to affect his inherent sense of right. And the other fact, that they were deprived of adequate food, evoked no protest in his heart. Individual suffering was no longer important. He had retired into a shell which he shared only with Hog and Joner. The puncture of this shell meant freedom for him. He would try it. “We'll go first,” Abner told Hog. “Joner and I will find a way Hog looked scared. “Tt’s death if you fail,” he said. “You might do it alone, but with Joner,” disgust swept his face, “he’s bad luck.” “ll risk it,’ Abner said.

Hog turned out a dozen wooden boxes a day. They were used to ship manufactured prison goods. Hog sawed the wood and hammered the nails; and Abner and Joner worked close by in the same shop. “Jonet will go first,’ Abner whispered. And it was done in a moment. Joner slid into an empty box, and Hog nailed him down. A hammer had been left inside. The box was trundied

out and put with the others on the wharf, and thence hauled to the deck of the waiting steamboat. It was a narrow box, with just enough room for Joner to stand. He could not move to the right

or to the left. Only his hands were free. Neither Abner nor Hog knew the fright in Joner’s heart. Nor the pain in his head. The unknowing crew had placed the box bottom-side up. Joner squirmed in the box, his head down, his feet pointing upward. Meanwhile, there was tragedy in the carpenter shop. In his haste and nervousness, Hog had taken a huge supply of nails into his mouth. He motioned to Abner to slide into the second box.

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Just as Abner was about to comply, he noticed something amiss with Hog, whose face turned suddenly black. He stood transfixed, his mouth gaping, the nails showing in ominous protrusion. Hog clutched at his throat. Abner grasped his head and jerked it downward. The nails fell out. But still Hog’s mouth remained open, and he breathed in choking gasps. Other prisoners working near gathered around. The cry went forth that Hog had swallowed a nail; the disorder brought several guards and keepers on the run. “Send for the doctor,” one of them yelled. But before the doctor arrived,

Abner had acted quickly. He held Hog’s head and looked into his mouth. A nail was imbedded deeply in the soft flesh of his throat. Abner seized an iron pincers and pulled it out. Hog drew a long breath, sighed, and fainted.

Joner stood upon his head in the box on the deck of the steamboat. The vessel had cast off and was paddling downstream toward New York. The pain in Joner’s head was unbearable; his veins bulged and knotted. But he thought of New York and freedom. He would bear the suffering; he clenched his teeth and held on to fading consciousness.

But suddenly he became aware of another danger. He felt hot. His whole body dripped perspiration. Then above the churning of the paddles, he heard plainly the hiss of steam. The heat was intense. He realized that his box lay alongside the ship’s boiler. He forgot the pain in his head, in the fear of suffocation. Come what may, he had to get out. He stamped his feet on the top of the box, he twisted his body, first one way, then the other. The box toppled over. He seized the hammer and pounded with all his strength. The crew heard. The box was seized and opened; and Joner was dragged out, a half-conscious, sodden spectacle. The ship turned about and set her course back to the prison. In an hour Joner was back on the wharf, staring pleadingly at the whip in the hands of Keeper Wiltsie.

Fifty stripes descended. But even as the blows fell, Joner thought that he would rather be whipped than stand on his head in a tight wooden box, close by a ship’s steaming boiler. Abner, watching from a distance, thought—Joner’s luck! He would find another way. Alone.

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31

Robert Wiltsie’s tenure as keeper of Sing Sing was nearing its end. For almost nine years he had presided over its destinies, a weak sovereign who permitted contractors and their agents full sway over men’s bodies. They had reduced Sing Sing to a human shambles. They regarded crime with indulgence and criminals as their peculiar property. There appeared in that community of cowed human beings, in the late thirties, a gentleman who saw in every man the image and likeness of his Creator. His attitude toward prisons and prisoners was born of sympathy and understanding, which had come to him early in life. ““My mother was a Quaker,” he explained, “and a serious conversation she had with me, when I was four or five years old, has affected my whole life. I had joined some boys who were tormenting a kitten. We chased the cat and threw stones, till we killed it. When I came into the house, I told my mother what we had done. She took me on her lap and talked to me in such moving style about my cruelty to the helpless animal that I burst into sobs. Afterward, if I was tempted to do anything unkind, she would tell me to remember how sorry I was for having hurt the little kitten.

I never forgot the circumstance. For a long time afterward I couldn’t think of it without tears. It impressed me so deeply that when I became a man I could never see a forlorn wretch run down by his fellow beings without thinking of that hunted and pelted little beast. Even now the ghost of that kitten and the recollection of my mother’s gentle lessons come between me and the prisoners at Sing Sing, forever admonishing me to be humane and forbearing.” That man was John W. Edmonds, one of the newly appointed prison inspectors.

It was Edmonds who, in 1840, compelled the abrogation of summary punishment in Sing Sing and established the rule of trials on complaint by contractors and keepers. Under the new system, the principal keeper heard the accusing officer and also the plea of the accused. He determined the method and character of the punishment. And it was Edmonds who inaugurated the practice

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of semiannual visits by relatives of prisoners. No longer was Sing Sing isolated, nor its prisoners outcasts. Edmonds’ reforms were more than merely permissive. He urged prisoners to write to parents, wives and children, inviting them to come to Sing Sing and resume the broken threads of kinship. In the course of his rounds and his interviews with the prisoners, he met Abner. Edmonds called to the prisoner through the latticed door. But Abner did not respond. It was Sunday, and Abner felt tired and listless. A sheet of white paper lay on his plank bed. He stared at it. It was meant for him to write his letter. It was meant to bring a visit. But there was no one to whom he could write. He knew nobody who would visit him. Inspector Edmonds beckoned to a keeper. Abner’s cell door was opened, and Edmonds entered and sat down on the plank bed beside Abner, who still remained silent.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Edmonds began. Abner kept still. He did not seem to hear. But Edmonds persisted. He hummed a tune.

‘Who knocks so loud?’ ‘A lonely sin.’ ‘Slip through, we answer, and all hell’s in.”

“Did you ever think, Wilde, that the same thing may be said of faith and courage? They are always knocking at your heart. Let them but enter, they can make life whole again.”

Edmonds talked on. Gradually Abner’s interest was aroused. The man was strongly reminiscent of Keeper Willis in old Newgate. Without seeming to question, the inspector learned of Captain Pete and Mathilda. And Jane. And of the son Abner had never known. As Abner talked, the inspector’s eyes rested on the markings on the stone. He made no mention of it as he rose from the bed. “Beginning next Sunday,” he said as he gripped Abner’s hand, “we are to have services in the chapel. I want you to come.” Abner stood at his cell door gazing after the retreating figure. His face impassive, he turned and walked the length of his cell. Three treads back, three treads forward. Seven feet. They seemed more. It might have been the fresh winds from the Hudson. The

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dampness he had breathed for so many years gave way before a breath of freshness tinged with salt. Faith and courage! Abner wondered, sneered. He turned to chisel his script. Twelve years ago at Newgate. In the chapel two hundred men in irons gazed expectantly at the pulpit. The Sunday chapel services proved highly successful. Prisoners looked forward to them eagerly. The chorus of song swelled through the crowded hall. Two prisoners on either side of the chapel led in the singing. Hog was one. Joner the other. Both engaged in friendly rivalry, each urging his side to sing louder and truer. Joner was generally the winner. Abner taunted him goodnaturedly one day. “You seem to like our Christian God,” he said.

Joner looked at him in surprise. “Your Christian God? But God is God. When we die and are buried and then come to life again on the earth in the trees and grass and flowers, can you tell which grass and trees and flowers are Christian,

or Jewish, or Chinese, or Mohammedan?

Nature

don’t put any marks on them! God don’t either. Your face, your

body, your language may be different. But the soul, it has no label.” Abner was especially interested in the sermons of the visiting chaplains. It was Inspector Edmonds’ thought that the prisoners liked to see and hear a chaplain from the outside world, who could bring a message from “over the hills.” It lent freshness to the service, new points of view that gave the prisoners something to think about during the week. It was six months after the first visit of Inspector Edmonds to Abner’s cell. All prisoners were assembled for the usual Sunday service. As always, there was a few minutes’ delay after the congregation took the places in the chapel. A hushed audience waited for the entrance of the prison chaplain and his guest. There was an air of expectancy as to the identity and personality of the visitor. Prisoners often recognized familiar faces as ministers and preachers from their native regions appeared before them. It brought them closer to home. And to life. A thousand heads turned toward the door. Two figures entered and passed down the center aisle. The Reverend John Lucky, the

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prison chaplain, walked in front, and behind him came a burly figure. The man’s face was deep-lined, tanned, and he walked with

a heavy lumbering step. Abner saw, started, and half rose from his seat. He drew his hand across his eyes and looked again. The chaplain and his guest ascended the platform. The stranger looked out over the congregation, his eyes roving restlessly. They swung to Abner and halted. Captain Pete and Abner gazed at each other. . . . The chaplain read the opening prayer. Then came the chaplain’s introduction of the visiting preacher. “Our guest this morning,” said Mr. Lucky, “is a gentleman who has had a wonderful experience in life. Trained in his youth for the ministry and having gained the degree of Doctor of Divinity at Oxford University in England, he forsook the cloth almost immediately and became literally a man of the world. His restless energy led him to the sea. His courage and sense of leadership soon got him his commission. He won his captaincy. He has sailed his ships over the seven seas. He has seen life in its every manifestation. His own has been rich in adventure. The glamorous East, the languid South, the hardy West—he drank from all of them. For twenty-five years he trod a ship’s deck, fought against nature’s furies, and gamboled in the calm and serenity of her sheltering arms. He has lived among savages and cannibals; he has hunted wild beasts in the sunless jungles of the tropics; he has known the luxury and culture of the Orient. But nowhere did he find what his soul was seeking—the peace that comes with contentment. “It came to him fifteen years ago, in an unfrequented bypath, among primitive people to whom he preached the word of God and the laws of man. The wonder of his work has reached out beyond the confines of his parish. It has brought him honor. We, his brethren of the cloth, admire and envy him. It is fitting that a man

whose knowledge of life is so vast should bring his message to a congregation whose world is circumscribed and whose vision is necessarily limited. It is with a feeling of gratitude for his presence here today that I present the Reverend Captain Peter Keys.” A wave of resentment surged over Abner. They had all found peace, Captain Pete and Mathilda and Jane. The peace that had been denied to him. They had lived quietly, and he in torment.

But as he looked at Pete and saw the kindness in his homely face,

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the bitterness in his own heart softened. Pete’s thin hair was white at the temples. His shoulders were bent, his back less straight than when he stood on the wharf at New Orleans and drove the blacks with their loads of cotton bales. Captain Pete did not preach to the congregation of prisoners. He talked to them. He took them into distant lands, amid strange peoples and customs. “Everywhere,” he was saying in his booming voice, “I found men and women searching for something, they knew not what. Struggling for life and with life. They were chained and shackled to unmeaning traditions. Chains and shackles that mutilated them and narrowed their horizons. . . . “You will find, as I have found, that freedom should not be

measured by physical standards. Freedom is vision. The man whose mind can reach out beyond self, that man will never feel the pinch of iron bracelets. Walls will crumble before him!” 32

The hall had emptied. The thousand men in stripes had shuffled out and were back in their cells. Abner had been ordered to remain.

Captain Pete came down from the platform. Abner went forward to meet him. Several seconds they looked at each other in

silence. Then as Abner wavered, Pete grasped his arm and guided him to a bench. “T couldn’t come

sooner,” he said. ‘I—we—Mathilda

and I

had to take care of her. We couldn’t leave her, not even for you.” It took Pete a full hour to tell the story of fifteen years. “Her heart was broken. Life had been too burdensome. She didn’t complain, but she grieved for you. Five years ago her mind broke. Every morning she would stand at the door, watching the sunrise. ‘He’s coming today,’ she’d say. And then she would cook things for you.” Pete smiled. “It was rather expensive but we humored her. Then when night came she would sit and brood. Sure that you had lost your way. Mathilda would lead her to her room and promise that ‘tomorrow Abner will surely come.’ “The children know you, everything about you. The tone of

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your voice, that strong stride you—used to have. She taught them. Little Jane is the image of her mother. And Abner, tall and a good-looking boy. “She was always quiet and gentle and patient. One day it was very cold; the snow was deep on the plains and in the woods. Jane got up suddenly from her chair by the fire and said in a frantic

voice, ‘He’s lost somewhere in the woods. I’m going to find him!’ We couldn’t hold her. We harnessed the horses to the sleigh and went all over the country. It was hours before we could coax her to come back. “Then one day the boy and I went hunting. We left the womenfolk at home. We got back at dusk. Little Jane was in tears and Mathilda was having a fit. Jane had got up and gone into the woods. ‘He’s on his way,’ she said, ‘I’m going to meet him.’ ”

Pete paused, and went on in a quiet voice, ““We found her body under the trees. She had lain down to rest. Frozen!” Vision. Freedom. It was clear to Abner, sitting on his plank bed. He was a rebel. Not against love for which Jane had suffered, died. Not against life that still held so much promise in their children. But against cruelty and oppression and the Captain Lynds’—society’s only answer to its own shortcomings! Abner shook his head and muttered to himself. “That’s not the right word. I'll change it... .” He worked slowly and steadily. But it took him years to draw a line across the stone, through the words. He did not have time to write another. It was remarkable how quickly five years sped by. Remarkable, too, that in that final period of his confinement the lash did

not seek him out for special caressing. Hog and Joner had both gone, discharged at the end of their terms. To each of them Abner had given a note addressed to Captain Pete. Harmon Eldridge, the keeper, approved of the letters. “The new country,” he said, “will make new men of you. I wish all my prisoners could go there, instead of going back to their old haunts.” Abner missed Hog and Joner, but somehow the days were not too long, the years did not drag. He had his constant visitors in the letters he received from Captain Pete and Mathilda, and

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young Jane, and his son, Abner. They were long letters telling of the Ohio plains, and vast untouched forests and lands where men and women were building a new civilization. 1846. It was written on the record of stone, the year of his deliverance. Not only from Sing Sing, but from the old life, and all that it stood for. In his forty-ninth year, Abner stepped through the gates of the prison. Captain Pete was waiting for him. “We'll not tarry,” he said, as they embraced. “They are waiting for us, out there.” Abner’s hair was white, but his eyes shone with life and hope and vigor. He walked straight, his gait was sure. They turned toward the west.

23 In the first flush of spring, Abner sat by a little greenclad mound. The air smelled of fresh earth and new grass. Captain Pete stood by his side. Their eyes took in the sunshine, the furrowed fields stretching away in the distance across the winding road. From inside the cabin came the clatter of dishes and the shrill, tuneless voice of Mathilda, as she sang the steaming pots to a boil. The sound of incessant hammering came from the rear of the cabin. Hog’s muffled voice, his mouth filled with nails, berated Joner. “Tl put the lash on you,” he threatened. Joner winced as though he felt the cat-o’-nine-tails bite into his deeply-scarred back. Then he laughed—“You can’t! The king is dead!”—and went on, working as best he could with his poor, prison-broken body. “I’m telling you, Abner,’ Captain Pete said, smiling, ‘‘this is going to be a great spot. It’s just the place for a great city. Like New York.” “How do you figure that out?” Abner said. “Look,” Captain Pete answered, pointing to the pigs wallowing in the roadside. “The beginnings of prosperity!” Abner’s eyes followed the figures of the boy and girl—young Abner and Jane—in the fields near by, helping their bronze-faced

uncles, Robert and Terry Todd. “Pete, if only the world don’t catch up with us. And them!”

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Two

EDMUND

ROLPHE—CYNIC I

HE

visitation

of the dreaded

pestilence,

in 1822,

almost

emptied the Island of Manhattan and left it a shambles, harboring only the homeless cats left behind by their fleeing owners. One hundred and twenty-five thousand people forsook homes and business, and sought safety across the swamps in the distant village of Greenwich, three miles north on the shore of the Hudson. The news of an outbreak of yellow fever in Rector Street brought consternation to the whole population. Captain Emory Rolphe heard the report .as he was preparing to cast off at his quay for his customary trip to Albany. Saturday, August 24, 1822. The city resembled a town besieged. From daybreak till dusk a single line of carts loaded with boxes, merchandise

and household effects crawled toward Green-

wich Village and the upper reaches of the Island. Carriages, hacks, wagons. Horsemen scoured thoroughfares and crowded the roads. Anxious crowds fled through the streets. “The air was hot,” says a writer of that day, “‘and close and

moist, as if you had been walking in a Scotch mist or stewed in a vapor bath. Streets swarmed with famished animals whose piteous howlings added much to the distress of the few inhabitants who had not fled. Pavements were thick with lime as if buried under snow; stricken neighborhoods fenced off and quarantined. Vinegar was sold as a sure preventative for fever. You could hardly meet a man

in the street but had a bottle at his nose, till their nose

points and upper lips were turned as brown as the sole of a newmade boot. The women took Scotch snuff.” The fleeing mob was whipped to frenzy by the recollection of 127

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the last visitation of the plague in 1798, when one-tenth of New York’s population had succumbed. That was the year of Captain Rolphe’s arrival on these shores. He had been among the stricken, but his great strength, or perhaps his good fortune, had seen him through the attack, and he had recovered. There was no fear for himself, now, in the captain’s heart. His huge bulk rode at ease on the driver’s seat on the cart which carried all his worldly goods. By his side sat little Ed, and behind them, bestriding the miscellany stacked high, his wife and fouryear-old Jenny. As the city receded after them, the closely packed carts and their passengers fell into a carnival spirit. Banter and hilarity supplanted fear and worry. They had escaped the enemy. They, and their dear ones and their possessions were safe. The voice of Captain Emory Rolphe boomed above the clatter and hubbub of the moving host. Jerking his head, he burst into a song of the riverside:

“When New York Streets are free from pigs And ladies use no paints, Parsons refuse a salary And jailers all turn Saints.” Little Ed joined in the song. His small tinkling voice bore a comic likeness to his father’s rolling baritone. Captain Rolphe gave the reins to the little boy who shouted to the horse, “Come up!”

Straining his voice, loud, to sound like a man. “Mother’s calling you, father,” Edmund

said.

The captain turned around. His wife was sitting apart from little Jenny. There was a look of panic in her face, her hands wove balancing motions in the air. He halted the cart, got down and went around to the rear. The woman bent down and whispered something. He looked up, saw the purplish hue of her nose, the slightly inflamed eyes that

gazed at him, beseeching. “Ts it that?” Emory Rolphe bowed his head. The enemy had caught up with them.

E Day2UIN DPR OT PTE GY NTC

129

The sun was a globe of fire over the rim of the Palisades. The river was as still as death. The woman got down from her place on the cart. She swayed a moment,

turned toward her husband, the boy, and the wailing

infant. Then with a cry of despair, “God bless you all!” she ran quickly from the roadside. Captain Rolphe called and ran after her. He saw her gain the river shore, and without looking back, plunge into the calm

water. Cries of panic came from the wagons on the road. Several men ran to the river edge and held the man. “°Tis an easier death,” they said. “Let her be!” The surface was as smooth as the bottom of a plate. The men who had assembled on the bank to look for the body had given up the search, climbed up on their carts, and moved on again. A solitary chip of a star winked out of the clear turquoise. And still the man waited, alone. Craning forward where the cliff rose at a steep angle, the rocks exposed below, a jagged dark welter piercing the water level. Starting, stopping and going on again in slow despairing circles, at length he trudged back to the cart by the roadside where the boy waited, crouched in fear. The weeping of the female child would not be hushed. #2

New York recovered from the epidemic of 1822 as it had from similar scourges in years gone by. Broadway

again became

the avenue of commerce and pleasure. Steamboats and packets once more tied up at their old wharves on the North and East rivers. And Captain Emory Rolphe again stacked his belongings on a cart and with Edmund and Jenny, drove the three miles down the newly laid roads to his house on Roosevelt Street, three blocks distant from the shore. For three months the captain had not sailed his vessel on the Hudson. He had not even reported for duty. Now he was both father and mother to his youngsters, helping Edmund with his

reading and Jenny with her letters, as they sat around the lamp in the long, dark, wintry afternoons.

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The captain had been abruptly tamed. The loud animal vitality that had worn his wife to a dwindling wraith was checked, subdued. Bob the Wheeler, of the Darby and Joan Tavern, would

not have recognized the low-voiced gentleman for the hot-blooded

champion who once in his establishment had knocked out six roughnecks, when they insulted the flag of freedom. Bob the Wheeler was a London pugilist, who had set up a beershop that became the resort of English roustabouts. Most of his guests were said to be men of shadows who plied their trade in the wee hours of morning.

Bob remembered. Somebody had shouted, ‘‘Hell’s bells! The States sooner or later’ll be comin’ ’ome to roost under the Union Jack!” And the next thing, Rolphe stood panting in the center of the room, around him half a dozen damaged and groaning fellows on the sanded floor. Grinning, and howling cheers from his nook behind the bar, Bob filled a double bumper and tendered it to the victorious gladiator. “Ye did a good job, man! I’ll drink with ye— America and freedom for aye!” A decent fellow, but a deep one, an odd card. Bob the Wheeler, alias Sutton, ex-star of the ring, renegade and all-round crook. He had cut loose from some kind of tragedy, a domestic mix-up back in England. Nobody ever knew what it was. A lonesome cuss. Every now and then he complained of queer feelings crawling around in his belly, that made a serious disturbance along the path of his esophagus. One of those feelings must have attached him when he saw the captain after his return and heard the circumstances through which Rolphe had lost his wife, for he did a queer thing.

“Man, ye'll be goin’ back to the river,” he said then, “and how about the kids? Ye got nobody to leave ’em with. It’s tough, but I tell ye what—TI'll let ye ’ave Uncle Henry.” It was an astonishing piece of altruism. The captain was still too bewildered to say no to a proposition that was going to provide for his youngsters. So he accepted and said, “Thanks.” Bob the Wheeler grunted. “That’s the ticket!” He leaned over, becoming confidential. “T was lettin’ ’im go, anyhow. ’E’s the blackest nigger I know, but e’s got a white heart. I was goin’ to give ’im ’is freedom.”

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So the captain went back to the river, and Uncle Henry came into his household as a freeman working for wages. With the confidence of one easily persuaded by his own words, confidence that is the privilege of childhood, Edmund told his sister that the colored man was black inside as well as out. The chance remark put a thought in Jenny’s little head: perhaps Uncle Henry could be made white with a good scrubbing! Didn’t it say in the hymn Edmund knew, “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow’? But Edmund changed his mind—or at any rate, changed the assertion—one day when some boys in the neighborhood said that his nurse was a black slave. “He is not. He isn’t a slave! And he’s white, it’s just that you can’t see it!”

He proved it with his fists, on several juvenile noses. The boys changed their minds, too, when Uncle Henry became the hero of the great Pig Parade, an event so unusual that even the Common Council seeking the removal from the city streets of the unwholesome scavengers was impressed and consented to a temporary reprieve. The pigs were scrubbed in preparation for the gala march.

The back yards of Roosevelt Street echoed to the literal application of soap and brush upon the backs of swine! Then a bugle sounded.

And

from Captain Rolphe’s house stepped out a uni-

formed figure, trousers and coat of blue with brass buttons and a soldier’s cap, and flourishing a long baton with a round nickel top. Children with drums and fifes swarmed out of the bystreets. At a

signal from the uniformed general, the fife and drum corps tuned up and passed to the center of the street. The line of march formed, a boy astride each pig. And behind, another lad with sharpened pole poised for action. The procession started. To the accompaniment of martial tunes, a hundred

squealing hogs bore their youthful riders the length of Roosevelt Street. It was Uncle Henry’s triumph. And it had its effect on the Council, who allowed the pigs to remain. But there were other times, not gay, when Uncle Henry

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couldn’t be spoken to or coaxed out of his awful meditations. At those times Edmund’s heart beat high in his throat. The black man held long conversations with himself and an audience invisible to the rooted gaze of the boy, shaking his head and gesticulating, mumbling on and on in some unknown mad jargon. Sweat stood out on his brow, his loose-jointed frame quaked and his eyes rolled, the eyeballs fluttering witlessly, turned back till the iris disappeared from view; sending a freezing horror through the bones of the child. Appeals and questions shook out of him no response beyond a cataleptic murmur,

‘“Don’ bodder me, chile. Don’ tech me. I’se

confabulatin’ wid de Lawd!” One day after one of these mysterious and prolonged communions—a day Edmund never forgot—Uncle Henry appeared suddenly, looking for him. And he was wearing his high-crowned black hat. “Come on,”’ he said, and hustled Edmund into his jacket and

cap. They walked up Broadway, past the rows of three-storied brick buildings with shiny brass knockers and doorplates, past multitudes of fast-walking people, trotting horses, rolling stages. Edmund gazed in bewilderment and awe at the stately carriages, the negro coachmen in livery and footmen clad in green and gold. But it was not to look at these things that his companion had brought him out. The tall limber black man covered ground on his long legs, absorbed, forgetful of the child trudging doggedly at his side. They walked northward beyond the stores, the houses and the thronging people. They came to the limits of the city. And still the man’s mercilessly striding legs did not pause. To the boy’s gasped-out question he made no answer, beyond a mumbled hope that they would not be too late. At length, in the distance, he saw a great crowd of people. The negro slackened his pace. He stopped on the fringe of the crowd. Edmund saw his face

haggard and sad, his eyes flaring with wild sorrow and fanatical determination.

Presently he forgot the face, his interest transferred to the

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people around, men and women and children, nearly all of them munching popcorn or biting into pears dipped in honey. They all gazed in one direction. Edmund could not see over their heads. He slipped away from his companion, squirmed through the wilderness of legs and trunks. Before him was an open square in the center of which, on a raised platform, stood a wooden frame. A rope hung from the top beam. A hush fell on the crowd, like wind passing over water. A group of people appeared on the platform, Edmund counted six men. They were leading a woman. She was black, and she wore a dark hood over her eyes. A stifled murmur went up from the crowd as the woman knelt down. The men waited until she had finished praying and rose from her knees, then one of them tied the rope around her neck. . It happened so quickly, Edmund could hardly see. There was a loud thud. The woman swung clear of the platform. She kicked in the air a moment, and was still. He did not know why he waited, breathless—not until he heard the yells of the crowd did it become clear to him that the woman was dead. His eyes never lost the vision of her suddenly convulsed body dangling from the rope. A hand clutched his arm. Uncle Henry, too, was staring with awful eyes at the woman on the gallows. Heedless of the mob of stamping, yelling spectators from whose throats now issued streams of indecency and jibes directed at the object swinging on the gallows, he fell on his knees. His face turned up to the sky, he prayed in loud emotional tones for the soul of her ‘“‘who died on de cross!” Tears were streaming from his eyes when he stood up. He looked down at the shuddering boy, and pulled him away out of the crowd. “TI oughtn’t to a-taken you. What de captain goin’ say?” They walked back in silence. Edmund was afraid to speak.

But when they had gone half the distance he asked, ‘““Who was that woman?” The negro’s face softened, his voice grew tender and mourn-

ful, as he answered cryptically, “She was God’s little gal. Dat was a long time ago. Now she done sit in de chariot an’ ride ’cross de ribber to de Promised Land!” They never told Captain Rolphe. And not until much later

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was it clear to Edmund’s understanding that Sarah, the woman who was hanged that day at the Potter’s Field in Washington Square was Uncle Henry’s daughter.

3 New York was pushing northward. By 1832 the city’s population had climbed to 270,000, and its appearance had undergone a surprising transformation. Streets were being cut through and widened;

old houses demolished;

mansions erected for new

mil-

lionaires. Meanwhile there went forward a tremendous activity in draining, filling in, leveling and grading. The shore line along the river fronts was extended for the better accommodation of fast growing commerce.

Downtown along the main thoroughfares, Broadway and the Bowery, traffic problems were developing among the many stage lines that raced their impatient passengers on errands of business or social intercourse. Whereas in previous years everybody had walked to and from business, it being held to a man’s discredit if he “pampered himself with sixpenny rides in an omnibus,” merchants now began to display fast trotting horses and richly adorned carriages and chaises. But the strategies and ambitions of the mighty did not as yet touch the frugal household in Roosevelt Street. The large iron chest, mured in the deep closet of the captain’s bedroom, was half full of gold coins, the captain’s savings. It was opened once every month to receive the increase. Some day, the captain told himself,

he would have had enough of the Hudson and the paddle-wheels, and when that day arrived he would betake himself to a pleasant farm where he might watch the earth grow green with the abundance of his labor. It was the period of state banks when Andrew Jackson, having

put an end to the Federal institution by ordering the Secretary of the Treasury to withdraw the government deposits, was ‘‘breaking the money power.” With the blessing of that champion of

the people, private banks multiplied like the kine of Jacob. A flood of paper money swamped the country. Specie was scarce, but

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printers were kept hard at work anticipating the needs of speculators. “One bank, with a cash balance of $86.45, had issued over half a million in bills. In one year, applications to the New York Legislature for charters for banks, insurance companies and other enterprises, aggregated over $52,000,000. All that was necessary to get rich quickly seemed to be to start something—anything, so long as it had shares. All the time there were exposures of recklessness and dishonesty; banks were buying up insiders’ shares at high prices and presently failing. Dividends were paid out of capital; defalcations were hushed up, agents were peddling bills of a concern about to go under at a third discount, while they were nominally at a one and a half per cent discount.” Every new invention was made the occasion for a new and overwhelming supply of paper. The introduction of gas, of steam, the completion of the Erie Canal, the opening of new land—all became the playthings of share junketeers and money privateersmen, who had somehow acquired an uncanny intuition for ferreting out iron chests that secreted the savings of the common people. The first time Jonathan Peck called on Captain Rolphe, with interesting matters on his mind, the captain was not at home. Uncle Henry, in ceremonial attire of swallowtails and gleaming buttons, received him. With gravity befitting his stewardship, he invited the gentleman to come again. Edmund was pleased with the rich, evangelical roll of the man’s voice, and greatly struck with his elegant appearance. Mr. Peck wore a fine broadcloth coat with velvet collar, black vest with yellow stripes, and check trousers. His boots shone with a polish you could have seen your face in.

“Hello!” he said at the fourth visit, his words rolling out in unctuous bass chords. “You ain’t joshin’ me, Snowball. By the livin’ hokey, I'll wring your neck if you don’t tell me the truth.

None o’ your grinnin’ at me. This is business. I’ll be here tomorrer an’ I’m expectin’ to see the captain!”

He did see the captain. He came again on the following day. The day after that Bob the Wheeler joined them. They sat in the parlor, Bob asking a lot of questions. Then the iron chest was dragged out of hiding. Captain Rolphe fumbled

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with the lock. When he got it open he turned the chest bottomside up. A cascade of gold coins rattled out on the table. Bob and he counted them, arranging them in stacks. The countenance of Jonathan Peck glowed with an effulgence that seemed a reflection of the golden disks, as he swept them from the table into his leather pouch. And then, the light of glory in his face, almost as if he were a priest of God turning to his communicants with the pyx in his hand, he held out to the captain a large and beautifully printed scroll. The captain examined it with pride. Catching sight of the two wide-eyed children watching in the doorway, “I wouldn’t a-done it,” he explained, “if it weren’t for them! It’ll give ’em a start. The boy’ll be something more’n a river man.” “That certificate will be worth ten times what you paid for it,’ Jonathan Peck declared solemnly. “If it wa’n’t the fact you’re Captain Rolphe an’ know your Hudson River, I wouldn’t never a-come to you. Why, we'll be runnin’ a dozen steamboats up that river, an’ you'll be president o’ the company!” ; A smile of beautiful content glimmered on the captain’s thick features. Bob the Wheeler’s face wore an expression of heavenly peace. Jonathan Peck rose to go.

“Yer a capitalist now!” he said as he shook hands with Captain Rolphe. The iron chest was restored to its place, considerably lightened. The shares of the Steamboat Navigation Company rested within, a handsomely printed certificate on which the name of Captain Emory Rolphe appeared in large gold letters.

4 Edmund was growing. In physique and mentality he was more like his father than Jenny, who had the ill-health and the birdlike stature of the mother. It was Edmund who went places and saw things. He stood in the front line on Broadway to witness the mighty ovation with which New York greeted General Lafayette on his first visit to America since the Revolution. Immensely awed, he gazed at the stout, slightly limping gentleman who bowed ac-

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knowledgment to the plaudits of the throng lining both sides of the street. He never forgot the dignity and kindliness of his manners, or the gracious smile with which Lafayette replied to the Mayor’s greeting. When he got home he related it all to Jenny— how in the enthusiasm of the moment an elderly man standing in the crowd lifted the hat from his head and placed it in the gutter where Lafayette was to pass, and how Lafayette checked himself and would not step on the hat but begged the owner to resume it. Nine years old, he stood with his father in the celebration for the opening of the Erie Canal on November 5, 1825. They saw it

all from the deck of the steamboat that paddled out into the bay to join the hundreds of other craft, flag bedecked and crowded almost beyond capacity. They heard the booming of the twentyfour guns on the British sloop of war Kingfisher; the music borne across the water from the Battery where thousands of people watched the aquatic procession, headed by the boat carrying Goyernor Clinton and the high state and national officials. Then the great parade on land: the four buglemen on horseback followed by a band, the brilliant uniform of the grand marshal; the numberless societies and trades represented, each with its special banner. Captain Rolphe said it was the greatest parade ever staged in the streets of New York. Edmund had enjoyed himself thoroughly. He could not understand much of the discussion between his father and Bob the

Wheeler as they talked about good times coming to New York with the tapping of the West through the Erie Canal. He knew only that the parade was grand, the music exciting, people happy. People were always happy with parades and music and ovations! But in 1827 people were not happy. A weight of dead discouragement crushed down breasts that a short while before had swelled with such high hopes. Something had missed fire.

The man in the street could not understand why he lost his job, why money became scarce. He went to his bank to draw on his savings and was told that it had failed. He looked to his investments, his shares, his bonds, and discovered that they were worthless. For the first time in a good many years there was actual hunger

in New York. Captain Rolphe came home hurriedly one evening, unlocked

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his iron chest, took out the beautifully printed certificate and left again in haste. He did not return until nearly midnight, when he came in with Bob the Wheeler. And he was very drunk. It was an unusual thing for the captain. Bob the Wheeler could not be made drunk. Not if you inserted a hose down his gullet and filled him full of raw whisky till it ran out through his eyes. “Pil take it to the District Attorney!” the captain roared at the top of his lungs. Bob laughed. “And what will ’e do for ye? ’E’d ’ave to arrest arf the town if ’e went in for that. Ye wouldn’t even get an ’earing.” He paused. “Now if it was me,” he resumed in a puzzling tone, “I’d take the law in me own ’ands. It’s the only way.” A desperate year, 1827. Almshouses were filled to overflowing, soup kitchens sprang up on scores of street corners, homeless men, women and children swarmed in every section of the city. But to Edmund it was a boom year. It brought Elizabeth into his life. One fateful August afternoon the boat from Albany—heavily overloaded, reports said—met disaster when within three hours of its destination. Eyewitnesses described the thick black smoke

and flames belching from her single funnel as the steamboat chugged against the tide. Her paddles appeared to churn the water with sluggish and wearying effort. The cliffs along the shore echoed with the hammering of her engine. Passengers were crowded together on the deck, waving and hallooing from the rails. Suddenly there was a loud explosion. A cloud of steam, fire and smoke enveloped the boat. Panic broke out, cursing and screaming could be heard above the cries of children. The boat was sinking. Captain and crew worked in frantic haste to lower the lifeboats. They were too few. Emergency safeguards in those days were crude, unequal to catastrophes. Hysterical parents clutched their children and jumped into the river. Soon the area around

the visibly sinking boat was thrashed and churning with men and women struggling against the current. A mile away Captain Rolphe heard the explosion and saw the

column of smoke and steam ascending from the deck amidships.

e

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He ordered full speed ahead and soon came alongside the drifting wreck. A large number of persons who were unable to swim or could not hold out against the current had already drowned. Some were

drifting about, half conscious;

crying, cursing, calling on

God, stretching out failing hands. Two children, a girl and a boy, clung to floating wreckage, gazing with desperate, pleading eyes at the rescue craft approaching. They were taken on board, numb and exhausted, were given stimulants and allowed to rest. Later, in his quarters, Captain Rolphe put the story together. Three of them, the mother, sister and brother, had been on their

way to New York to seek the father, who had left home five years before. They had heard he was in the city and had left their farm in New England to look for him. Farm. The captain’s eyes brimmed with the old dreams. Why, thunder! What kind of a galoot was he to go off and leave a good farm? But dammit, he had to tell ’em. The woman

had drowned.

The girl’s eyes were gray sea-depths of sorrow. “You'll come to my house,” the captain said. “I got a boy and girl. Must be about your age. What name?” “Peck. Pm Elizabeth Peck. My brother’s name is Joshua.” Captain Rolphe sat up, his big face brick-red, the pupils of his eyes dilating like a cat’s. “T wonder . . . is your father’s name Jonathan?” “Tt is, sir,” the girl answered. “Would you be knowing him?” “Would I be knowing him!” His fist came down whacking on his knee. “If that don’t beat all!”

“Oh, would you be knowing him? Will you take us to him?” The captain shook his head, the dark brick color flowing down his neck. “Years ago, I knew a man by that name. I wouldn’t know where he is now.” Jonathan Peck could not be located in New York. Like the Dutchman’s flea he skipped and flitted along an ever lengthening trail of abandoned addresses, always a jump ahead of his pursuers.

But though seemingly invisible, he had a wide reputation. Bitten landladies lifted their eyebrows at mention of his name, hostelries

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exhibited bills the absconding gentleman had overlooked in the haste and secrecy of his movements. Jonathan was gone. Gone, and the office of the Steamboat Navigation Company was vacant. The white letters on the windowpane were all that remained to tell of that vaunted enterprise. Captain Rolphe resigned himself to the inevitable. His jovial laugh sounded a bit forced at times, but he never referred to the damnable trimming he had suffered. Uncle Henry cultivated the little patch of garden at the back of the house, and Elizabeth took over the kitchen. It was she, too, who insisted on sending the three younger children to the free school. Every morning thereafter Uncle Henry hitched the horse to the cart and gathered in a load of Roosevelt Street youngsters, bound for the new school that was going to educate the young hopefuls to be loyal Americans. Elizabeth was two years older than Edmund, Joshua a year younger. Jenny was the youngest. Yet it was the dainty, prettily pouting Jenny who ruled the household. Like the rest of New York, Roosevelt Street buzzed with ex-

citement on the day when gas replaced the old oil lamps. But Uncle Henry was disgusted when the first sackful of coal was delivered. ‘Yo’ all sho gwine to be eatin’? smoke wid yo’ bacon an’ *taters,” he complained. ‘“‘Ain’t no sense in it, noways. Ain’t nuthin’

like a old-time log fire, cold mornin’s an’ nights, to keep you warm!”

And how the captain did laugh, on his front porch one August afternoon, watching the cartmen shoo the hogs out the roadway and hoist them into the waiting vehicles. The had spoken; the pigs must go. Holding tight to his sow, Uncle Henry pleaded with

hot into law the

officials, men of no compassion. “Ah sho gwine had de law on yo ! he called out as they drove 9999

off, the sow squealing. The men thumbed their noses at him. “The law’s with us, fella,” they shouted back.

“Pig law!” One evening at dusk in the late spring of 1832, Edmund and Joshua were down by the shore, their fishing lines thrown far out

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in the water. In the kitchen the girls were tidying up after supper. Uncle Henry, in the yard, was stooping down to examine the early sprouts of beets and onions and potatoes. In the intervals of his inspection he spoke aloud, apostrophizing the vegetables, as though addressing some animistic spirit of fertility dwelling in the earth’s dark rind. “Be fruitful an’ multiply! Da’ what de Lawd done said. I giben you de sweat o’ my brow. Come out de darkness into de light so de sun can kiss you an’ gibe you life!” He spoke in a singsong tone, half chanted. Every now and then the mumbled psalmody was interrupted by gleeful laughter. It was his ritual, he was propitiating the spirits of the harvest. In the front part of the house the captain was engaged in another kind of secret mummery. He crept up to the girls’ room on the second floor, laid a mysterious-looking package on Elizabeth’s bed, paused a moment and stole down the stairs again. Then going into the parlor and pretending he had only just come in, he shouted out an ordinary greeting that resounded in the back of the house. Two voices answered from the kitchen belowstairs. Jenny ran in and kissed her father. Elizabeth, smiling and tender-eyed, looked very grown up as she came forward. She was nearly as tall as Edmund now. They looked well together, she and Edmund, strolling in the evenings down Broadway on the shilling side of the street. The shilling side was the west edge of the promenade, reserved for the lowlier folk, whence they might gaze respectfully across at the great folks parading in their finery. Edmund grumbled, and always wanted to cross over to the dollar side. ‘““We’re as good as they are! Even if their clothes are better.”’ But Elizabeth refused, out of shyness, saying, ““We belong here. And anyhow, I like it better.”

“The boys’ll be home soon,” said the captain, speaking in a voice of authority. “Better go up and change, so we can walk down to the Park.” He sat down and took up his newspaper. Fifteen minutes or

so went by. A light step tapped on the stairs. The captain looked up without having read a line of his paper and burst into exclamations, all his pleasure rolling out in his voice.

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“Well, upon my soul! What’s this? Who’s this grown-up lady we've got here?” Elizabeth stood still, holding herself stiff as a doll, the better

for him to see and admire the wonders of her costume. In her right hand, holding it by the top of the handle, she carried a bright parasol that exactly matched the rose plumes of her bonnet. The fingers of the other hand wound loosely about the long lace gloves she presently would slip over her graceful hands. And most bewitching of all—modest adornment toward which the eyes of gentlemen strollers would be straying, with familiar yearnings— the starched pantalettes with pink bows, peeking a good six inches below the edge of the rose-flowered crinoline. Her figure posed in the doorway for the captain’s admiration. The happiness she derived from the wonderful new clothes glowed in her heightened coloring, in the luminous depths of her eyes. Looking at her, Captain Rolphe felt delighted even beyond his expectations, and greatly pleased with himself. At his exclamation, shouted in hearty tones, the memory of all his kindness to her and her brother overcame her. Her queer frostbitten self-consciousness, like a flower coated with ice, momentarily

fell away. She ran to him and flung her arms around his neck, her tears dropping to make a spot on his shirt front. “Well,

I declare now,”

exclaimed

the captain,

abashed

and

taken by surprise. ““The young fellow that gets you, my dear, ’Il be in luck. He’d better mind his oats. Let me hear of his not handin’ you a square deal—P’ll break his confounded neck!” Elizabeth and Edmund walked on the dollar side of Broadway that evening.

5 Edmund woke to the sound of voices. Listening drowsily, he made out his father’s and another that he knew. He could not hear what they were saying. He did not know what impulse of curiosity moved him, or what fear; he sensed only

that it was singular. Carefully, to make no noise, he slipped out of bed and crept close to the stairhead in the hall. He heard a subdued crying. And his father’s voice was gentle. “Hush now. Child, say no more of such notions! Your home

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is in this house. Why, if you put it that way—the river owed me something. And it paid me—you.” They stood up, saying good night, and he heard no more. He crawled miserably back to his bed. Stretched between the sheets, his adolescent mind swarmed with impossible fancies. He did not really believe in this thing, this fabrication concocted out of his jealousy. Still, he swore to himself it was true, or it was going to be, his imagination licking and hugging the abominable thought in his witless fury. No gesture or syllable of love had ever passed between him and Elizabeth. He did not dare let her know about the flood of his feeling. Now it struck him with black and damning suspicion —his father had not plunged after his mother that long gone day when she drowned herself in the river. He had not thought of it before. But now the thought entered his mind with a conviction it did not occur to him to question. His father had not leaped after his mother, he had not tried to save her! He had not realized,

when quaking with terror at his mother’s death in the river, that men held back his father from jumping in after her, saying, “ ’Tis an easier death. Let her be.” Now he seized on this piece of evidence of his father’s guilt. “Oh, yes,” he told himself. ““Oh, yes!’’ His loud exclamation awakened Joshua, who shared the bed with him.

He moved as far over on the other side of the bed as he could get. Not to be near Joshua. Above all, not to touch him. At dawn Captain Rolphe was aboard his vessel, preparing for the run to Albany. And Edmund stood at the point of Battery

Park, gazing out into the bay whose shimmering surface already was churned by paddle wheels and furrowed by flying keels. His eyes followed the tall masted schooners heading for the Narrows, bound for distant points. Roosevelt Street, New York, America seemed too small. Out there was the wide, free ocean. And beyond that more land, whole

continents. He told himself he would find a berth and see the world. He turned toward home, resolved to pack his things and

inform them of—oh, how would

she take it—his intended de-

parture. Edmund’s route took him past the Darby and Joan. He had

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never seen the other side of the swinging doors. His father had counseled him to avoid the place. But to go in now, at this moment, seemed the proper and fitting thing to do. Hell! Who was the old man to tell him? Confident in his manhood, in the arrogant maturity that had come on him since last night, he flung open the doors and stalked in.

Bob the Wheeler was standing near the door, his shirt sleeves rolled above the elbows. He looked at Edmund with his canny eye, in which was neither malice nor humane sentiment. Simply not caring.

Edmund went on past the jumble of tables and stood at the bar. Bob walked around behind the counter, easy and without haste. He made one disinterested attempt to dissuade the boy from drinking. Then he handed over the flask of gin and watched him fill his glass. He grinned. “Want to get drunk? Go to it, son.” Around noon Bob led him home, reeling. Jenny came to the door. Her small, animated brown eyes flashed fury at the impassive visage of the barkeeper, as she put out a tiny hand to steady the faltering steps of her stupefied brother. Elizabeth ran to arrange his bed. Joshua looked on, scorn in his eyes, while Bob and Jenny pulled and lugged at the heavy swaying figure to get him upstairs. His eyes would not focus, but through the painful dislocations behind his bloodshot stare he recognized Elizabeth, tense and grieved, standing at the foot of the bed. Jerking away, he went up to her, caught hold of her arm, and with lewd fingers caressed her cheek. He laughed, a loud, insulting,

lunatic laugh that would not be hushed until he had spewed out words of insult, shouting in her face, “He fetched you out of the river—a river girl, that’s what you are!” All through that day and into the next morning, he slept.

When he awoke Elizabeth was bending over him, speaking, trying to penetrate his drunken stupor. He rubbed his heavylidded eyes, looking up at her, the perception of time gone from his consciousness. What was she doing in his room anyhow? Anger rose against her while his sodden brain floundered, struggling out of the turgid undertow of sleep. And then he heard her say, in a cold, accusing tone, ““You’re drunk. And he’s dead.”

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“Dead! Who?” “Your father is dead,” she repeated in the same cold, hostile

voice. “The boiler blew up. There’s a man downstairs . . .” Without so much as a glance at her, he jumped off the bed and rushed downstairs. The sailor at the door was talking to Jenny and Uncle Henry, gesticulating violently. Jenny was weeping. Edmund clutched the sailor by the arm and dragged him through the door. Together they ran down the street toward the water front. No one could account for it, Captain Rolphe’s sudden mania for speed. Up and down the river he had been regarded as the safest skipper on the Hudson. “Well, sir,” one old seaman remarked, standing in the throng on the docks, “I been around some an’ don’t need no eyeglasses to show me a fool. I can see ’em all right with the glims God Almighty give me, if they’s one a mile off. This beats me! The last feller I'd a-thought ever would a turned such a caper as that.” They said he had kept coming down on the engineer to give her more and more. The bridge was directly over the boiler. When the explosion came the captain was hurled into the air. He had fallen back on the deck, dead before they reached him. The engineer and his helper, with three more of the crew, had been blown to glory. The bodies of the six men were laid on mattresses on the pier head, and covered with sailcloth. People fell back to let Edmund through. He knelt down on the bare planking, and lifting the canvas, took hold of his father’s hand.

A scalding grief was in his heart. His impulse was to humble himself. He wanted to cry out and ask pardon of the corpse. “I was mistaken. Forgive me!” But even as he stretched out his hand

he heard in his memory the cold, admonishing voice of Elizabeth. “You’re drunk!” And he despised her for the insulting words he had flung at her the day before, in his drunkenness. Untouchable, inhuman, in her cold, white, pentecostal purity. Damn her!

His rebellion mounted. Though he knew it was folly, his stubbornness would not yield. In another part of his being he continued to stir hatred against his father, working himself into belief in his dead father’s: secret intentions toward Elizabeth.

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He clenched his teeth on his emotion. And in silence, grimly, he walked away.

6 The Roosevelt Street house itself seemed to have slipped its moorings. There was a feeling of division among the individuals. They did not communicate with each other. They were adrift. Jenny, pale and full of tears, prayed for the repose in heaven of the souls of her parents. Elizabeth often wept, and went about making beds and filling pans and dishes with things to be eaten, with the listless, stargazing air of one for whom common tasks have no meaning. Uncle Henry got no rest at all, so continual were the voices and powers with whom he held spiritualistic converse. Joshua, bored and glum, spent the greater part of each day idling in the captain’s armchair. Edmund sat long hours in his father’s room, sorting over papers taken from the iron chest and reading the letters written by his mother—letters telling of the love and devotion she bore the man with whom she had united her life. He carefully counted the gold and silver pieces that were his only inheritance, other than the roof over their heads. One hundred dollars. No miracle of eye or finger could make it more. He spent every morning delving and rummaging in the chest. Every afternoon, late, he would descend the stairs with heavy step and without a word, without a look or a sign to Jenny or to

any of them below he would leave the house and walk slowly toward Broadway and down to Battery Park. Then he would stand more hours by the sea wall, peering into the darkness that hung over the water. Unaware of the torch-flares that gave the Park the appearance of a campground, heedless of the importunities of vendors and the chatter of promenaders, he strained his eyes toward the unseen shores beyond. At midnight he returned and crept noiselessly to his room. And then he would lie on his back— motionless, staring, thinking. His room alone now. Joshua slept in the captain’s bed. Jenny, spoiled by her father, was disconsolate and mourned the loss of his petting. And she fretted at Edmund’s failure: to notice and console her broken heart. Joshua was a more satisfactory

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mourner. He took her out a great deal to places of amusement along Broadway. She found herself comforted. But Elizabeth could find no distraction from the miserable,

anxious thoughts that troubled her. She argued with herself, that Edmund was stunned by the shock of his father’s death. But secretly she suffered from the misunderstanding that lay heavy between

them. She asked herself, ““What have I done? Or said?”

And she asked Uncle Henry. “Yo’ ain’ had words wid him?” The old negro’s weak eyes were focused on her in a piercing scrutiny. She did not answer. She put her hand up to her cheek, feeling the spot where Edmund’s drunken fingers had caressed her in mockery and shame; it burned hot against her palm. In the pain of her grief and humiliation, she comforted herself with lacerations. She told herself he no longer wanted her in the house. He would be glad to be rid of them both. As though in that way he could be reached, wounded through her wound that was selfinflicted. Edmund had never seriously considered the choice of a career. But now he knew that he must do something—the meager inheritance would not long maintain himself and the four persons dependent on him. Surely, he told himself, as he walked home on the tenth night

after the death of his father, somewhere there must be an opportunity for him. He would cut out the emotional business, get down to brass tacks. Bob the Wheeler was a good one to pick up information about jobs. Edmund decided to drop in at the Darby and Joan.

It was almost closing time when he walked into the tavern. The place was dim. A single lamp burned in a far corner. Two men were sitting at a table. In the gloom he did not recognize them. Talkin’ of angels!” exclaimed Bob the Wheeler. And the

other mumbled, “Lord A’mighty!” Both men stared at Edmund in silence. Bob spoke first. “Looks like a full house. Shall we open the meetin’ with prayer or a slicker 0’ rum?” He laughed, a thick croaking laugh. “T’se been talkin’ to Mr. Bob,” Uncle Henry said, hesitating.

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His voice was weak, and he looked frightened. “It’s about Lize— she wants to leave.” Edmund sat down heavily. His hand reached out for the glass Bob had placed on the table. He drained it at a gulp. “It’s all right with me,” he said evenly. Bob watched him out of narrowed eyes. He leaned back in his chair, a smile on his face. “Want ’er to go, Ed?”

“Tt’s all right with me,” Edmund repeated. Bob winked and spoke soothingly.

“Seems she wants to go. An’ ’e’s satisfied. Guess there ain’t nothin’ else to talk about.” Edmund sat silent. “Guess T’'ll lock up,” Bob said out of a yawn. Edmund scraped back his chair and stood up. Uncle Henry rose, too. He came over and stood next to Edmund, his prominent Adam’s apple moving up and down in a swallowing way. ““Yo’ ain’ had words wid her, is you?” He added after a pause,

“She'll stay iffen yo’ ax her.” Edmund turned away, scowling. His hand was on the door, drawing it back to pass out, when

a man’s figure appeared in front of him, blocking the way. Startled, he stepped back a pace. A ragged apparition rose up in the darkness, feverish-eyed, chest heaving, as if the man had been running furiously.. ““Where’s Bob?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. Bob had come up behind Edmund and stood with his neck thrust out, peering beyond Edmund’s big shoulders. “You!” he exclaimed as he got a view of the face in shadow. “Holy Jeez!”

Shoving Edmund aside, he put himself in front. The man caught hold of Bob’s arm and pulled him outside. Presently he returned without the stranger. His manner was suddenly full of stealthy cunning, and he advanced into the room, stepping carefully, setting his feet down precisely, without sound. His mouth was drawn down on one side, and he spoke out of the

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“It’s two blokes from the marble works up the river. I gotta find a hideout for ’em.” He stared at Edmund

thoughtfully. “Your cellar,” he said,

“just for a day or two. Then I’ll move ’em.” He added, reading Edmund’s face, “They ain’t done nothin’ to make a fuss about. One o’ them errors 0’ justice!” Edmund met Bob’s eyes, doubting. “They ain’t dangerous,” Bob said. “Friends 0’ mine, see? I tell you—they ’ad a raw deal.” “Let’s go,” Edmund said, feeling the man’s will on him. “I suppose it’s all right.” He did not want to be mixed up in anything, but he felt unable to think or act for himself. His mind was sunk in a painful lassitude, all his recent assurance unaccountably gone from him, he felt now that he did not care much what happened. His heart was full of a dull, dry bitterness. “Sure, it’s all right!” he heard Bob the Wheeler say. Uncle Henry walked after them, disapproving. “You better mind. Boy, you don’ know what you gettin’ into!” Outside they were joined by two figures, hunched up in the shadow against the wall. The collars of their long coats were turned up, their hats pulled down. And their faces were not visible. The house was in darkness. Edmund opened the front door. The five men stepped in. “Guess it’s safe to light up,” the man who had made the arrangements with Bob the Wheeler said. “Just so we can see each other. Joe here—” he laughed—‘“‘you might wanna see his face!” “Maybe they won’t like my face,” Joe said in a whisper.

Uncle Henry went for a candle. In a few minutes he came back, holding it high over his head to throw the light farther. As he drew nearer to the two fugitives, he uttered an exclama-

tion. He lowered the candle and held it close against their faces. Bob’s eyes went suddenly hard. Edmund

looked into the nervous countenance

of Jonathan

Peck. “So, that’s it!” Bob exclaimed, jerking around and confront-

ing the man called Jerry, his eyes baleful. “Ye double-crossed me!”

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“I swear to God!” the man cried, defending himself. ““He only just told me, on the way over here.” ‘Where did ye pick ’im up?” Bob asked, ignoring the other’s explanation. “What the hell do ye think I’m gonna do with ’im? Put ’im in a Santa Claus stockin’?” Jonathan Peck groveled. “Don’t give me up,” he pleaded, his dirty red melon face uplifted. “Just don’t give me up! I’ll go back home an’ settle down!”

“That'd be a regular treat for the folks, wouldn’t it?” Bob said. “Like hell!” Jonathan Peck continued his repulsive entreaties. Only one thing was clear in Edmund’s mind. Elizabeth must not know. “He can’t stay here,” he said, raising his voice and moving out into the room. “I won’t have him in the house. He robbed my father!” He stopped abruptly, hearing a sound in the hall. Elizabeth was standing in the doorway, a light-colored dressing gown thrown around her shoulders. She looked with questioning eyes at the strange men. “I heard you talking . . .” She turned to Edmund. “Is anything the matter? Who are these men?” He answered quickly, ‘Friends of my father’s. They’ve come a long way. I thought they could stay here tonight. They’ll be leaving early—before breakfast.” He drew her out into the hall while he was speaking, edging toward the stairs. “I heard you saying something about your father.” Edmund did not know why, but her words provoked in him sudden, intolerable rage. He burst out, “You and my father . . .!” But he said no more. The words born of his anger bubbled back in his throat. From behind him came an explosion of dirty laughter, mingled with speech. “So, Mr. Jonathan Peck—a daughter you’d make of her—by Jesus, that’s a good one!” And Bob’s voice, muffling fury, “Keep quiet, you fool!”

( BEDAGUN DER ODRHE—CYNIC

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Too stunned to feel any emotion, Edmund could only follow her with his eyes as she went down the hall toward the front room. He slunk after her on fainting legs, as far as the door. She approached the blubbering Jonathan and stood over him. Edmund could not see her face. But in the stiffening of her figure which seemed to become taller, he discerned her pride rallying, the ice creeping over her. Peck made a move to eels up to his feet. She checked him with a motion of her hand, saying in a freezing, forbidding voice, “Don’t. Don’t come any nearer. I had to be sure. You are Jonathan Peck. My father.” “Elizabeth! Elizabeth—my own daughter!” Jonathan stretched out his hands in supplication loathsome beyond words. Without speaking she turned from him. And Edmund knew in that flicker of her eyes as they met his own how deeply she despised him for the charity she had received in his house, and for the shame of her father’s dishonor.

Her glance moved past him. With a look of that pain which feeds on itself, a kind of rapture in martyrdom, she bowed her head and passed out of the room. And his heart gave a violent

shudder. As soon as she had gone, Jonathan Peck regained his poise. “T knew her the moment J set eyes on her!” he cried, bounding up, a light of satisfied paternity beaming in his countenance. *Couldn’t mistake it. So like her dear mother. But, say—” He broke off, fear and cunning creeping into his manner. “Is she here, too?”

It was Bob the Wheeler who told him what had happened. All the next day Elizabeth held herself at a distance, and Edmund felt that she was avoiding him deliberately. She did not come to meals. She gave him no opportunity to speak. Jenny was in a showery state of tears most of the time. Joshua was disgusted with her wet red nose and showed it by constantly saying ill-tempered, cutting things which, far from stopping the drizzle, invariable

brought on another deluge. On the second evening, Jonathan Peck had a conversation in

private with the daughter so remarkably, if not quite happily, restored to his bosom. Until then Elizabeth had not approached or

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noticed him. No one ever knew by what magic of personality or persuasions to filial duty Jonathan had healed the rift. But that evening Elizabeth came looking for Edmund. “T’m going with Father. He needs me.” They sat facing each other across the small table in the parlor. The house was deathly quiet. A pale, bluish, softly hissing gas flame cast a ghostly nimbus of light over them. She avoided his eyes. Her own glistened with tears that fell softly. The moment had come. But he could not utter the desire of his heart. He could find no words to beg her not to leave him. She had no words to tell him that she longed to stay. The little blue flame hissed and sputtered. “Let’s say good-by now,” she said. “It will be easier.”’ They stood up. He moved deliberately around the table and, putting his hands on her shoulders, kissed her on the mouth. An instant, his mouth on hers. Then they shrank apart, selfconscious, afraid of each other.

“You’re only a boy, Edmund,” she said, remembering the two years’ difference in their ages. “But . . . but T’ll be hearing about you. I'll be proud.” “Obyt,.../ whessaidss Well... es00d-by Yes, good-bye. Only a boy... .

ve Next morning Edmund breakfasted with Jenny and Joshua. Elizabeth was with her father. He did not see her when he left the house at the usual time, to hunt for a job. When he returned after dark Jenny was alone, curled in the captain’s armchair.

“They’re gone!” she wailed. “Mr. Wheeler came and took ’em away. Joshua didn’t want to go, but . . . but they made him.” “Well, brace up,” Edmund said, patting her on the head. “Now you're the lady of the house. And I’m the man. I got myself a job today in the shipyards.” Bob the Wheeler wouldn’t answer any questions. “Less said the better,” was all that could be got out of him on the subject of where Jonathan had taken his family. To that piece of information he added just one comment, about as instructive

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as the comfort offered Job, “The gal turned ye down for ’er worthless father. She ain’t worth worryin’ about!” It needed no great insight for Edmund to see that Jenny was mourning the lost Joshua. He wanted to be nice to her. So one evening, two or three days later, he bounded into the house, waving two yellow pasteboards. Tickets to the Old Bowery Theatre.

“We're going to the theater!” Jenny put on her white satin dress. The theater was jammed. Jenny held tight to Edmund’s arm

as they were borne through the doors, Their seats were in the gallery. * Neither of them had ever seen such and swashing about in the huge pit, an chanking, tobacco-chewing crowd. The

breathless and battered. a host of people, swaying orange-sucking, peanuthouse rattled with the

storm of yells, shouts and catcalls. Pushed from behind, the crowd

was driven close up against the stage. Some of them stood with their noses pressing the footlights, their active mouths squirting tobacco juice on the bottom of the curtain. There was a sudden lull at the sound of the orchestra. Then, once more, the uproar began,

drowning the music and disturbing the actors, and continuing through most of the performance. When the curtain fell Edmund tried to protect Jenny from the crush in leaving the theater. All around them men and boys jostled and heaved and swore . . . “Keep movin’, be the hully Betwstlc. 8... J1ang.0n; cil. .'.1. ,ot jt, Dill §. Got. oft my toes, damn yer soul... .” Edmund laid about him, clearing the way. One young man of slender, wiry build, refused to give ground. He turned and stared insolently at Edmund, then bent his head to peer up in Jenny’s face. “What’s your hurry?” he said. “The night’s young.” Edmund shot out his right arm and landed a blow between the young fellow’s eyes. He dropped, stunned. In the stampede he would have been trampled had not Edmund managed to get him up. He lugged him outside, bundled like a loose sack under one arm. In the fresh air, he revived.

He swayed on the sidewalk, steadying himself against Ed-

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mund, saying with a limp smile, as he caught sight of Jenny, “My apology to the lady.” He bowed ceremoniously. The glare of the flaring torchlights showed a red mark on his forehead, gradually turning purple. “Does it hurt much?” Jenny asked. He had a humorous smile that gave his finely cut features an expression of boyish animation, passing swiftly from gravity to mirth. He seemed to be in his early twenties. “Tt was well deserved,” he said gravely, his eyes on Jenny. He held out his hand to Edmund. “My name’s Richard Kerrian. Dick to my friends. I’m deeply sorry; I’m very much to blame for my conduct to the lady.” Edmund shook hands. “Rolphe’s the name—Edmund Rolphe. And this is my sister, Jenny.” Jenny curtsied. And Kerrian bowed again.

“Sister Jenny,” he said, smiling, “I’d risk another of Rolphe’s anvil thumps to be certain of your notice!” Edmund laughed. “Another of my thumps, and you won’t be certain of anything.” Kerrian strolled with them up the Bowery toward Canal Street. He talked with a lively and entertaining humor. He was surprised to hear this was their first time at the Bowery Theatre. He went a great deal to the theater, he said, to educate himself. “TI come here to see life. It’s the audience that really interests me. For the purer art, I go to the Park. I’m aiming to write a play about a Bowery audience for the Park stage. To teach the high something about the low. They’re too far apart. Hardly know each other. It speaks ill for the country!” Dick talked incessantly. About New York. America. And himself. “Tm a scribbler. I write for the Express. I write about the things I see.” He laughed. “But I see lots of things I don’t write. They’re more interesting!” When they reached home, he stopped at the door. Laughing, he said good night. “It was good of you to pounce on me,” he added, “I'll come

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back for more—that is, if sister Jenny won’t take it unkindly.” Sister Jenny gave him her hand, then ran swiftly into the house. Edmund liked Dick Kerrian. Thereafter he was a great deal at their house. To the horror of Uncle Henry, Dick appeared one evening with a paper sack containing tomatoes, which he announced he had brought as a special garniture for supper. Nobody ate tomatoes. Uncle Henry was sure they were poison. But before them all, Dick proceeded to eat one, without ill effects. “They’ve got a name that makes ’em popular,” he said with a wink, as he handed one to Jenny. “Love apples!” Jenny courageously bit into it, blushing almost as red as the

tomato. Dick was an enthusiastic young New Yorker, keen about his work. His assignments took him into all sorts of places. And he got a great thrill out of viewing the backstage life of the city, which he declared was the meeting place of all nations, the mirror of all America. “Our latest census,” he announced with pride, “gives us a population of 205,589. We'll have half a million before the turn of the century. It’s a fact and it’s been proved—we’re the fastest growing, the wealthiest and speediest and biggest country on earth!” | Edmund, too, felt proud to be united actively with an expanding America. He was working now on one of the big ships, first of a new line of packets, the Sea Gull. Four hundred tons. But her size was not the main thing, so the company’s agent said. Speed. “There’ll be no reefing or furling,” said the captain who ex-

pected to sail her. “No taking in her canvas till she makes port across the pond!” “What a magnificent figure!” Dick Kerrian remarked one afternoon to Jenny, when they were standing in the commotion of the shipyards watching the half-clad, bronzed, perspiring Edmund towering in the gang of dock workers. ““A Jove among his thunderbolts!” Dick thought Edmund ought to study. “You'll get enough of swinging that hammer. Be a big man,

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build your own ships, why not? Better be improving your mind

while you work your muscles.” Edmund stayed at home after that and studied in the evenings, when Dick took Jenny to the theater. He was just turned eighteen when he became a member of the Twenty-third Engine Company. That, also, on Dick’s advice. “Nobody is anybody in this town—if you don’t own a red shirt and a leather hat.” So Edmund joined, to be somebody. He took his duties seriously. Henceforth when the deep, somber notes of the City Hall bell sounded the call, the spectacle of the gooseneck fire engine dragged through the streets by a score of bawling men was no longer just entertainment. He was generally the first at the fire-house, always at the head of the line pulling valiantly with his fellows as they sped toward the distant blaze. The membership of the Twenty-third was composed of social swells, recruited from the best families, bankers’ sons and heirs to great wealth. At first they looked askance at Edmund, with the scorn of their caste. But Dick’s friendship helped. And presently

his strength was noticed; it talked, in the exploits of the company at fires. The Twenty-third was no longer washed; the lowlier and brawnier companies from the “wards” now had a higher regard for the silk-stockinged aristocrats. Edmund’s astonishment was great when he learned that Dick

Kerrian’s father was head of the corporation building and intending to operate the new line of packets. He had not known even the name of his employer. Old man

Kerrian, he was

told, was

a moneylender, a bill

shaver, and a large owner of property. Edmund was still more surprised, one day, when he was summoned to Mr. Kerrian’s Wall Street office. He was to present him-

self before the big boss immediately after work hours. He had never been inside a Wall Street office. For an establishment that dealt with such large ventures, the meanness of the furnishings in Mr. Kerrian’s place of business was altogether surprising. He had expected palatial splendor. Instead, in the outer room the clerks sat on high stools in front of plain pine tables. And they worked late, it seemed. The whole atmosphere of the

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place was bleak and uncomfortable. A small room to the rear was the sanctum of the chief. Edmund was taken into Mr. Kerrian’s private office. The clerk announced him and departed unobtrusively, backing out and closing the door after him. A desk covered with papers and a single extra chair for important visitors completed the furnishings. Edmund stood, cap in hand, waiting for Mr. Kerrian to speak. The older man looked up, finally. A pair of chilly blue eyes, small and curiously tight in the cadaverous face, met Edmund’s in a stare of astute reckoning. There was no friendliness in the wrinkled countenance. And no resemblance to Dick, except in the sharp jutting chin. Mr. Kerrian’s voice was no warmer than his eyes. “You're

a nail driver down

there on the docks,” he said.

“A purty good one. I’ve watched you. A little better than the rest of them. ’m wondering if yer head’s as strong as yer arm.” He paused. Edmund remained silent. “Well, I’m going to promote you,” Mr. Kerrian said next. “The work down there is too slow. Our fleet must be got ready by spring. I’m taking you from driving nails and putting you to driving men. You'll be the new foreman. D’you think you'll do?” Edmund hesitated, scarcely knowing what answer to make. “Of course,’ Mr. Kerrian added, sensing his hesitation, “there'll be a raise. I'll raise your pay.” “T’ll do my best, sir,” Edmund replied modestly. “*That’s all.”? Mr. Kerrian ended the interview abruptly. “The overseer’s got his orders. Report to him tomorrow.” Edmund walked home on air. His mind swarmed with heroworshiping thoughts of Mr. Kerrian’s genius in affairs, and his own future brilliant achievements. Jenny found it delightfully thrilling to be the sister of a new captain of industry.

“Tt won’t be long, I think. Only you'll be so much younger when it happens than Mr. Kerrian, that’s the nicest part!”

But that evening on their walk down to the Battery she was wistful, unusually quiet. Edmund noticed it, especially as they

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stood in the bright glare flooding the park from the lights of Castle Garden. “Something troubling your little heart?” She answered with eyes primly lowered. “Oh, nothing, Edmund. I’m very happy about you. Only now you’re making more money, I thought—maybe

I—oh, dear,

I should think I might do something, too! I’m so tired of being with just Uncle Henry all day!” “Do something?” he echoed, amazed. “J want to be a dancer—Dick says I ought. He took me to Monsieur Charrand’s Terpsichorean on White Street. And Monsieur agreed with him.” She made her voice full of coaxing appeal.

“Oh, Edmund, don’t you think I could?” “A dancer! Like those girls in the Bowery?” She laughed, looking coyly up in his face. “Of course not. I’ll be an artist like Madame Celeste at the Park Theatre!” He hadn’t yet got over the shock of it. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe, if Dick says so. I guess so. But it don’t seem right to me, somehow.” “Oh, yes, it is, Edmund. Really! Dick thinks so.”

She gave his arm an appealing little squeeze.

8 Edmund was a man of responsibility now. On his direction depended accuracy of workmanship, and speed in performance. On the first day of his advancement the keel of a new ship was laid. She was to be a sister ship to the Sea Gull.

“Three months is the limit,” Daniel Kerrian growled to his overseer, with a glance also at his new foreman. “Three months! You'll do it or answer to me. Drive yer men. There’ll be no loafing on this job.” His heavy cane resounded on the planking in grim confirmation of his words. “Well, young un,” the overseer said solemnly, shoving his hand out to Edmund, “you an’ me’s in a goose trap. He’ll not take no fer an answer.” Snow, sleet, rain, biting cold and dripping thaws—nothing

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put a stop to the clang and fury out of which the new ship took form, a sleek, tall-masted

skimmer

of the sea. Daniel Kerrian’s

imperial eye measured each day’s progress. The thick cane thumped the solid timbers of the hull. “Rather the ship than me!” Edmund thought, watching from a distance. Some of the men swore positively that there was a sword inside that sturdy cane. They said the thing was hollow, specially constructed as a hint to keep busy that worked like a charm. The Old Man never budged without it. Edmund could get used to himself as a slave-driver. Pride in the accomplishment helped to take off the curse. Meanwhile it was rumored things were not so rosy with the Old Man lately. Nothing definite. Only the vaguest of rumors. Edmund watched developments in the metropolitan area with the gratifying feeling that he himself was, in some way, standing back of them, taking part. He was one of the interested spectators who witnessed the first run of the steam locomotive over the Harlem Railroad that ran down as far as Fourteenth Street. He had spent one entire Sunday riding by stage up the east shore of the Hudson

River, to see for himself the much

discussed steam

train of the Mohawk and Hudson that was said to have attained the astonishing and fearful speed of twenty miles an hour. On the subject of steam locomotion he developed eloquence. Steam trains were a subject of constant and heated debate among the members of the Twenty-third Fire Company, when they met for social discourse. Norton Saunders, trained in conservatism of

the law, was against them. “Cinder-throwing, flame-belching, oil-smelling, space annihilating monsters!” he called them in the prolific vocabulary of his occupation. He thought the old-fashioned mode of five or six miles an hour, in one’s own horse and carriage, would remain long

after this newfangled notion had run its course.

“Look what it’s doing to our better element!” he cried, rising to his full height of five feet one inch; his small, keen eyes flashing disgust. ““My sister Geraldine took passage on one of the confounded contraptions several weeks ago, from Boston to Providence. Not only were holes burnt in her cape, but she was obliged to sit the entire journey between two villainous-looking fellows

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who smelt of salt fish, tar and molasses! Fifty or sixty tobaccochewers were in the car. And a dozen factory girls—all sucking lemons and eating green apples. The steam train’ll make it impossible for decent people to travel!” “Well,” said Dick Kerrian, “decent people can stay home then. Or fly. There’s that new invention of an Italian—Signor Giacomo Novella. There’s a machine’ll take you up above the common people! Decent people will be able to fly in the pure air high above the earth.” “Fly! How impossible! Nature never intended man to fly. Else he’d have been born with wings.” “I guess nature never intended man to wear clothes or shave, or he’d have been born with a razor in one hand and a pair of pants in the other.”

“It’s the ease of travel that will make this country great,” Edmund said. “Right!” cried Dick, jerking around and addressing Edmund. “Steam will level the barriers between classes, that’s just what we need. To make common people decent and decent people common. They'll know each other better. After all, it was the Ebenezers who

fought the Revolution—while you gentlefolk stayed home scared to risk your lives and property. And it’s the Ebenezers will run this country. After a desperate experience, they’ll learn to run it right!” “Like this fellow Andrew Jackson,” put in a young chap who had recently joined the company. Nobody knew him very well yet. “My father says he brought on the cholera!” A laugh followed the young fellow’s remark. Dick was not at all flustered. “You can criticize Andrew Jackson. All the same, he made the common people politically conscious. Jackson made this a peo-

ple’s country!” Somebody suggested going to the rally to be held tomorrow night in a hall in Harman Street. Dick was enthusiastic. “How about it, Edmund?”

Edmund nodded. He had taken no part in the discussion after they drifted away from the subject of steam. He could not quite grasp what

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they were talking about. There were the rich, and the obscure poor. He had never questioned the arrangement. The struggles of Andrew Jackson with Congress over the bank question did not arouse in him any of that passion to explode into words that Dick took so seriously. He had never heard that wealth and poverty could clash. Or must. And it seemed altogether wrong from his point of view that common people might usurp the power of government. Harman Street ran from Chatham Square to Grand Street. The entrance to the auditorium was so jammed with people overrunning the sidewalk that there was no chance of getting in. Dick led his companions around to a side window that looked out into an alley—one of the stunts he was on to in the news business. There they had a pretty good view of the doings inside. Several thousand people were packed into a space hardly sufhcient to hold an Irish family on a holiday. Some of them were barefooted, others in shirt sleeves. Men with hats and without. The

crowd overflowed onto the stage, where men were gesticulating and shouting. The din, the hoots and catcalls and stamping of feet could be heard blocks away. Suddenly a space was cleared in the center. A stocky fellow with his hat stove in, the brim ripped off and hanging down on his shoulders, made his way to the front of the stage and drew a bow across a rickety fiddle. “Sounds like a pig when he’s being poked,” Dick said, twisting his face into a knot of agony. The sound quieted the gathering, however. A stentorian voice interrupted the fiddler. “Hurrah for the Native Americans! Hurrah for equal rights!” The response was deafening, as if some fabulous Noah’s Ark collection of wildcats and bears and wolves and screech owls were howling and squealing together. Some stamped on the floor and danced and hooted, others merely yelled. Then they burst into song. “Yankee Doodle” and ‘Hail, Columbia.” And finally, “Auld Lang Syne.” There were Irishmen side by side with dark-faced Israelites, and a good many Germans. “T thought this was native America,” Norton yelled in Dick’s ear,

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“Well, they can yell American,” said Dick, roaring. “And they’re common. That makes ’em right.” The uproar died suddenly. A man was standing on the edge of the platform, one hand raised. The crowd waited in silence. “Gentlemen,” the man shouted out in a booming voice, “the Native American Party is proud of this great gathering of free American citizens. America for Americans—that shall ever remain our slogan and our call to duty. . . .” The sentiment that evoked another burst of patriotic feeling from the audience. Irish, Jews, Germans joined in the salute to the

Native American Party that was going to make America safe for Americans. The speaker had to call for silence.

“Tonight,” he continued when he was able to make himself ‘heard, “Connecticut sends us a message of cheer and coéperation.

Mr. Ebenezer Doolittle will address you.” A prolonged shout greeted the guest speaker. Then the audience settled down to listen to the message from Connecticut. A gentleman stepped to the front of the stage and faced the audience. He was a large, full-chested man in striped pantaloons, a dazzling vest, and tight-fitting coat with long tails. The instant he opened his mouth, his voice sounding out in long, barrel-organ rolls, Edmund knew that Ebenezer Doolittle was Jonathan Peck. “Friends, we Native Americans stand for true liberty. The field of Lexington is still wet with the blood of our patriots who gave their lives for the cause of freedom. They were willing to die for their convictions. How tragic that their sacrifice has been in

vain!

All

around

trickery ere. The voice on rolling up rafters with a audience in a

us we

see corruption

and

dishonesty

and

of Ebenezer Doolittle soared and subsided, and went

great, wind-swollen cadences that burst against the noise like thunder and fell back on the heads of the smashing crescendo likely to shiver their eardrums. Presently, warmed on flatulence, he lapsed into the vernacular of his native Connecticut. “Ther? ain’t a ginuine patriot amongst all t’other parties. The sound of truth ud suit them politic fellers ’bout’s well ’s water would a mad dog... .” The audience went wild with enthusiasm.

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“Hurrah for the Yankee!” Mr. Doolittle bowed and smiled. Hats were thrown into the air. Men pounded each other’s backs. It all buzzed in Edmund’s ears. His friends could not imagine what he meant to do. Without a word to appease their curiosity he scrambled in through the window, and fought through the crowd, heading for the platform. He flung himself against the wall of cheering men hugging the stage. Bracing his hands, he climbed up quickly, vaulting heads, and reached the side of the bowing Jonathan. But the very moment he found himself on the stage two other men arrived in the vicinity of the smiling hero. One of them stepped up and whispered something in Peck’s ear. “What?” exclaimed Jonathan. “You got the wrong man. My name’s Doolittle.” The fright on his face could not be covered by his dying smile. As he glanced about wildly, he caught sight of Edmund. A crafty, insolent, accusing expression crept into his eyes. “Oh, it’s you, eh? Bob’ll be tickled to death to know about

this. And Elizabeth’ ..c.41”* The men had grasped him by the arms. Thunderstruck, Edmund saw him led away between the two constables. He did not rejoin his companions. He did not heed the jeers and threats that followed the disappearance of the orator of the evening. The cool night air outside was sweet in his lungs. He ran along the dark streets, toward the Bowery, not slackening his pace until he reached the Darby and Joan. Bob the Wheeler was standing in his accustomed place behind the bar. “Howdy, son,” he said with one of his cool stares, as Edmund

came across the sawdust floor. “Er ye drinkin’ again?” Edmund leaned over the bar, ignoring the question, staring into Bob’s narrow squinting eyes. ““Where’s Elizabeth?” he demanded in a still, thick voice.

Bob’s eyelids flickered. *’Ow should I know?” He added, smirking, “Yer old love waked up?”

Edmund shut his fist on the counter. But he made no move.

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“I just thought somebody’d better kind of break it to her. The constables took her father tonight. It happened at the meeting in Harman Street.” “Hm. Well, poor devil. Do ’im no ’arm, goin’ back to the

marble works.” Their eyes met again, in mutual suspicion. Edmund and went out of the bar.

turned

2) Edmund remembered that Dick Kerrian was to have supper with them. The thought entered his mind now without raising his spirits. He felt tired and out of sorts. That business about Jona-

than Peck had upset him. He had not been able to put Elizabeth out of his mind. As he let himself in at the front door, and went into the parlor, he found Norton Saunders there with Dick. Jenny, it struck

him, looked a little wilted, considering Dick was there. And Saunders, slouching in his chair, a frown on his face, was as glum as a hen in the rain. “You'll stay to dinner, Norton?”

Edmund

said, wandering

about the room. “I hope we’ve a good feed tonight, Jenny—I could eat my hat.” Norton leaned his elbows on the table in front of him and looked at Edmund, glowering. He said nothing about acceptance or regrets. “You realize, of course,” he brought out, deliberating over

the words as though he couldn’t bear to part with them, “‘you’re in a bad way. You can’t harbor escaped prisoners and avoid the consequences. This fellow Ebenezer Doolittlk—Jonathan Peck— has made a clean breast of it and involved you and Bob. The sheriff took his sworn statement and will probably hand it over to the District Attorney in the morning.”

Edmund remained silent. He clung to the edge of the table, waiting for Norton to continue.

“I don’t quite know how to handle it. Unless you claim you didn’t know the men were escaped convicts.” “But I did know,” Edmund repeated dully.

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“Then why the devil . . . what made you do it?” Edmund eyes were fixed. And he was silent. The thing seemed far away. He only remembered that he had not cared very much. The reappearance of Jonathan Peck, the associations and memories clinging about that felonious apparition, all were as shadows, shadows that yet had power to affect him. Insubstantial, remotely

stirring, as weeds undulating without sound. He understood nothing of his emotions. And yet to see Jenny now, crying on Dick’s

sleeve, distressed him horribly. The sound of footsteps on the front stoop fell into the oppressive silence. No one spoke as they waited for the knock. It came, a thud of knuckles on wood. The visitor did not trouble to use the knocker. Norton got up to go to the door. A short, slight figure in a long greatcoat stood outside. In his right hand he carried a thick cane which he pointed at Norton,

demanding in a voice frosty and sharp. “Does Rolphe live here?” “Mr. Kerrian!

Come in, sir.’

The astonished countenances of Edmund and Dick appeared behind Norton in the hall. The visitor stepped in and pointed the cane at Dick. “You, what are you doing here?” Jenny had risen and was standing in the doorway between the parlor and the hall. Dick started to speak. The old gentleman interrupted him, waving his cane and thumping on the floor. “Your manners, son,” he said, with a smile. “Why don’t you

present the lady?” Edmund

stepped forward.

*“My sister, Mr. Kerrian.”

Jenny curtsied. The austere visitor bowed. Taking Jenny’s outstretched hand and bending over it with a gesture of grave gallantry, he touched it with his lips. “Ah, gentlemen,” he said with an ironic emphasis, still smiling, “the old man still has an eye for beauty!” Jenny blushed. Again the cane rattled on the floor, ending their uneasy laughter. “Come, come,” Mr. Kerrian complained humorously to Ed-

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mund, “are you no willing host? Do you not offer your guest a chair? And take his hat and coat?” Edmund murmured an apology. They moved into the parlor. “You are Lawyer Saunders’ son,” Mr. Kerrian said addressing Norton, stretching out his legs and leaning back in the armchair. “Your father’s fees are high—too high. But he knows his books. And what’s more,” he interrupted himself, chuckling, “he knows

the judges. A valuable gift—for his clients.” Norton kept still. “You’re a man of few words—I know something about you,” Mr. Kerrian went on, more gravely, his eyes straying toward Dick who sat gazing at his father, on his face a look of wondering concern. “Not like my son whose aim is to be unlike his own father. And who spends his time scribbling about life instead of living it.” He spoke in a tone of angry scorn. His voice, low-pitched, vibrated with a curious confidence and calm. His glance moving away from Dick, he went on as though he were communing with his own thoughts, his eyes on the floor in front of him. “I’m getting on in years, and you will inherit all I have. Men will fawn on you, shower you with honors and grovel at your feet as they do at mine. Not because you can turn a phrase, but because you will be Mr. Richard Kerrian who counts his wealth in millions. Ships and property and gold!” Dick stirred uncomfortably in his chair. “All I want is to live my own life,” he said quietly. “Hm, well,” old Kerrian grunted, “I’m letting you alone. You’re young. Wisdom will come to you in time.” He sat up abruptly, seemingly made aware that these feelings of embitterment, of division and personal anger against his son that he had allowed to be unleashed, had driven him off at a tan-

gent. He turned sharply to Edmund. “I did not mean for you to witness my father. My business is with you privately.” “You will excuse us, I hope, my dear young cause we must do without you at times that

son’s disrespect to his He added, softening, lady? It is surely beour sex must look to

you to freshen our dull minds with the joy of your sweet company in leisure.”

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Jenny had risen, excusing herself. Mr. Kerrian once more bent over her hand in formal gallantry. “Keep your seat,” he said to Dick, who was about to follow Jenny out of the room. Edmund made a sign to Norton to stay. “With your permission, sir—Saunders is my good friend.”

“Very well. Yes, quite right.” When they were seated, Mr. Kerrian did not beat about the bush. “Rolphe, I know all about it—you’re in a mess. Never mind details. I've no time to listen to long-winded explanations. The District Attorney has been to see me.” The coolness of his tone went beyond belief. It was clear that such an action on the part of the District Attorney was quite regular, a matter of course. Perceiving the astonishment in Edmund’s face, Mr. Kerrian held up his hand, imposing silence, and turned to Norton. “Your father will be seeing judges again and sending

me a terrific bill for a retainer. Rolphe is too useful to me to be placed in the shadow of the law.” Moving his head, he looked directly at Dick, a glance of unmistakable meaning. “There'll be no talk of this in the papers!” His son slowly nodded. Whereupon old Kerrian got off on a ripsnorting discourse that constrained his listeners to wonder what on earth he could be driving at. “Rolphe’s in a bad way, headed straight for State Prison unless I give the word. He has been a fool. That’s why we have prisons— for fools. But lawyer Saunders will do his work well. This man Peck’s story will die in his throat if you keep my secret. We’ll trade secrets!” He laughed. “Though I have the better bargain.” There was something almost uncanny in the man’s preoccupa-

tion with the working of his own brain. It seemed nothing on earth or in hell could break his confidence. In his inhuman cynicism, he was like a prophet without a God. “Those fools over there in Harman Street, bawling and cheering at patriotic

speeches—Native

Americans,

Loco-Focos,

Lord

knows what—they are but pawns who move as they are played. They’re all fools, even you, who aim to live your own life. You

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can’t, I tell you. It’s being planned for you. Will it or not. By forces you cannot control! “You young ones don’t know what lies ahead. We’re living in a fool’s paradise! The old order of leisured, measured life is passing. My ships carry taller masts and stouter spars and sails that stand the fiercest gales. Even they will give way to steam before long. We will run faster, sail smarter, dive deeper, and fly farther than any other people on the face of the earth. Steam’ll do that for us! It’ll stretch our railroads across the continent and make New York the greatest city in the world!” The old man leaned over and spoke in a whisper.

“That fellow Morse who is tinkering with electricity, I watched him over in Castle Garden. He stretched a wire from one end of the building to the other and sent an electric spark clear through. Remarkable things will happen in your lives.” The deepset eyes, burning with the light of prophecy, became somber. “But I won’t live to see them. Would I—I could be master of them all!” He went on more quietly. “New York, America, will grow in population and in wealth. Millions will come to these shores seeking something—they call it freedom, prosperity—and they’ll find it,” he scowled, “in Harman Street meetings! They’ll be given the vote and they'll play with ballots—while men of vision will make use of their labor and of their lives.” Dick Kerrian rose from his chair, and leaning across the table, said with a smile that did not impress his father agreeably, ‘That sounds like a page out of Fanny Wright. I couldn’t have done better myself!” “Sit down,” the old man commanded impatiently. “Fanny Wright was only half right. Everything in New York sells at an exorbitant price. Rents have risen fifty per cent for the next year. Food costs are out of all proportion to wages. The value of real estate has doubled and trebled. “That old Dutchman, Astor, has bought up half New York and will sell nothing. But the supply of specie has dwindled; it no longer can carry the burden of credit. The country is flooded with paper money. Fools, not to know that the day of reckoning must

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come! Their house of paper will be blown down in the first wind! I'll bring misery and starvation and endless suffering.” He leaned back in his chair, sighing. Norton spoke, bewildered. “But what has all that got to do with Edmund? Is he to hold up the dam and stem the flood?” Into the sad eyes had come a look of cold shrewdness. “Rolphe is competent. And what’s more, he’s loyal. I’ve watched him. He has brawn, I have brains. After what I’ve been

saying, you will hardly be surprised to Secretly. I have turned my ships and my A gasp went round the room. “Wait!” Mr. Kerrian went on. “I'll with a lot of property when prices tumble

hear that I’ve sold out. property into currency.” not be among those left

and land goes a-begging

with no buyers. I don’t own a single house or a farm or a vessel— not a stick!” “But, father,” Dick said, “what will you do with all that paper

money? When the crash comes?” “Ah, son,” the old man rubbed his hands together, and his face’shone with owlish satisfaction, “you’re anticipating me. I’ve bought gold with it! I paid heavily, the American dollar is greatly depreciated. But I chanced it.”

It was as if the man’s morbid vitality were renewed, transformed;

a remarkable

regeneration

of hardened

faculties taking

place within him as he talked of the precarious projects into which all the incandescent energies of his brain and his physical being

were poured out. No longer was the black frost of egocentric and material ambition withering in his countenance; a geniality, almost tender, had become visible in his demeanor. He seemed more human

than his son could remember at any time in the course of their

curious relationship. His eyes shone with fascinating brilliance. He kept them fixed on Edmund discourse.

throughout the remainder of his

““Now let me tell you exactly what I want of you. My agents are scouring Europe, buying up gold. The shipment is due to arrive in a short time. As soon as I am advised, definitely, of its departure from the other side, we’ll discuss the details. This is all, for the

present. But I shall need a man I can trust to superintend the un-

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loading and transfer to the storage vaults. And, Rolphe, I’ve picked you!” ‘You honor me, sir,” Edmund answered, pride flashing in his

face and in his voice. “Well,” exclaimed Dick, rising, “that gold ought to go far to ease the catastrophe.” The humane glow had disappeared from his manner when Mr. Kerrian spoke again. He stood up, his tone once more was that of the imperialist dreamer. “When the house of cards these fools have built topples over and bankruptcy ends their career, I’'ll step in and buy—with gold. I will buy ships and steamboats and railroads and property. Their prices will be low, but my gold will come high. It will make me the most powerful man in New York!” A look of worried incredulity on his face, Dick said, “You

have really done this?” “Tis done, lad!”

“And you really think that your three hundred thousand in gold will accomplish all this?” Mr. Kerrian laughed. “Te will be worth three million when the banks close down on their specie, as they must.” He waved an eloquent finger toward Dick. “And before you have lived your span of life, it will become thirty million!” “T hope the ship founders before she reaches port,” Dick murmured, turning away.

It was a night of violence, veiled by the first howling flurries of a blizzard; the thermometer dropped meteorically. Edmund intended to walk with Mr. Kerrian to his house, not far away.

As he opened the street door a gusty blast shook the house. They tightened their greatcoats in the raging wind and bent their heads against the driving snow. Edmund grasped Mr. Kerrian by the arm, guiding his steps. Steadily, in silence, they trudged on, hearing only the wheeze of the gale as it whirled the snow in endless circles. No cabs or omnibuses were abroad in the dark, slippery streets. They met no one; they were alone. Presently the faint ray of a watchman’s bunker hove into sight. Within doors, a leatherneck sat drowsing over his charcoal fire.

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Edmund left Mr. Kerrian at his door and went home to his supper. When Dick and Norton left later in the evening, he went out with them, thinking he would go around to the Darby and Joan for a little while. Vicious weather as it was, he did not want to

sit still in the house. He felt limber and tingling with restless excitement, an exhilaration in part whipped up by the storm and by the nervous energy of his own thoughts. As he plodded on through the howling streets toward the tavern, the snow already beginning to lie up in drifts, he felt the increasing cold. But his brain burned with the memory of Daniel Kerrian as he had appeared in that singular interview, his eyes glowing with prophetic genius, foretelling the collapse of an order that now seemed to Edmund more fabulous and insubstantial than the one Kerrian proposed to erect on its ruined foundations. His imagination glowed with reverent homage for the mind that planned so clearly. And he felt smugly sorry for Dick Kerrian, confused by vague, temperamental animosities that prevented him from drawing near, in sympathy, to the prismatic radiations of that keen-cutting intelligence. Dick was a dreamer, one of those fire-eating visionaries whose enthusiasms fizzed themselves out in talk. He gabbled on and on about the common people ruling themselves, about how they would overthrow class and privilege and power. Dick was off his chump the same as they were. The common people couldn’t rule them-

selves. They could only yell and cheer and howl at the demagogues who harangue them as leaders. Suppose they elected presidents and governors and judges, and grew violent over political questions— what of it? Back of them still would be the real power that controlled their destinies. Daniel Kerrian stood for that power. And

gold was the instrument. Actually, the physical personality of Daniel Kerrian affected Edmund with a kind of repugnance—the small, keen eyes, curiously tight in the narrow face, the bony hands streaked with bluish veins. Such men do not invite affection. What Edmund felt was an emotion devoid of any personal warmth—an abstract veneration such as a common soldier in the ranks feels for the high commander who wins victories, without ever revealing himself to his men. Daniel Kerrian would rise to power on the wreckage of other

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men’s fortunes. The greater the devastation, the more extensive would be his power. Edmund bethought him of the evil latent in such ambitions. Had Kerrian been a remarkable military genius

at the head of an invading army about to lay siege to New York, he knew he would have been in the front ranks resisting the advance. But as it was, deeply conscious of his own mental inferiority, it was that very awareness that inspired in him such awe of strong minds as he entertained toward Daniel Kerrian. He felt

a stirring exultation in the fact that Old Man Kerrian had singled him out. After all, he justified himself subconsciously,

the suffering

and hardship among the common people were only incidental to Kerrian’s ambition. His fight was with other Kerrians, a battle of giant minds. And he, Edmund, would have a part in both the contest and the victory, he would be on the battle line. As he stepped into the smoke-dim, noisy interior of the

Darby and Joan, brushing the snow from his shoulders and legs, he walked swinging his body from the hips and thrusting out his chest, his trunk erect in a posture of relaxed ease and superiority that did not reflect the thoughts in his mind. He was thinking with suppressed eagerness of the battle soon to burst. IO

Some time after Edmund had parted from Dick and Norton at the corner, on his way to the Darby and Joan, a figure slinking into the shadows made by the projecting abutment of stoops over basement entrances, passed along the far side of Roosevelt Street and paused opposite Edmund’s darkened house. After a quick survey of the empty street, the figure crossed over, fled up the steps and leaned over, peering in one of the windows. The thickening frost on the pane interfered with his view of the dimly lighted room. But by craning his neck the man managed to get a fleeting glimpse of a girl’s pretty figure swaying in dance steps, and his ears caught the subdued squeak of a fiddle. His right hand reached out of the swirling snow and grasped

the brass knocker, letting it fall with a discreet and light reverberation. The music ceased, along with all other sounds inside. Again

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the man took hold of the knocker and let it go—this time, more loudly. In a moment,

he heard the latch lifted. The door opened

warily. He pushed it back with his foot and strode into the hall. “What you doin’?” demanded the voice of Uncle Henry, with white-rolling eyes. “Dere ain’t nobody home.” The man shut the door and with a quick movement jerked the woolen cap from his head. “Whaddya mean, nobody home! Nobody home for me?” “You sho ain’t got nuthin’ to do, come messin’ round here.” But Uncle Henry’s remonstrance was ignored by Joshua Peck, who had already seen Jenny coming down the stairs. With a little cry, “Joshua!” she put out her hands, her face

lighting with joy. In a second, he was beside her at the bottom of the steps. They heard Uncle Henry shuffling down to the kitchen. Still with linked hands they stood together, letting the first emotion of meeting spend itself in the sight of each other. Then Joshua, stooping down, lifted Jenny in his arms and carried her up the stairs to her room. Two hours later he was saying good-by. Jenny lay on her tousled bed, and he sat beside her, his hand smoothing her hot tear-wet cheek. “TI was afraid to come sooner. You know. Besides, I hadn’t a

dime. But now—that’s going to be different.” “Oh! Are you rich, Joshua?” She held his head close, her fingers playing with his hair. He laughed, sitting up. “Rich! Why, of course! But don’t tell anybody. And I think we'll go to Texas and get richer.”

“Texas! But I don’t want to go there, Joshua. I’m going on the stage, dancing. Monsieur Charrand is sure I’ll be a success.” He stood up. His shoulders twitched with noiseless laughter. “You may have to go to Texas!” The little pouting frown between her eyes vanished. He saw that she looked frightened. He took up his coat and cap. “If you don’t hear from me by a week from today, go to the post office and ask for a letter.”

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Closing the door behind him, softly, he walked carefully down the stairs. Uncle Henry rose up in the darkness of the hall. Joshua spoke roughly. “Nigger, you ain’t got eyes or ears. You ain’t seen nobody or

heard nuthin’! Understand?” “I ain’t payin’ nobody no mind, iffen dey minds dey own business. But time dey ain’t got no business . . .” “Well, look out. That’s all. For two cents I’d ship you back to old Virginny!” Uncle Henry cowered, clutching the front of Joshua’s coat. “Oh, no; oh, no. You can’t do dat, Mr. Joshua. I’se free!”

“I like free niggers,” Joshua said with a laugh. “They bring good money, in the land o’ cotton!” He pulled open the door and stepped out into the driving

snow. el

It was a long night. Edmund sat on his bed in the early hours of December 16, 1835, removing his boots. He had trouble getting them off, for his feet were sodden and stiff with cold. He had not done with these exertions when he heard, above the drumming wind, a distant muffled clanging. The City Hall bell was tolling the news of a fire. He went to the window and leaned out, but he could see noth-

ing but the writhing, ghost-white dust emptying down out of the invisible sky. “We can’t do much tonight,” he told himself, coming away from the window. The bell tolled on. A little fire at the corner of Pearl and Merchant streets was heading up to a conflagration. Edmund was the first man‘to reach the fire house. A full company reported. All of the men wore long gray coats over the uniform red flannel shirts, with stiff, tall, leather hats and high boots. The polished, silver-mounted, gooseneck engine was made ready.

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The company headed down Broadway, pulling the heavy manual along the middle of the street. A red glare had become visible, spreading in a widening arc over the Battery. The men pulled and strained at the ropes, but they were hampered by the soft snow and the high wind. They made slow progress. The cold was intense—the coldest night in thirty-six years. And the glare grew, like an enormous, crimson flower unfolding on the shrouded horizon. As they neared the blaze another company caught up with them. Bob the Wheeler, pulling with his squad, the Darby and Joan, passed close to Edmund in the confusion of struggling men. “Looks like a bad business!’’ he called out. “Whoever did that job picked the right kind o’ night!” Before Edmund could answer he was borne along out of earshot. In half an hour they had reached the corner of Pearl Street, the first company to take position. The store of Comstock and Andrews was being consumed by flames. They threw a stream of water on the opposite side of the street, against which the gale was driving. But so fiercely did the heat and embers increase that Edmund ordered the company to retreat for their lives and the safety of their machine. A threatening wall of fire was advancing toward them. It spread through William and Water streets and Old Slip. In a little while they had to give up fighting the flames. The hydrants froze. The

engines were

useless.

Their work,

henceforth,

was

to save

property. Edmund

and his company then, like the others, concentrated

their efforts on removing the contents of buildings in the vicinity beyond the expected path and reach of destruction. Immense quantities of goods were dragged out and transferred to the huge,

great-columned hall of the Merchants Exchange on Wall Street, piled up in Old Slip, Hanover Square, in churches and in graveyards. But in a few hours, the ravening flames reached those areas and swept everything away. New “fireproof” buildings with iron shutters, copper roofs and gutters, were sucked up like pasteboard. The fire got its teeth in and the noise of its busy chewing, the monstrous licking and

grinding and splintering, went on with the nightmarish ferocity

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and persistence of a plague of caterpillars destroying a forest. The shutters glowed red, and scalding liquid from the molten copper dripped down on the firemen. Driven by the furious wind, the blazing mass swept down to the East River and threatened the ships at the wharves.

The Twenty-third Company broke up and scattered; every man bent on saving the property of his intimate friends. Edmund arrived in the neighborhood of Daniel Kerrian’s counting house. As yet the fire had not come into that area. Edmund stood in the crowd gathered around Mayor Lawrence, who with his officers was surveying the spreading desolation. Somebody suggested blowing up the buildings in the path of the fire, as the only means of stopping the disaster. Two men started off to get explosives. Edmund walked on toward Wall Street. He could not find Dick and Norton. There seemed nothing more to do now but wait’ till the fire burned out. Daniel Kerrian seemed to have been among the fortunate. The fire had not spread northward. The wind was carrying it to the south and west. But even as the thought went through his mind, a pillar of smoke shot up from the corner building which was Kerrian’s, accompanied by a muffled thud. Flames burst into the pallid sky. Edmund stood amazed. The building was outside the danger zone; he supposed it must have been an instance of spontaneous combustion.

In a moment, running nearer, he caught sight of a crouching figure fleeing from the doomed building. Instantly he realized that Kerrian’s counting house had been set on fire. A deliberate act. The man ran on toward Broadway. Edmund started after him.

By this time several bystanders had seen the man dashing up the street. Cries of “Stop thief!” began to snap at his heels. Edmund was hindered by his coat, which kept flapping open and wrapping around his knees. The fugitive increased his speed. All at once something dropped from him and fell on the pavement. Other people were running, too. The man did not slacken speed. And the pursuers, gasping in his wake, kept on, dividing like a broken wave in passing around Edmund, who had halted and leaned over to pick up the thing dropped by the fugitive.

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They took no notice of Edmund. If they saw him at all, it was only to get out of his way. And rush on. The object in his hands was curiously heavy. It was a leather belt. Straightening up and moving to one side, in the shelter of a doorway, with no illumination but the wild, red glare that made infernal the silhouettes of lampposts and the black overhang of snow-furred cornices looming above brick and stone, his fingers made a blind examination. Groping, they came in contact with the hard, round shape of coins. A money belt. Quickly, he unbuttoned his coat and tied the belt securely around his body. Then

buttoning the coat again, he walked on at a brisk pace in the direction of the pursuing crowd—a shouting, gesticulating mob of men whose yells and profanity had become a hullabaloo... . “This fire was set! They’re after the incendiary! He deserves a hanging! ...” In the next square a wild throng blocked the way in a solid mass. Edmund beat his body against it. Cries of “Hang him!” exploded around him, focusing on a point invisible beyond the barricade of shoulders and heads. He pushed through to a narrow’space around a lamppost.

There, twisting in the sick area of the gaslight that cast a livid, greenish blotch like mold in the bloody glare, suspended from the lamp bracket by a cord improvised from strips of the coat torn from his back, the limp body of the fugitive swung

gently to and fro. Someone in the mob reached out and felt over the ribs of the corpse, as if to pick his pockets. Somebody else struck him a

blow in the face. The cord twirled around, unwinding, bringing the face into partial view. Edmund craned forward, a sick feeling rising into his throat. The grisly prankster was joined by others, twisting and untwisting the rope. They made a regular game of it, winding him up. Would his head come off? “Jeez, look at him spin!”

An instant the face was in full view. And Edmund recognized, in the staring eyeballs and horribly contorted features with gaping mouth, the beaten and disfigured countenance of Joshua Peck.

A guttural exclamation that sounded as if it had come out of a barrel made him turn.

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Bob the Wheeler stood not six inches off, pensively regarding the body of the hanged man. “They’re sayin’ it was ’im started the fire.” “But why? What did he want to do it for?” Bob grunted. “Im an’ ’is gang planned to loot the town while the fire was burnin’. Some of ’em did, I guess.” A large bundle of brimstone matches had been found in the pocket of Joshua’s coat, Bob said. The weight of the belt was suddenly awful. Edmund moved away from Bob, not wanting to encounter his evil, reptilian stare.

“You knew—about him?” “They’re safe with me. I never ask questions.” A sudden cry of “Leathernecks!” came down the street. And the mob melted away. “Come on,” Bob said under his breath, “‘they’Il be wantin’ to know things. I ain’t givin’ no interviews.” The cadaver was left alone, swaying in the wind. In the streets purged of lynchers the lurid reflection burned with deepening blood color in the dusk of snow. The noise of falling walls sounded muffled in the storm. The wind hurtled large fragments of blazing timbers great distances, and bright clouds of sparks and red embers were lifted high and blown through the air, resembling intermittent showers of meteors. Edmund plunged along, trailing Bob, with little thought of where his feet were taking him. He ached all over with fatigue, a heaviness crushing him like a lid of stone. Feeling the belt sag against him, the gray void of his mind slowly filled with the leaden image of Daniel Kerrian. His consciousness fluttered feebly around the old man. Then once more as if a stone had rolled over it, wiping out Kerrian, his mind was full of the memory of Elizabeth that burned like a wire incandescent at the core of his brain. . . . “We had better say good-by now. It will be easier.” ... . And yet—she had been warm and yielding in his arms... . The Darky and Joan loomed dark and dead against the glistening snow. Bob unlocked the door. He struck a match to the single gas jet.

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Edmund unloosed the buttons of his greatcoat. It opened, and the belt around his waist slipped down and fell to the floor with the clank of metal. Bob turned at the sound, stooped quickly and picked it up. He fingered it a moment, glancing obliquely at Edmund.

“You, too!” he exclaimed in an accusing voice. And he jerked back his head and laughed. “What the devil do you mean?” Edmund cried, his face flushing up with anger that was only half-hearted. Bob handed him the belt. “T ask no questions,” he said cynically. “The drink’s on me!” I2

When Edmund reached home, stone drunk, it was eight o’clock in the morning. Uncle Henry let him in and steered him upstairs. He gabbled disjointedly and insisted on waking Jenny to give her the news about Joshua. But Jenny, as it happened, was not in her room, ‘having already risen and gone out to have a look at the fire. Uncle Henry gave thanks to Providence.

“He called you a nigger,” Edmund shouted, tottering on the edge of the bed. He was holding the money belt clutched in both hands and would not let it go. Uncle Henry finally took it from him, and put it under his pillow. Jenny ran across Dick Kerrian and Norton Saunders on the northern fringe of the burned area. Sooty and bedraggled and gaunt and frozen. They and half the members of the Twentythird accepted her invitation to a hot breakfast. “It’s probably the luckiest thing that ever happened,” Dick remarked at the breakfast table. ““A new city will leap up on the ashes of the old!” “But terribly costly,” Norton said. “They say over six hundred buildings went down, and the loss will be close to twenty millions. The insurance companies will go broke. There’ll be bankruptcies and G.T.T. signs all over.” “G.T.T.!” exclaimed Jenny, laughing, as she poured out the coffee. ““What’s that? It sounds awfully mysterious.”

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“They that fold their tents in the night! It’s the regular thing now, you know. Swindlers, goose-trappers and persons who don’t care for Sing Sing—they just scuttle off to Texas. The trail is long, and the country’s big. Good place to lose old names and get new ones. Gone to Texas is the despair of creditors. Only when I see it written up on the premises, I read it, ‘Go, thou thief’ and

good riddance!” The coffeepot fell from Jenny’s hand. She put both hands over her face and burst into a clamor of tears. “Oh! Oh! Gone to Texas! Oh, dear!”

And to the extreme consternation of the young men present, the wails continuing behind her defenseless little hands, she ran out of the room. They were left to finish breakfast without her. “Seems like trouble be bound to home in dis house!” Uncle Henry mumbled, sweeping up the contents of the coffeepot.

Dick did not leave with the others. Instead, he wandered up and down the parlor, hoping Jenny would return. In the course of an hour he made a minute examination of Captain Rolphe’s library of works on navigation, searched through the Almanack for the year 1825, sat on all the chairs, and at length dipped into a volume of a philosophical nature by the Reverend Mr. Goodbread, on the

mothers of great men, which contained a great deal of useless advice to the young. Finally, after what seemed a very long time, and it was so in fact, he walked upstairs. Seeing Jenny’s door shut, he passed on to Edmund’s room. Edmund lay on no more than six inches of his bed, the outermost verge, the pillow under him pinned by one corner, his arms hanging down, his head twisted around in a fashion certain to produce acute cricks in the neck. “Gosh, what a rum-soaking he must have had!” Dick thought, at sight of his friend. Edmund’s mouth was open, and he breathed through it with the deep-drawn, sighing exhalations of soddenness. Dick approached the bed and took hold of Edmund’s shoulders, to lift him

over, smiling in a brotherly way. Edmund sighed and shut his mouth with a licking movement of his tongue. Dick’s hand under his shoulder felt something hard. Involuntarily, his fingers closed over the object, withdrawing.

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“What the devil!” He held it up and saw the leather belt packed hard and tight with coin, and his hands went limp as he read the initials in gilt letters—D. K. The smile left his face. It grew solemn with the question in his mind. And the question remained, for he told himself he didn’t know a damn about any of it. He shoved the belt back under the pillow and went quietly out of the room. Downstairs, he picked up his hat and walked slowly home.

About noon, while Edmund lay asleep, in the great long room of a three-storied red-brick building on upper Broadway, near Bond Street, a small gray-haired man paced the soft-carpeted floor. His slippered feet made a light rustling, scarcely audible. His fingers clasped and unclasped in nervous abstraction. Facing him, on a red settee banked by thick velvet cushions, sat a sharp-eyed, long-faced gentleman, bald except for the graying fringe that hung low on his tapering head. Daniel Kerrian was conferring on private matters with his attorney, Mr. Gamaliel Saunders. “T need that boy, Gamaliel,’ he was just saying. “Nothing must happen to him. This fool business of harboring an escaped convict mustn’t stand in my way! Ill pay. What’s it worth?” Mr. Saunders smiled gently. “T’ve never failed you yet, Daniel. You know how such matters are handled.” He sighed. “Shakespeare had the right idea— ‘Steep my senses in forgetfulness!’ There are so many people who will have to forget that fellow Peck’s statement. And it is not easy to forget, unless . . .” He hesitated, pursing his lips. Daniel Kerrian interrupted him impatiently. “Yes, I know. I’ll pay five hundred dollars.” Mr. Saunders gazed pensively down at the red-carpeted floor and shook his head sadly. Another sigh escaped him. “Nothing less than a thousand. In gold. My business today is all in gold, you know what the times are.” And he added, as

though it were a tactful courtesy to mention it, “You have gold.” The draperies at one of the deep bay windows rustled in a sud-

den draft as the door was opened and Dick Kerrian entered. He nodded a greeting to the lawyer and spoke a word to his father.

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“About your friend,” Mr. Kerrian said, “Saunders has undertaken to see it through. Shakespeare has given him the clue, he will sow the seeds of forgetfulness in the minds of the vulgar. There will be no prosecution! Though I must say,” he added, grumbling, “Shakespeare comes high these days. And is quite discriminating about specie!” Dick laughed and sat down next to the lawyer. “I have news,” he said slowly. “I would make Constable Hayes a good assistant. Maybe you'll get me the job? Do that much for your prodigal son! I have the scent of a hound and the eyes of a hawk. I have discovered something.”

“Stop chattering and talk. sense,” his father commanded sharply. “What have you found out? Anything about the fire in the counting house or the gold that is missing?” “The fire, yes,” Dick said. “The gold . . .” He shrugged his shoulders doubtfully. “Well, get on with it.” Dick answered indirectly. “The man who fired your counting house is the son of Jonathan Peck, the escaped convict. Joshua was his name.” “Was his name?” “Was,” Dick repeated. ‘“SHe was the man who was hanged by the mob from a lamppost. They suspected him of setting the fire. Maybe they were right.” “But the specie—upwards of five thousand, you know. Did he have it on his person?” Dick regarded his father with steady eyes. “There was nothing on the man’s person. But there is a trail—” As Kerrian moved forward eagerly, Dick raised his eyebrows in mocking laughter and started out of the room. Sardonically he called over his shoulder, “My eyes are the eyes of a hawk!” Coming out into the hall he turned at the staircase and bounded up the two flights to his top floor bedroom. Rummaging in one of the long drawers of his desk, he found what he wanted. He pulled out the silver-mounted pistol and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. “Just in case,” he said to himself. ““He’s prob-

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ably still drunk—and drunks are obstinate. And . . . others may

know and may have flocked around by this time.” It was long past sunset when he left the house. The weather had cleared. The air was still, a handful of stars glittered in the sapphire sky. The snow

on the ground was silver-white in the

light of a full moon climbing to its benign swing across the heavens. The short December day had almost passed into night when Edmund awoke. The first thing he was conscious of was a headache. He sat up, loathing himself for having been such a dumb fool. The house was quiet as the grave. As the events of the previous day straggled into his mind, like rabble soldiers, he slid his hand under the pillow, remembering the belt. Ah! Still there. Relief flowed over him in a cooling wave. He dragged it out and loosened the clasps. A stream of gold coins jingled out on the bed. They were of various denominations, twenties, fifties, hundreds. He arranged them in stacks, then he counted them. A little over five thousand

dollars: His breath coming fast, he stared grimly down at the fortune in gold. Old Man Kerrian’s arithmetic came back to him. “Three millions when the crash comes. Thirty millions before you’ve lived your life through.” If the Old Man’s knowledge was as good as his talk, five thousand maybe would become fifty thousand. Then five millions. He remembered

Bob’s remark, spoken with sly insinuation.

"You, too!” And he knew what Bob meant. Had known, at the

time. The dirty sewer rat! He had not really stolen the money, that was the main thing. Joshua, not he, was the thief. And Joshua had paid the penalty. True, it was a rather sickening recollection—Joshua dangling from the lamppost, and he coming by the fruits of Joshua’s crime. With none of the penalty and none of the risk. But hadn’t old Kerrian staked his hopes upon a vast destruction that was going to overwhelm thousands in misery and ruin? Yes, by God! And Kerrian would hardly miss five thousand from the great sum that would soon be his. In all human experience there are few instances of sudden

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transition from good to bad or from bad to good. The emotionalism that lies back of swift reclamations of souls from the devil in religious conversions operates as a capricious blind force. Men and women, even children, have sometimes committed violent and

atrocious crimes during momentary impulses. What comes to the surface in behavior in such crucial moments is not the result of a sharp cleavage in personality; it is rather the culmination of a sequence of impulses that have been suppressed, and from which a reaction may presently follow. These transformations in character that are generally gradual, often imperceptible, are without relation to intelligence or mentality except as the latter speed or retard the evolution. Edmund got up, went to his closet and dragged out the iron chest that had been his father’s. Carefully, he collected the money and put it back in the belt. He stuffed the belt down underneath an old uniform of the captain’s, locked the chest and put the key in his pocket. The house was in semidarkness when he came out of his room. He looked in at Jenny’s door and saw she was not there. Nor was Uncle Henry about downstairs. He sat down, shivering, at the cold grate in the parlor, with a feeling of irritation. Almost dinner time. And no sign of dinner or anyone to eat it.

13 As Uncle Henry stood by the window on the night of the fire, gazing out at the sky brightening above the roofs of Roosevelt Street somewhere in the pelting storm, the snowdrifts rising higher and higher against the houses opposite were transformed into clumps of waving, tall-growing cotton, bending their long stalks to the caress of a mild, tropical wind. A vast field of downy whiteness stretching into infinitely receding horizons. The red glare was the flaming sun, beating down on the stooping backs and bare skin of negro field hands. All day he had been thinking of the southland, of his own former existence among the slaves, in the time before ole mistis died, and he fled from bondage to an alien master who would have been his in the forthcoming division of the property. And his

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thoughts turned to his son, Zephaniah, who long ago had been promised his freedom.

Uncle Henry had not seen this son in twenty years, but he had by no means forgotten him. Nor had he forgotten the words of the young master who, perhaps in quixotic idealism, had declared he would free Zeppy when he came into his inheritance. Anyhow, this promise had been sustaining the old darky in the vicissitudes of a renegade existence in the North. His daughter had always been a cause of grief and worry.

When money man’s taken

he sold himself into the service of Bob the Wheeler to get to save her from a term in prison for stealing a white diamond pin, he was comforted. Some of his burden was away; he felt his bartered life in part redeemed by the

knowledge of his son’s freedom. Far back, deep in the forgotten past of his race, were the ancestral roots of Uncle Henry’s belief that the souls of slaves are in bondage with their bodies. Freedom to him meant not merely

physical liberation, but the soul’s life in the world beyond death. So it was that Joshua’s threat of that evening struck down to the inmost soul of the black man, with implications more awful than condemnation to the yoke of lifelong servitude. It was in the same spirit that following his daughter’s trial and conviction

for arson, he stood in the crowd to witness her

hanging, and when it was over, fell upon his knees, giving thanks that she died a free woman. “She comes to you unshackled, Lawd!’? meant much more than the same words might convey to any white person. And now, after twenty years, Uncle Henry had met disillusionment. It reached out of the world and seized him. His son was here, in this city, about to be sent back to slavery.

The identity was not entirely certain. But Uncle Henry felt that it must be true. This darky’s name was Zeppy. And Uncle Henry needed nobody to convince him that no man, woman or child with a skin one shade darker than white, free in New York,

was safe from “burking,” that form of kidnaping infinitely ter-

rible to the negro population. Bob the Wheeler, his erstwhile master, had tipped him off about Zeppy. Bob was in possession of most diverse and accurate

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information connected with transactions carried on in the shade. And it occurred to him that if this black boy were really the son of his former bondman, Uncle Henry might want to buy him. He knew him for a thrifty nigger. In all likelihood he had enough salted away. And his boy’s freedom would be worth more than any white man’s price, that was another thing—a little something extra for Bob for doing a good turn to a poor devil. He intimated that the nigger would be in the back room of his place with his present owner on the day following. That was tomorrow—and maybe Uncle Henry might want to have a look at him. The morning after the fire a thick dust-colored cloud hung over the lower part of the city, besmirching the pure sky, lifting from the still smoldering debris. Uncle Henry stepped out into the cold noon air and plodded through the deep snow that lay white and serene in the warming sun. “A pillar of fire by night an’ a cloud by day!” he murmured, lifting his eyes to the pall of smoke overspreading the lower sky. When he turned in at the Darby and Joan, Bob came out from behind his counter and, signaling with his thumb toward the back, steered him into a large, stuffy, ill-lighted room behind the bar.

Two white men were seated at a table in the far corner, their

heads close together in mumbled conversation. Some distance off, as became his color and his caste, sat a large-framed, strong-looking,

youngish mulatto. He held himself erect in a posture of superb and striking dignity, his eyes moving in alert calm scrutiny of the surroundings. Bob jerked a thumb toward the mulatto. Thats him: ¢

A violent trembling seized Uncle Henry. “Zeppy!” he said in a broken voice, going forward slowly, his knees faltering. “Is you Zeppy?” The young negro stared back at him, mildly curious, and nodded his head. “Dat’s ma name. Ah reckon dey’s got me; Ah wasn’t quick

enough. Nem’ mind, uncle, Ah ain’ dade yet!” Uncle Henry said in a matter-of-fact tone, “I ain’ yo” uncle;

I’se yo’ daddy. Ain’t Massa Ned freed you like he said he would?” “Massa Ned done been in de groun’ close on twenty years. Dey done sold me twice ovah.” He added, fixing his glance on the

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white-haired old darky in front of him, “Sho nuff, is you my daddy? Seems like I can’t recollect you.” Uncle Henry looked at him with pride. “Tt been a mighty long while ago. De Lawd come after ole mistis, done tuk her in de chariot an’ ca’ied her up to heab’n. Ah name

yo’ Zephaniah,” he said, “’cause

I knowed

God was

hidin’ in you. Yo’ sho looks godly, son!” The men seated at the table had been listening to this conversation with passing interest, to which were added indulgent grins. Uncle Henry turned now, addressing them, speaking in a tone of respectful entreaty. “T’se free. But I'll let you-all have my freedom an’ go back wid you where you come from, iffen you let my boy go on ’bout his business.” A burst of laughter from the men interrupted him. “That'd sho ’nuff be a fine trade. You ain’t got one foot in the grave, you got two!” Then in a more businesslike tone, as if it

were time to make an end and get to the point, the speaker added, “Why don’t you buy him? You're a free nigger.” Bob the Wheeler, leaning against a corner of the wall, took

no part in the discussion. But it was clear from the alert, though detached, eye he kept on the proceedings that nothing escaped him. The other man spoke next, appearing already to have reached an understanding with his companion. “We could maybe fix it up, if you got the price in gold. It’d save us some trouble. We’d make a bargain if you act quickly, but we’re not takin’ no paper, remember. And you better be back here ’fo nine o’clock, ’cause we’re goin’ to be leavin’ this town

by then.” Uncle Henry did not have enough money saved to buy his son’s freedom. And he did not know how to go about getting what there was changed into gold. Only one hope lay heavy in his mind —the money in the belt he had placed under Edmund’s pillow that morning. He knew by the feel of the coins that it was gold. He did not doubt that Edmund would give him the money. But he could not be sure Edmund or the gold would be in the house when he got back. He walked home, vouchsafing all manner of promises

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to the Almighty if only Providence would be merciful and aid him now. Dusk had fallen when he arrived back in Roosevelt Street. The house was in darkness. He listened in the hall, but there was

no sound. No voice answered his call. He trudged upstairs and discovered Jenny was not in her room. The door stood open, and various undergarments in most unladylike disorder were draped

over the backs of chairs, as if she had dressed and gone out hurriedly. He went on to Edmund’s room, in a growing panic of misgiving. The room was empty. The rising moon

filtered a pale light through the window, ghostly and frozen. Uncle Henry stood distractedly hesitating, his heart driven down into the nethermost corner of his heels. Despair possessed him. He took a step forward. Crystallizing within him was a desperate resolve to find the gold. He stood suddenly still, halted by a sound from the closet. Someone was there. His knees shaking under him, feeling horribly afraid, he stepped forward, calling out in an unsteady voice, “Who dat? What you doin’ in dere?”’ The door of the closet burst open. A man with a mask over his face, holding a pistol pointed in front of him, stepped out, said in a rough voice, “Get back or I'll shoot!” Fear of the man and despair for his son had become one. If he were prevented from getting the money... Uncle Henry leaped forward and flung himself on the man. Despair gave him strength. The man was edging toward the door. Still Uncle Henry held on, trying to twist the pistol out of his grasp. As they struggled a shot rang out. A short, spluttering sound as if he were starting to swear,’

came from the man. He fell against the door and sank down slowly. Terribly still. Electrified to the roots of his white wool, Uncle Henry squatted over him and tore off the mask. Then he ran to the table by the bed, struck a light, and came back with the candle to kneel by the body. Lifting the candle, he stared in horror at the dead face of Dick Kerrian. The hole in his left breast showed the flight of the bullet. It must have gone through the heart, stinging him with instant death. No blood flowed from the wound. It was a clean shot. Uncle Henry struggled to his feet, rubbing his knees and ex-

EDMUND claiming, “Oh, my Jesus! My Jesus!”

ROLPHE*CYNIC

Savior!”

He

repeated

over

and

189 over,

“Oh,

Moaning and crying to himself, he fled, half falling, down the stairs, down to the kitchen and out by the back door. He ran, stumbling, into the stable. The big black horse was noisily and contentedly munching straw. “Yo’ an’ me is got to make time, Ajax,’ Uncle Henry mumbled, pushing the beast out backwards. “Yo” jes’ got to he’p po’ ole Uncle Henry!” He dragged out the harness, and in a moment had the horse hitched to an ancient sleigh. The horse stood quietly in the courtyard, with that waiting air of old horses, as if he knew exactly what was expected of him. Breathless, Uncle Henry mounted to the second floor again. He dashed into the closet, scooped up several handfuls of gold, the chest having already been broken open, and without stopping to count the money, dropped it into the pockets of his greatcoat. Then, with the strength of desperation he dragged Dick’s body out into the hall and half lifted, half hauled it down the stairs. He got it up onto the floor of the sleigh, and covered it with a horse blanket and an old carriage robe. Then, so that the wind would not lift the blankets and expose the corpse, he tucked in the corners carefully, and threw a couple of saddles and a bag of oats on top. Drawing up at the Darby and Joan, he did not stop to see whether the freight in the back was still covered. The body was left with the patient horse. A freezing wind was blowing down the street.

Finding the men with Zeppy still there, his relief was great. His hands shook so that he had to use all his will power to keep anything in his grasp. But he got the money onto the table. And the men counted out five hundred dollars in gold pieces. “You northern niggers are damn smart!” one of them remarked disagreeably. “It’s a mighty good thing you’re where you are. You’ve got too plumb uppity for the white folks down South!”

They looked sharply at him, noticing his shaking hands, the tension screwing up his face.

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The other said, “I’m not askin’ you where you got that gold. I only hope you didn’t steal it. That’d get us into a pack of trouble, sure “nuff.” “Dis here’s my wages money,” Uncle solemnly. ““Ah done save it.” “All right, nigger. You done right well!” companion, “We better get goin’. I don’t like Out on the sidewalk Uncle Henry took a “Lemme

Henry

announced

And turning to his this climate.” long look at Zeppy.

look good at yo’, son,” he said, his voice choking.

“Oh, Ah done pray for dis! All de time Ah been up here in de No’th, Ah pray to de Lawd to make yo’ free. Time we git where we goin’ now, yo’ better pray wid me.” They were advancing toward the sleigh. A slight frown creased Zeppy’s face. “Pray,” he said slowly. ““Reckon Ah ain’ de prayin’ kind. Ah ain’ done no prayin’ sence Ah was a chile. It nebber gets yo’ nowhere. No, suh, prayin’ nebber freed no slaves.” “It got yo’ freedom, son,” Uncle Henry said in a fainting voice.

The young negro laughed. “Tt wa’n’t yo’ prayers; it was yo’ gold. Gold!” he repeated. And stepping closer, he stared shrewdly into the frightened eyes of the old darky. “Whar did yo’ git dat gold? Yo’ done pray fo’ dat, too?”

With a terrified gesture, Uncle Henry clutched Zeppy by the

arm. “Git in. Better ride up here wid me!” They drove on some distance. Zeppy’s jaw fell weakly open ~ and a look of fear appeared in his face. After a while, sighing, he said, ‘““Reckon dey wa’n’t no two ways ’bout it. Ah sho gwine he’p yo’ all Ah kin!”

14 It was midnight when Edmund got home, and the house was cold. He lit a fire in the parlor grate. Jenny was in her room, sleeping quietly after a long rehearsal at Monsieur Charrand’s. Edmund dropped into a deep chair beside the fire and leaned his elbows on his knees, thinking and trying not to think. Pain

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went through his mind on Jenny’s account, for he imagined she was still in love with Joshua. Poor girl! “But he’ll get her out of it,” he told himself, bringing his reflections to bear on Monsieur Charzands 2.15 He must have slept. With a start he grew conscious of a sound, a light tapping at the window. So light, it was scarcely audible. He thought at first it was the snow blowing against the window pane. But the sound was repeated, louder. He sat up, listening. Now the tapping was at the street door. He got up and went out into the hall. Cautiously he opened the door, and called softly: “Who’s out there?” “Lemme

in, son!”

Bob the Wheeler came in, and with a quick motion closed the door behind him. His manner was mysterious, his eyes furtively roving, but there was in the rest of his deportment a self-possession oddly at variance with his stealth. They walked into the parlor, and Bob made himself comfortable in the chair by the fire. “Well,” said Edmund, who remained standing, “what brought you out this time of night?” Bob’s eyelids drooped and opened wide. *“T’ve come to ye,” he said slowly, ‘“‘because I want the truth. You'll be better off if ye speak out. Ye killed Dick Kerrian!” He did not ask a question, he made the statement. At the joining of the word “killed” with Dick’s name, Edmund clenched his hands over his face. It was only a second till the shock passed, his mind grasped the fact that Dick was dead and that somebody

had done it. Dropping his hands, he walked over and hit Bob in the face. “What the hell are you talking about? Dick’s my best friend! And if you don’t quiet your damned tongue, [ll kick your damned rotten teeth in!” “Well, all right, all right,” Bob said, pulling his head away. “Ye don’t ’ave to go off the ’andle. Just ’cause I’m tellin’ ye facts! Dick Kerrian’s body was discovered at the water front by one 0’ my bummers. Hell’ll break loose in the mornin’, An’ I just wanted to be sure—about ye.” Shue why 2. simer”

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Bob’s eyes were screwed on him again suggestively, and he pronounced his words slowly, with deliberate emphasis.

“Cause Dick was on the trail of the gold that was stolen from Old Man Kerrian’s countin’ house the night o’ the fire. Lawyer Saunders ’eard ’im tell. ’E said ’e knew somethin’. An’ Saunders thought maybe I might beat the rest of ’em to it... ’e offered to split with me.” “You think Dick knew?” “T’m only supposin’.” “But—but nobody knew. Only you and me!” So great was his panic that Edmund did not realize his mistake until too late. But no sooner was the slip off his tongue than he saw by the other’s expression, a sort of satisfied glitter, how he had compromised himself. He had played directly into Bob’s hands. He hated him at that moment, with a mad, crushing hatred. “Well, I don’t know Edmund walked over Suddenly, as though mind, Bob asked, “Where For answer, Edmund

about that,” was all Bob said. to a chair and sat down heavily.

it had only that moment come into his ’ave you got the gold?” took up a candle. “Come on,” he said,

and led the way upstairs. They slid noiselessly along the hall and into Edmund’s room. Bob shut the door. Edmund walked over to the closet and seeing the chest broken open, turned around and gazed wildly at Bob, terror crawling in his look. “Someone has been to it,” he said, his voice shaking. “Uh-huh,” Bob grunted. “Now ye see, it’s more’n two knows

about it. An’ it’s no secret that’s shared by three.” He was stooping, examining the floor under the bed. In a~ moment he straightened up, holding something in his hand. He passed it over to Edmund. It was a silver-handled pistol on which were engraved in small letters the initials R. K. “It’s “is. No mistake about that. Shot ’im with ’is own pistol. Whoever dragged that boy’s body away was in a mighty big -urry. An’,” he added, “mighty careless!” They went downstairs again. Bob sat in the chair, slouched forward, his legs stretched out

toward the pleasantly burning fire, hands clasped over his stomach, and: his chin hanging low in deep concentration. The warmth of

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the fire nuzzled up his trouser leg, giving him an agreeably toasted feeling. Edmund walked up and down. Lines appeared in his face, fear and pain showed in them. “Where’s the nigger?” Bob shot the question at Edmund. “In his room, I guess. I haven’t seen him all evening. He never showed up at dinner time. He ought to be back by now.” “Yeah. He ought to.”

Edmund was irritated by the question, but he was silent, thinking of Dick. If he could only be where Dick was. Dick hadn’t deserved it. Poor Dick. Oh, what the hell! There was just one thing he could do, to get loose from Bob’s grip on him. Show the dirty scoundrel. “Tm going to give back that gold,” he said doggedly. “In the morning, I’m going to.”

Bob’s voice was a growl. “Ye are, eh? Ye do, and they’ll be ’angin’ ye for the murder o Dick Kerrian!” Edmund could feel himself turning green. But it was too damned silly! That he could be accused of the murder of his friend—which for some unlucky reason was done in his house. But it wasn’t silly. And Bob had him. Pinned. Bob came over. and laid a hand familiarly on Edmund’s shoulder. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that, son. Easy now. There’s nothin’ to be scared of, long as the gold stays hid.” Edmund jerked back, and the unctuous hand slid off like a slippery fin. “I’m not scared.” He bowed his head in his hands. ‘“‘God, I

feel like a murderer. As if I had killed two men with my own hands!” “Ye mean? Ho, ho! That’s a good one! I wouldn’t a-minded doin’ the honors for the Peck lad myself. The Judas bastard!”

Bob’s laughter was like the collapse, when squeezed, of something soft, viscous, ganglionic. He continued speaking, in a tone of dry malice. “What’ll ’is sister think o’ her sweet relatives now? Maybe she won’t be quite so ’igh and mighty!”

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Edmund was standing close to him, his arms shaking, not so much from contraction of the muscles as from the desire to let go his fists. “Shut up!” he said between his teeth. “Look out! I got a gun.” Bob’s tone was mildly ingratiating as he added, “I didn’t mean nuthin’. I didn’t mean that for a slam

on the girl. I should think ye’d feel that way yourself.” Bob had stepped back. Edmund moved up with him, still keeping his face near. His neck was thrust out, the cords standing out and working like the throat of a bullfrog, collapsing and filling up with wind. “You know where she is. You’ve always known. And now you’ve got to tell me!” “Ye can see er any time ye like. If she’s around! I ain’t ’oldin’ ye!” “Where

is she, then?”

“Ask somebody that’s been keepin’ tabs on ’er. Some of ’er missionary friends! I ain’t no bureau of information.” He started to go. But at the door he stopped. “Better tell that nigger to pray hard an’ ’old ’is tongue. If he’s got to talk he can converse with God. God don’t tell what He knows—not to constables. If He did—the hangman’d be the busiest mortal alive!” He laughed, and went out.

i) Hell did break loose the next day. The news of Dick Kerrian’s death traveled with the speed of the great fire itself. Rumors flew.

Dick had committed suicide; he had been shot in a gambling den; he was the victim of spurned love; he knew too much about a certain bank scandal he was covering for his paper; an actress had poisoned him for breach of promise; and by no means least, though it was far down the list, he had known something of a recent passion crime in which a rich little nugget of names prominent in society would have appeared if one of the principals hadn’t done him in.

Along the water front where the body was found, in count-

.

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ing houses, gin mills, in boudoir intimacies, homes of gentility and among men of the world tall tales were recounted and sufficiently relished. Everybody knew the inside facts of the story, and nothing at all. The police were the oniy ones who discoursed with simple candor: they said they were mystified. Norton Saunders came in, swelled up like a mad alligator with the news. Besides his heart and his laboring lungs, Edmund’s eyelids were the only part of his body that moved when Norton began to speak. “It’s not known whether it was murder or suicide,’’ Norton

said, leaning on his palms, as though he were addressing a jury across

the counsel

table, “‘or merely an accident.

Of course, it

might have been an accident . . .” Edmund looked up quickly. “An accident?” he repeated in a voice barely audible. Norton nodded. “The pistol was found only about two yards off. And his clothes were torn as if he had been in a struggle. The pistol might have gone off accidentally.” Only two yards off. His clothing torn as if in a struggle. ouldsBobe...e..? “Yes, that’s so,” Edmund

said, sighing. “It might have been

an accident.” Bob the Wheeler listened in stolid silence to the talk in his barroom. When Lawyer Saunders walked into the Darby and Joan one day, Bob waited for the portly little man to be seated at one of the more secluded tables. Then he came around the counter and strolled over, as a mark of respect, to take the order in person, as well as to indicate a proper attention to business and other serious matters. He naturally remained standing, until the lawyer motioned him to be seated at the same table. Mr. Saunders was drinking gin. He sighed, refilled his own

glass from the bottle on the table and touched glasses with Bob. Finally, he spoke. “Ever hear of Marlowe, Bob? Well, for a poet he was a pretty smart fellow, if a little too fond of the gay life and the ladies. But he knew life, oh, yes! and things were not so very different then, in the days of Good Queen Bess, than they are right now.

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‘Crime leads to crime, as brook to brook doth fall; until at last

death’s ocean swallows all.’ Yes, yes. Very true.” Mr. Saunders paused, to allow the full measure of this truth with its infiltrations of subtle meaning to sink in. “Murder,” he continued presently, “is a most desperate and vicious crime. It is punishable by death, death by hanging; that’s the law, sir. Not a pleasant death, to be sure. But death, no matter how it comes, may be merciful—to

the dead, as well as to the

killer.” As this last observation rolled off his tongue, he was staring with a kind of bright fixity into the small, busy eyes of Bob. “It is my business to weigh mercies. There may be extenuating circumstances, real or imagined, which if properly presented may stay the noose and restore the defendant to the bosom of his loved ones and the grace of his fellows, an accomplishment that requires wit and learning and prompt action. “J am a modest man, Bob. But I own to a large measure of perception. And in addition, I hear things. Possibly even more wonderful things than your ears take in in this illustrious establishment! What is more, I am learned in the law, and I never tarry

where speed is of the essence. “Your silence is commendable, man. Commendable, indeed! I

do not know whether you are acquainted with the incident that came to my notice recently. I heard, through one of those sources by which interesting gossip comes to me, that your former slave bought his son’s freedom from two gentlemen who laid claim to his body, and paid them in gold. A circumstance that may, or may not, arouse the hangman’s curiosity.” He gulped his tumbler, sighed again, and stood up. “Good morning, Bob. There is nothing in all New York equal to two glasses of your remarkable gin!” Bob gazed after the retreating figure of the lawyer. And there was a spark in his eye, kindled from his own appreciation of finesse. “Nuthin’ this side 0’ hell escapes that man!” Lawyer Saunders walked briskly in the cold morning sunshine. He scarcely noticed the hardening snowdrifts through which he

passed. He was smiling.

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“A thrust in the dark, but it struck home. Two

197 and two

always make four! Arithmetic hasn’t failed me yet.” An accident, that was how Edmund interpreted the mystery of Dick’s death. There must have been some sort of encounter between Uncle Henry and Dick, in which one was surprised by the other in the act of purloining the gold. In the scuffle the pistol went off. He could not conceive of the old darky committing a murder deliberately, in cold blood, any more than he could imagine such a thing of his friend. He saw in it, too, another of the fateful mischances of which his own life was so strangely filled, an instance of the unpredictable course of things in which he became embroiled. The fact that he did not choose to dwell on any of the evil consequences, the harm that might result to others from a course in which he felt himself morally in the wrong, did not now occur to him. In his want of courage to face possibilities that might thwart or interfere with his personal interests, he went on making excuses for himself, putting the blame on circumstances and on fate. And because he dreaded even now to face these things, he refrained from questioning Uncle Henry; he merely accepted the least unpleasant explanation that seemed plausible. The temperamental antagonisms, the clash of interests and point of view between Dick Kerrian and his father had long been common knowledge. Nevertheless, there were those who now proclaimed as esoteric information before all the world that the old man had broken cruelly under the loss of his son. Sentimentalists and purveyors of lamentations announced that the blow had been too much for him. The grief he concealed was destroying him. There was an element of truth in this. For the most selfcontained individualist lives, even as do his more timid fellows, in the shadow of death. That most mortal, most intolerable dread of

loneliness, personal isolation and the end of life, may be as an acute and secret force converting fear into incentive. And the more carefully guarded the ambitions of a life, the more insupportable is doom when it strikes.

It had been whispered about for some time that all was not serene in Daniel Kerrian’s affairs. His son’s death was a sort of

preliminary, the first cold stroke of ruin that fell upon him

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presently in the general monetary debacle. The very ruin he had predicted, and in scornful language had laid upon the blind unintelligence of others, overtook him. The crash came to the country even sooner than he expected, and he was caught in the panic that followed the suspension of specie payments by the banks, about which he had talked so per-

suasively to Edmund. The liquidation of his holdings had been too long delayed. The crash in American securities made them worthless in Europe. His agents had miscalculated. And now he had not enough gold on hand to meet current obligations. All his great enterprises were undone. Daniel Kerrian was bankrupt. The sensation in Wall Street was enormous. His name became a byword in the Street,

a synonym

for disaster. To have “ker-

rianed” meant a floundering and a wreckage. In banking circles the word denoted failure and bankruptcy. 16

About a month after the great fire, Jenny made a startling announcement. She was going on tour with the ballet of which Monsieur Charrand was now the inspirational director. She would be the star of the company. Everything was arranged. They were to leave the following week. Edmund received the news with amazed disapproval. “But you can’t mean it, seriously! That sort of thing, it lowers a woman’s standing. To go around the country and mix up with all sorts of people and be brought in contact with their loose Wav

Me s

ns:|

“Loose ways! Why, the idea of your talking like that, Edmund. What do you know of artistic people? You! You’re a perfect ignoramus.” Jenny set her little mouth, her eyes snapping fury, in a determination Edmund knew it was foolish to challenge. She meant to get her way, and she would, by one means or another. She was

fearfully angry with him for his stupid opposition. Still, she did not like to put herself in the wrong. And so obediently and capably was her emotional nature at the service of her mind and its desires

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that she could always shed tears at the appropriate moment to gain sympathy for herself. “Oh, dear,” she lamented, “you make me say these things! You’re so unreasonable. And you don’t care a bit about my future.” “Of course, dear, I do,” he answered, sighing. “Only it seems to me you have so little sentiment.” He was thinking, how easy it had been for her to forget Dick in the short time. It was so easy for some people, why not for him? He had forgotten nothing he had ever felt. And never would. Now

Jenny.

and then, at long intervals, Edmund

Bright

triumphs;

letters,

the wonderful

full of chatter

about

had letters from

herself

and

her

clothes she had now, the brilliant life,

her gay, wonderful friends. Then he heard with astonishment, she Was going to Paris. He saw her when she passed through New York to sail. Only one afternoon, for she seemed to have as many engagements as a duchess, to say nothing of hours upon hours at the dressmaker’s. He never saw her again. For when she made her infrequent visits to America, he was in prison. All his human and material anchorages were gone. In the boredom and futility of his life now, he went a great deal to the Darby and Joan. It was only the first evidence of a great change in his situation, a change that on the surface would seem to have had its origin in the cementing of a business connection with Bob the Wheeler, but which in reality had long preceded the external developments, having had its actual beginning much earlier, in that unknown hour when the spirit of change enters the psychic self. Bob the Wheeler was distinguished as a gentleman of versatile abilities. All who possessed an acquaintance with his intimate preoccupations knew him for a man of exceptional shrewdness in a variety of those malpractices from which power and money derive unlawfully. North of the Mason and Dixon line, for aid rendered to runaway slaves and his consequent connection with the underground railroad in that particular field of humanitarian endeavor, he was known and esteemed as an Abolitionist. He went a great deal to meetings attended by that Abolitionist man of the hour, Arthur Tappan, and by others of equal prominence—Garret Smith, Judge

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Jay, Captain Stuart, Joshua Leavett; and always conducting him-

self at such gatherings like a man of humane and Christian ideals. This behavior conflicted not at all in Bob’s reckoning, it was even of peculiar value in dealings below the line, where he resold escaped slaves and freedmen in a lucrative traffic carried on with southern landowners. But it was not with these things that Edmund dealt. Never in his life had he been to an Abolition meeting. He interested himself but little in issues of any kind, social or humanitarian. His single concern was to make money—to emerge out of the vast, anonymous obscurity of poverty into power, position and the prestige that money confers. And so it happened about this time, shortly after the fire, that this desire—which had suffered no check from recent events and only a temporary collapse of the hopes centering about Daniel Kerrian—continued to mount and exactly fitted the necessity of Bob the Wheeler for a young man of dependable intelligence to assist him in an important field of his undertakings. It was the most important of all, in fact, a domain provided with necessary connections—bankers and other useful persons. It was the business of making and retailing counterfeit bills. Bob was accounted a shrewd judge of character. He had always had his eye on Edmund. And more recently he had perceived that the time was ripe—Edmund’s character had inclined suffciently in the direction of Bob’s interests. He had become a man whose intellectual and moral virtues could be useful, and whose

weaknesses were of a nature to permit his talents to function in

the service of criminal ends without interference from those higher qualities. From his first desperate hatred of the other’s power over him, Edmund was awakening to a practical view of the man’s potentialities. He was coming to see in Bob another Daniel Kerrian—one whose operations chanced to be in a different realm. But not so very different in ulterior motives—money and power. “The trouble with Daniel Kerrian,”’ Bob once

remarked

to

Edmund, “was that he loved the glitter of gold!” Bob had his own uses for gold. But paper served him as well. Expert engravers could be had for good pay, men with no ob-

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jections to taking their compensation in the currency they created. The old room at the back of the Darby and Joan had become Bob’s council chamber. It had the air of a board room. Bob presided at the important conclaves around the big table in the same old beer-stained white apron he wore in the bar, sleeves rolled up over his fat-looking, muscular arms. But though his costume remained exactly the same from year to year, the room with its embellishments became a different place —a bright red carpet now covered the dirty floor, and in the center stood a large oblong mahogany table surrounded by tall straightbacked chairs. Settees covered with bright red velvet cushions were ranged along the wall between the yellow satin-curtained windows. Heavy, gilt-framed mirrors hung on the walls. They created an effect of splendid amplitude, and they made the men of affairs who came to the meetings feel at home in the gingerbread parlor magnificence of the period, in the style of their Wall Street offices. For Bob these mirrors had still another kind of usefulness—they enabled him to keep an eye on the gentlemen seated at the long table, even when his back was turned. And in the same way they

made it easy to hold the entrance, opening off a dim passage just wide enough for one person, in range of his perpetually busy glance. Huge figures were bandied back and forth at these sittings. Reports were heard and instructions given out for the distribution of the enormous supplies of counterfeit bills that were despatched

over the country. Edmund had a great deal to do. Being equipped with a little more education than his chief, and a greater facility in acquiring knowledge, it became his business to study conditions of the money market and to confer with bankers about rates of exchange. He appointed agents for specific fields of operation; and also passed

upon the quality of the work of the engravers. The bills had to be inspected and tested most carefully before being released.

As Bob’s adviser, he had almost as much power as his superior. But Bob retained the chief control, and his assistants recognized that it was healthier not to cross his will. Once Edmund had ventured upon a mild criticism of his methods; he never cared to repeat the action.

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It was on the day of the Flour Riot, in the panicky days of 1837 when, according to Daniel Kerrian’s prediction, banks were closed and specie withdrawn from circulation. Thousands of unemployed walked the streets. At Bob’s conference table they were busy, and Bob’s gold was fetched out of hoarding to finance large

shipments of flour and foodstuffs. When the shipments arrived, they were immediately stored and held over to boost prices. If the poor went hungry, it caused Bob no sleepless night. But it did worry a Mr. Hart, who was still outside the zone of Bob’s influence. It became known that Hart had received a large supply of flour which he intended to throw on the market at prices within reach of the suffering populace. Some of Bob’s henchmen from Five Points led a gang of ruffians to Hart’s warehouse and destroyed the flour. Edmund remonstrated. ‘“There’s a limit to oppression!” Bob stiffened in his large armchair, a look of flint in his eyes.

“T like ye, lad,” he said, ‘‘an’ ’m thinkin’ great things for ye. Don’t cross me.” And then there was the affair of a certain prominent banker who committed suicide after his ill-advised protest against raising

the exchange rate had drawn a cold rebuke from the high commander. It happened about the time a new man was taken into the ring of counterfeiters, an engraver recently discharged from the government service, who brought with him an official die stolen from the government mint. The talents of this individual were of such a superior order that a large quantity of new money, absolutely safe from detection, was prepared for the market within a very short time. The banker in question, tall, dignified and of © forceful presence, stood up in the conference and protested. “Tt will put a heavy drain on the specie reserve of the banks. It’s impractical from every angle. It will ruin us!” Bob’s reply was a question. But his nail-driven look into the other’s eyes pronounced the man’s death sentence. “And what will you do with your reserve? Are you a better keeper than I?” Thanks

to their influential connections,

as well as to their

dollars, Bob and his associates enjoyed an easy immunity from the law. The Darby and Joan was never bothered with official inspec-

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tions. Protection was paid for and received. And yet, important as was the protection of these men, in dread of incurring the animosity of Bob, Edmund could not fail to see that the arrangement worked out to a mutual advantage. They weren’t so much coerced as they appeared to be. They got something out of it for themselves, indeed yes. For a number of very good reasons, it was worth the price to keep in with Bob. Edmund imagined and believed they

were playing a game of their own—egging on that man of many tricks in the pursuit of power; deliberately, and with great neatness, lending encouragement to his egotistical delusions for their own ends which they chose not to reveal. He could not be sure. Nearly ten years after his first association with Bob the Wheeler, and in spite of being indifferent still to the cause of Abolition, Edmund finally was persuaded to go to one of the meetings. It was on Uncle Henry’s account that he went. “My boy’ll be dere,” Uncle Henry announced with beaming pride. “I sho’ wish you had a intention to go to dat meetin’. He gwine talk to de folks fum de platform. An’ how big dat boy kin talk!” Edmund had never seen Zeppy. But he had heard of him from time to time as an energetic and respected worker in the cause. Bob the Wheeler expressed himself as of the opinion that Edmund wouldn’t miss much if he stayed away. “What, you a high priest of Abolition, and you talk that way?” “Rats!” Bob remarked impiously. “I never was much on that poppycock. Lotta teetotalers and women.” “Well, I guess there’s no harm done if I go,’ Edmund said. ‘What’s the matter? You’re so much the other way, all of a sudden.

“Sure, sure. Go right along! ’Ave a good time. Go an’ get your face washed by the evangelists an’ all like that.” The meeting was being held in the church at the corner of Catherine and Madison streets. At the last minute Bob discovered an inclination to come

along. The church was already jammed

when they got there. Edmund glanced about, surprised and rather amused by the spectacle of blacks and whites sitting together on benches in intimate and companionable interest. An ebony girl

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with a white escort. A huge nigger, black as the ace of spades, sitting between two white girls. And on the platform with the other speakers, Arthur Tappan and his brother, Lewis. Edmund followed Bob down the center aisle to a couple of seats directly in front of the platform. There was a prolonged wait. Finally, when the atmosphere of the church had become positively stifling, a door at the rear opened, and down the aisle walked a tall yellow negro accompanied by a young white woman. At sight of them, the people on the stage stood up. The rest of the audience kept their seats, bursting into applause. Shouts and whistles followed the two people all the way to the foot of the aisle. Zeppy took a seat over at one side of the platform, as Arthur Tappan stood up and called for the opening prayer. But Edmund paid no attention to him or to the speaker, for just then the young woman turned to seat herself beside Zeppy and he saw her face for the first time. She was Elizabeth Peck. He heard no word of what any of them said, Zeppy or the rest. All his old emotion whirled up in a cloud that filled his brain and left him weak. So many women in the world, he thought, how could one woman do this just by her presence, and after so many years? He could not understand it. He only knew that to be near her again was both happiness and pain, and he could not forget. Not even for all she had made him suffer. She wore a plain black silk dress that hung straight from the waist, and her face, at moments,

wore

a kind of soft smile

from within. He kept his eyes upon her all the time, wondering, -

believing she must feel them burning across the intervening space. And the poignancy of her face, lit with that curiously soft and remote smile, made him believe that she had suffered, perhaps, as much as he. He saw her rise from her seat and bow toward the loudly acclaiming audience. Her voice came low, rising gradually to a flood-

ing crescendo, as the light on her face like the radiation of inspired martyrdom burst from her eyes. Elizabeth told of her own experiences. Of days and nights hiding in swamps; of desperate human beings fleeing before yelp-

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of poor, kindly folk who hid whole families from

enraged pursuers. And, finally, of her mission to weld more closely the units of the underground railroad and of years spent in prison, having been betrayed to the southern authorities by someone in her confidence. Edmund sat still, waiting, until the church was almost cleared of people. Then he got up, and restraining the passion that spurred his feet, forcing himself to walk slowly, as if it were necessary to discipline himself, he went forward and mounted the steps of the platform. Elizabeth did not look toward him. But all the while she was shaking hands and speaking to the people who lingered, slow to leave, she was conscious of his presence. She had already seen him in the audience. Not until the last man was leaving the stage did she turn, her face tense, her manner a mingling of eagerness and hesitation. Words

burst from his throat, and he heard his own voice,

subdued and pleading. “Elizabeth! I’ve loved you, I’ve been as good as dead all this time!” And her voice, husky, agitated .. . “Oh, Edmund!”

She had taken his hands and was gazing intently up into his face. And as they clung together, unconscious of the empty stage, he kissed her quickly. And again he heard her voice low and murmuring, as they surrendered to their emotion.

17 “So,” Bob the Wheeler said the next morning, “you’re ditchin

>

me! I been knowin’ all along it would happen as soon as the girl showed up. You’re choosin’ to part company. Well, it ain’t up to me to learn ye. But if you’re thinkin’ a marryin’ that pertickaler female, ye’ll be joinin’ up with a load o’ grief ye ain’t exactly goin’ to enjoy.”

Edmund stepped closer, cold fury in his face. “Hanging’s too good for your kind,” he said. “Elizabeth had a dose of hell for five years—because of your rotten doings!”

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Bob nodded his head.

“Unfortunate, it certainly was. But I wish ye wouldn’t talk that way, son. It ain’t right. "Cause I might mention a few things in your character that ain’t exactly recommended in the Ten Commandments. See? One o’ them lads we sent back beefed about ‘er an’ me. I ’eard about it.” ‘And you never told me!” “What for? Ye’d a been goin’ down to fit your neck to a rope. Them Southerners don’t love us.” ‘“Haven’t you got your hands on enough? You didn’t need

to do that kind of thing—for just a few more dollars!” Bob was scarcely impressed by Edmund’s moral censure. He grinned.

“I won’t answer that question,” he said. “Not now. But ye meet me tonight, will ye? You and Elizabeth .. . Pll let ye see for yourself.” Elizabeth was not glad to see Bob again. But she consented to go on this peculiar night ramble because she knew Edmund wished it. And because, in spite of the loathing she bore this man whose treachery toward her was identified in her mind with betrayal of humanity, she could not help being curious about the motivations of a creature she considered so absolutely evil. Bob walked rapidly and in silence. He guided them across Broadway, then over to the Bowery, noisy with gin mills and

flamboyant in the light of gas lamps, pitch torches, and store windows bedizened with ten cent finery. Vendors of honey pears and popcorn cried their wares unceasingly. Bob flung an occasional greeting into the jostling crowds. Except for such indifferent ~

acknowledgment of salutations disregarded by the others, he, to all appearances, cared nothing for the existence of the throngs, laughing, singing, bawling and filling the sidewalks. They turned suddenly off the Bowery, into the malodorous darkness of Anthony Street. The effect was of an entrance into an underground cave, a Stygian region of abortive shadows. Now and then one of the shadows halted, obliquely peering, then batlike flitted on. Houses sweating darkness, and leaning without form. Streets dwindled to lanes and alleys, floored with soft mud. Edmund knew that Bob was attempting to justify himself as

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a nigger snatcher. But why was he taking them to Five Points? Stumbling on, keeping hold of Elizabeth’s arm, he asked himself what possible connection all this could have—this nocturnal promenade through the back alleys of crime—with any purpose existing in the mind of that strange man of proving himself in the right. Whatever may have been in the mind of Bob the Wheeler, he made no mention of it yet. Only the motion of his eyes in his rigid face gave evidence of a constant concealed watchfulness, never for a moment relaxed. Once he spun around suddenly. Edmund and Elizabeth heard him speaking in a low-voiced, hostile drone to some invisible person or persons. “By Jeez, ye’re askin’ for a funeral!”

He moved forward, and coming abreast of a darkened doorway, reached in and hauled forth two shaking figures. “Varmin!”

They were curiously acquiescent, while his hands groped around in their coats. “Keryst!” He spat on the ground, in the same moment holding up two knives with broad, thick, straight blades, almost as long as swords. “Ye’d think ye knew ’ow to use em! Ye come to the tavern tomorrer, I'll ’ave some’n to tell ye. An’ if I don’t see ye, Pll be sendin for ye. In the meantime, I'll be leavin’ ye a little present.” His fist shot out, striking two blows in rapid succession. *That’s the language they understand,” he said, coming up again with Edmund and Elizabeth, who stood waiting. They stopped in front of a four-story wooden building, silent, gloomy, apparently without life. It was triangular in shape, with an alley reaching around on two sides. “I’m introducin’ ye to Old Brewery,” Bob announced, with a laugh. “America’s proudest mansion. One ahead of the White House. Come in an’ make yourself at ome!” He led them up a broken stairway, flight after flight, pushing open doors and going without knocking into rooms adjoining the dark central halls. Stairs and floor boards creaked underfoot. The smells issuing from walls and cracks blended together in one vile, colossal stench of animal and human dirt. Misshapen creatures crouched on filthy floors.

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One of the rooms, not more than fifteen feet square, lodged twenty-six squatting, hunched and lolling apparitions that bore only a shocking resemblance to human beings. In the illumination of a single candle end, blotched, diseased, famished faces peered at the visitors. A mixed assemblage—black and white, infants, children, derelicts of both sexes. All of them silent, dumb. All with

eyes lifelessly staring. On another floor a door stood open. They entered a small, narrow room. In one corner, by the dying flicker of a sperm candle, they perceived the crouching figure of a woman holding in her arms a wailing child who tugged with desperate and defeated activity at its mother’s sterile breast. The thought flicked across Edmund’s mind, as he watched Bob approach and drop a coin into the outstretched claw of the woman, that this playing Santa Claus to the poor was one of his most lucrative and useful poses! The woman clutched the coin with savage interest, biting it and storing it somewhere in her bosom. Across the hall from this miserable hole was a large room extending the length of the building. It was filled with negroes, mostly half naked, and of every shade darker than white. In the dim candlelight black faces and yellow faces leered like grotesque and gaunt ceremonial masks. There were at least a hundred of them. A subdued murmuring broke out when the door opened. And then from somewhere out of sight a shriek tore through the room. A woman flung herself down in front of Bob. Still shrieking, she clutched his hand and dragged it to her lips. “Massa Bob, de snatchers got my boy. Oh, oh, for Jesus’ sake, save my boy!” Withdrawing his hand, Bob said, ‘The snatchers didn’t get your boy. He bungled a job. He’ll get himself a stretch in the marble works.” The woman

looked at him, fear-stricken.

“Mah boy ain’t goin’ down South?” Bob laughed. “He’s goin’ north—to Sing Sing.” The woman fell on her knees. Cries, choked supplications gushed from her. Other voices were lifted up and quickly the room was in an uproar with wailing, rocking figures doubled over in

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B6s

attitudes of frenzied thanksgiving for the colored boy saved from slavery by the crime which sent him, a prisoner, to Sing Sing. Horrified and amazed, Edmund

and Elizabeth followed Bob

down the rickety stairs. Back at the Darby and Joan, Bob said to Elizabeth, “I wanted

ye to see. Ye talked about swords and blood and war. Ye see it comin’. So do I. It'll rock the land, the world. Death’ll live with

life an’ they’ll welcome it, glory in it. An’ when it’s over, what'll you ’ave?” He brought his fist down on the arm of his chair. “Old Brewery!

“Ye’re warrin’ for an ideal. But it’s the ideal ye think most of, not human bein’s. Ye’re condemnin’ slavery an’ givin’ no thought to the poor creatures prayin’ to be free.” He got up and came over and stood in front of her, looking fiercely down into her upturned eyes. “Have ye thought of the misery ye an’ yer missionary friends are bringin’ to them poor devils? They’re shackled, slaves, but they ’ave food an’ shelter. An’ most of ’em are ’appy. The only kind of ’appiness they know. Ye’re sendin’ ’em loose into a world that’s strange to ’em an’ don’t know ’em. An’ then what? The slaves of the South become the beggars of the North! Ye give ’em freedom but no food. They come ’ere without masters an’ also without clothes to cover their skins. They ask for help. An’ ye tell ’em to pray!

Edmund had risen and was standing behind Elizabeth. “You help them escape,” he said with blunt sarcasm, “and return them South to new masters. Their dose of freedom makes them more desperate!” Bob’s countenance cracked in one of his abortive grins. “Maybe,” he said. “My conscience don’t hurt me none. The man that seeks freedom, I’ll help ’im get it. But there’s slavery Wworse’n ye see on plantations an’ in cotton fields. It’s the white man’s little contraption. Law he calls it. But the law don’t take into consideration that the poor nigger can’t eat freedom. An’ it can’t clothe ’im. When ’e hunts for grub an’ clothes, the law takes is freedom. ’E’s sent to prison. A slave again. Instead of one, ’e ’as a hundred masters. Instead of pickin’ cotton, ’e hammers rock. Instead of one whip, the thousand stings of the cat-o’-nine-tails.

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An’ instead of wide open fields, ’e lives in a narrow cell the sun never reaches. It’s a steep price to pay for liberty!” “So you—” Edmund began. “So I saves the poor nigger from a hell worse’n slavery. It’s

only the ones in trouble that’s snatched an’ run South again. An’ it’s only to save ’em goin’ to Sing Sing.” “Bob the Wheeler, the good Samaritan! The black man’s God.” Bob shrugged his shoulders. “But why?” Elizabeth said. “

ment.”

She breathed heavily. “You have nothing to atone for, Elizabeth,” Edmund

said in

a jesting, chiding tone. Her features softened. She smiled, and shook her head.

“Perhaps not for myself, Edmund.” There was a dull glow in her eyes. And that was how it ended. She was quieter the rest of the evening. Hardly responsive. It was with a sense of relief that he left her at her rooms, and walked home.

Now for the first time since early childhood he felt the need

of prayer. He tried to picture the figure of Christ on the cross. But instead there was Elizabeth, her face lifted, her eyes brilliant. He spent sleepless hours tossing on his bed. Calm came to him with the dawn. He was surer of himself. Sure, also, about Bob the

Wheeler, and his pious justification. He could not understand how he could have permitted himself to be so dominated. He, of course, did not know that Daniel Kerrian had sown within him the seed of avarice which Bob had shrewdly coaxed into a growth of his

own whim. But that was when he was adrift, with no anchorage. Now he had Elizabeth. She would set him right. He understood more clearly now the urge that had drawn her away from him. “Sacrifice,” she had said. To atone for the sins of her father and brother. But that was over. Did she not understand that in casting him off she had driven him to Bob? He would make her see it. She would understand. He wanted to be right, with her, with himself, with God. She could help him...

.

It may have been that Elizabeth did understand. Or that she yielded to her secret and suppressed passion, from which even for her there was no escape. At any rate, she made no protest against his insistence on her visiting the old Roosevelt Street house. And in the very room where, years before, they had bade each other good-bye, she now

surrendered, trembling, to his embrace.

They were married the next day. Bob the Wheeler grinned when Edmund told him.

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“T ain’t ’oldin’ it against ye, son,” was the way he put it, as Edmund declined to drink with him, “though I ain’t strong on this teetotaler stuff.” He eyed him narrowly. ‘‘There’s gold a-comin’ Eorye.”

Edmund refused to take any part of it. “She wouldn’t like it, Bob.”

Bob gulped his glass of gin. And wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Seems like ye mean it, son,” he said, with a broad grin, “but if ye ever change yer mind .. .” Edmund did not wait to hear. He left hurriedly. He went back to the shipyards as a laborer. Elizabeth continued with her philanthropic and religious activities, and established the first mission in Five Points. It seemed at last that happiness had come to them both. One day, a year later, they were sitting in the parlor of the Roosevelt Street house, talking and sipping coffee. “Exciting times down there in Texas,’ Edmund was saying. _ “There'll be trouble with Mexico about it. War.” Elizabeth sighed comfortably. “Thank God, it’s too far away to bother us here in the East.” Edmund shook his head. *Tt’?ll come on us. Don’t you see, it’s all tied up with the

slavery question? The more land we get hold of, the more problems. And every new problem increases the tension. Some day it’ll all blow up.” Elizabeth looked worried. She opened her mouth to speak, then apparently thought better of it. Her lips tightened. She stared thoughtfully through the window. Edmund was eying her. “You’re worried, Lize,” he said, wondering.

She rose hurriedly and came over to him. Her hand stroked his hair as she stooped to kiss him. “You’ve made me very happy, Edmund.” He drew her down toward him. Both were silent, overwhelmed

with the peace and happiness that was theirs. “Let the world crumble,” he whispered, holding her in a tight embrace, ‘‘we’ll have our own little universe.”

She smiled her acquiescence.

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That night Elizabeth returned late from her meeting in Five Points. Edmund had already retired, and mumbled a sleepy protest at her tardiness. It happened again the next night. And the next. And again the next. She laughed off his objections. And promised it would not happen again. She kept her word. But Edmund noticed the deepening lines in her face, and her abstracted look. In the weeks and months that followed she showed less and less interest in his work, hardly ever asked about the names of ships he was building. Or about the progress at the shipyard. At first he was curious, then worried. Once—it was the day when a number of negroes were rounded up somewhere in Five Points as runaway slaves—Edmund detected the old glitter in her eyes. He watched her drawn features grow hard. It was merely her deep resentment, he told himself, and said nothing about it. He dismissed the sudden twitch of his muscles as groundless fear. He was sure Elizabeth was happy with him, with her work in Five Points. Yet he was conscious of a tremor in the region of his heart. And of a wobbly feeling. As if he were losing his hold on something that had given him strength and a sense of security. 18

It might have been merely accidental, their meeting on lower Broadway as Edmund was walking home from the shipyard. Edmund had not seen Bob for over a year. He responded coldly to the other’s warm greeting. And wondered why the grinning barkeeper turned around and fell in step with him. For a while they walked in silence. Edmund did not encourage any conversation. Finally, Bob coughed, a low, guttural cough. “Are ye ’appy?” he asked, grinning broadly. Edmund resented the question. But he remained outwardly calm. “Of course,” he replied, putting into the words all the emphasis he could command. “I suppose by now ye’re one o’ them Abolitionists.” “T’m not bothering with anything,” Edmund said. Bob coughed again, and cleared his throat. ““An’ the missus?”

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Edmund felt a momentary tremor in his limbs. “Just attending to her mission,” he said uncertainly. They continued walking. Bob did not press Edmund. “Still teetotaling?” And without waiting for an answer, he suggested, ““How about a drink o’ somethin’ that mission people take? There ain’t nothin’ in it to stir the blood.” Edmund told himself that he did not want to go with Bob. He had never despised him more. Yet when Bob turned the corner into the street that led to the Darby and Joan, he made no attempt to break from him. He continued walking. In a few minutes he was sitting in the red tapestried chamber in the rear of the tavern. Bob had gulped two tumblers of gin. Edmund had taken a mint. “No

alcohol in this,” Bob assured him.

Edmund

looked around at the familiar setting. Bob noticed

it, and grinned. “Things ain’t like the old days, son,” he said, after a while.

“Wallpaperin’ ’s gettin’ dangerous. That hifalutin tribe played me dirt.” Sensing Edmund’s interest, Bob gulped another glass of gin, and continued. “Remember when we cornered bills that looked like the real thing?” got their fill, they put the screws on day an army of brassbuttons descends

the gold market with them He sighed. ““Well, when they the district attorney, an’ one on our hideaway and smashes

everything to smithereens. They took the guy that made ’em. I ’ad all I c’d do to get ’im off—an’ save my own neck,” he added ruefully. Edmund laughed. “Why didn’t you put the squeeze on them?” he asked. Bob filled his tumbler, held it up to the light, eyed it, then gulped it down with a single swallow. “They tells about a bloke named Job, one o’ them Bible fel-

lahs, ’bout called it.”” hairy hand “An’

’is settin’ up a religion all ’is own. Patience was what ’e The heavy, scowling face was close to Edmund’s, the still gripping the empty glass. that’s the religion I got, too. The things I wait fer,

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come.” He set the glass down hard on the table. A cunning look crept into his eyes. ““An’ I’m waitin’ fer ye, too!”

Edmund smiled. Then laughed. An uneasy, mirthless laugh. “You'll have to find another religion, Bob. There’s nothing this side of hell can drag me back to you.” He rose and made for the door. Bob’s arm reached out, gripped his shoulder and forced him back into the chair. “It’s the gal ye’re thinkin’ of .. .” Edmund paled and glared at the gin-soaked, crafty face. Welle near “Think she’s stayin’ ’ome cookin’ vittels and darnin’ socks?” Edmund clenched his fists, extending them across the table. Bob stretched to his full height and looked down, with a defiant scowl. “TI don’t suppose ye’d be knowin’ she’s gone back to the niggecs!” Edmund’s fists opened. He leaned back in his chair.

“What of it?” he said in a cool voice. “T told ye she warn’t the marryin’ kind,” Bob muttered. His face relaxed into a broad grin. He waved his arms in a warning gesture. “She'll be leavin’ ye afore long, I reckon.” A stinging pain shot through Edmund’s body. His lips trembled. But he was smiling. “When that happens, Pll. . .” “Ye’ll listen to somethin’ I’ve been wantin’ to tell ye.” Edmund paused at the door, a cold suspicious look in his eyes. “Tf it’s got anything to do with counterfeiting, don’t waste your breath.” Bob’s head shook vigorously. “°?T'ain’t nothin’ measly, son.” “What is it?” Edmund asked curiously. The scowl on Bob’s face gave way to a broad grin. ““Nothin’ except an idee that’ll make us a million dollars!” “A million!” Edmund echoed in an awed tone. Bob nodded solemnly. “Tt’s like this,” Bob said, when Edmund had resumed his chair.

A swallow of gin started his flow of words. And while Ed-

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mund sat motionless, his eyes glued on his gesticulating host, Bob

expanded on the plan that was to make them rich. “It’s like this, son. An’ I’m tellin’ ye ’cause I'll be needin’ someone with good learnin’. A smart appearin’ lad like ye.” He breathed deeply. ““There’s goin’ to be a war with Mexico. I got it straight from that tribe of thievin’ bankers. An’ they got it straight from Washington. In fact, they’re pushin’ it ’ard. It’s their idee the stars an’ stripesll cross the Rio Grande an’ stay there. An’ take in Californy, too. An’ they’re sayin’ as there’ll be big contracts, food, an’

horses, an’ mules, an’ clothin’ an’ everythin’ else that makes an army march an’ fight. An’ they’re thinkin’ it’s their pie.” Edmund stared, uncomprehending. “An’ they’re willin’ to slice the pie!”’ Bob’s fist pounded the table. “TI don’t see that they’d need you,” Edmund said doubtfully. “Me!” exclaimed Bob, thumping his chest with his fist. “It’s me that'll scare up the men that’ll make old mules young, an’ lame ones whole. It’s me that’ll scour the warehouses fer forgotten stock an’ freshen ’*em up to look an’ taste like new. An’ it’s ye’”—Bob leaned over and whispered—‘‘c’n be my agent!” Edmund’s face had paled as Bob talked. He did not stir when the harangue ended. His eyes were wide open, staring. But it was not Bob the Wheeler they were seeing. Old man Kerrian seemed to be standing before him, talking expansively about human wreckage, and millions. Gold! As on the night of the great fire, when the money belt had burned against his body. The gold that had brought him fear of Bob. He felt the same fear now. This dirty, greasy man was drawing him away from Elizabeth, setting him once more adrift. If only he were sure she would not leave him. He felt chilled. And desperate. “Millions!” Bob was saying in that guttural voice of his, “Let’s have a drink,” Edmund said weakly. Bob

poured

him

a glass of gin, and stood over

him

as he

gulped it down. “Better have another,” he suggested, grinning. It was near midnight when Edmund stalked into the Roosevelt Street house. Elizabeth was in her room, waiting. She gasped as he

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entered, and rose hurriedly to help him to a chair. He waved her aside. And stood before her, reeling. “Edmund!” There was pain in her voice, and shock. And wonder not unmixed with sadness in her wide-open eyes. “Edmund! What’s come over you?” Her voice quivered. A drunken laugh twisted from his lips. He came closer to her, and waved his hand in her stricken face.

“So,” he jeered, as his body swayed unsteadily, ‘‘you’re going back to the niggers!” She stepped away from him. He followed her. “Ts it true?” He shouted the words. She shrank farther away.. His eyes, red and bleary, sought hers. “‘Is it true?” She was standing with her back against the wall. Suddenly she straightened up, and looked steadily at him. ; “You’re drunk, Edmund!”

He hesitated a moment, making an effort to steady himself. His hand still waved at her. “Drunk, eh? Sure I’m drunk!” He laughed boisterously. ‘““Me and Bob ’re joining up again!” He left her suddenly and tramped from the room. She listened as he descended the stairs to the floor below. And waited until she heard him slump into a chair in the parlor. Then she followed him. He looked up as she called his name. She was on her knees beside him. “Try to understand, Edmund.” She spoke softly. “I won’t leave you. . . I won’t go. I'll stay with you.” He made a great effort to throw off his stupor, but failed. He sank back, breathed deeply; his eyes closed. She sighed, rose to her feet and walked slowly from the room.

19 Neither Edmund nor Elizabeth referred to the incident the next day. Or ever. Apparently both were determined to forget it,

yet each knew the other remembered. And it was that consciousness which forced them apart. He, fearful that his drunken threat to rejoin Bob had cooled her love and turned her from him; she, mortified at her own restlessness, that she nad not been able to

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still permanently the call of her mission. She had so wanted peace, and the security that Edmund’s love had promised. Her earlier urge to devote herself to service as a kind of expiation for the sins of those of her kin who had strayed from the path of righteousness had weakened before the tremendous pull of her reawakened passion. She knew now that it had transcended and grown beyond any expiatory purpose. She no longer conceived her relationship to the Cause in the spirit of sacrifice. It had become rather an implacable call to duty, to participate in the moral uplift that was to unshackle the bonds of human beings, perhaps even to lead in the great struggle that seemed so imminent. And in the gathering momentum of her hysteria, she even dreamed of herself as a modern Joan of Arc

who would lead her hosts of black men out of the depths of their degradation into the golden glory of freedom. These undefined, chaotic inspirations were transforming the Roosevelt Street house into a prison, and making repugnant the intimacies which the eager and full-blooded Edmund demanded of her. Edmund saw in her increasing indifference the certain evidence of her rising aversion, which he ascribed to the night of his drunken folly. And he found himself hating Bob more bitterly than ever. He avoided the Darby and Joan, and gave himself to his work with an intensity that surprised his employers. Yet bitter as Edmund was toward Bob, and fearful as he was

about Elizabeth, he had not been able to banish utterly from his mind the man’s dream of wealth. He would sit at the table with Elizabeth, or in the parlor, when words came slowly to them, steal-

ing guarded glances at each other, and Bob’s guttural words would

ring in his ears. “A million!” In those moments he would let his imagination run riot. Why not? Old Man Kerrian knew the power of gold. It meant something to be rich. He could be somebody. The thought struck him, stabbing into his consciousness with lightning suddenness, that with gold he could help in her work. He seized on the soothing rationalization. A million dollars would go far to advance the Cause. There had been talk, she had mentioned it once in the days when they had been surer of each other, about an uprising of the slaves. “It would take money to bring it about,” she said. “And

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leaders,” he had told her. Yes, with money, and under her leader-

ship, it might be accomplished. And then, sobered, he had laughed inwardly, thinking of Bob’s astonishment if he knew. But even before the fantastic thought took shape in his mind, he realized that he would not go through with it. He wanted the gold for himself. Elizabeth was drifting from him. His own moorings were weakening. He would need a new prop. It would be that million! Yes, he hated Bob. And pitied himself for the vacillations that tormented him. Edmund and Elizabeth settled down to a period of despairing watchfulness, each waiting for the other to say the words that would bring them closer together, each suspicious of the other’s thoughts. Then came that night when Uncle Henry shuffled into the parlor, panic in his face, his eyes bulging, his body swaying drunkenly. Elizabeth looked pained. Edmund rose hurriedly and went toward the white-haired negro, intending to lead him away. But Uncle Henry dropped to his knees. His face was raised toward Edmund, and his mouth opened and closed noiselessly. Either the man was drunk, Edmund thought, or in some fix. “Speak up, man,” he ordered grufily. A moan came from the sniveling negro, and he flung himself down, his fingers clutching Edmund’s feet. “Dey taken mah boy!” he gasped finally. “Dey sendin’ him back down South!” Edmund stooped and raised the tearful old man to his feet. “Tell me about it.”” He spoke sharply. And then as Elizabeth’s face turned pale and lined, and Edmund’s jaw squared, Uncle Henry told of Zeppy’s capture by a band of “burkers.” He was even then being held in captivity somewhere among the dives of the city, and threatened with return

to slavery. “Ah bought his freedom!” the negro wailed. They turned from Uncle Henry and eyed each other. Edmund’s jaw was already rounder. He glanced away from Elizabeth, a troubled look on his face.

“Bob’ll know something about this,” Elizabeth said grimly. “Tl go to him.”

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And while Edmund stood staring down at the moaning negro, she ran upstairs, put on her cloak and descended rapidly; waving aside Edmund’s detaining arm, she emerged into the street. Edmund felt dazed. He walked uncertainly across the floor toward the bowed figure of Uncle Henry who was on his knees praying. At his approach, the tearful, ash-hued face looked up at him. ““Ah’m blessin’ Jesus fer her, Mister Edmund,” he said reven-

ently, “she’s God’s angel.” Edmund was stirred into sudden action. A great fear seized him. Elizabeth would be alone with Bob! He should never have let her go. He cursed himself inwardly for his hesitancy. And

damned himself for a vacillating fool. He could have shown himself strong. He should have gone to Bob, set himself right with Elizabeth. Bob’s taunting million! What was it, compared with the respect and love of Elizabeth? “Let’s go,” he called to the trembling negro, “we'll follow her.? ; Uncle Henry jumped to his feet. He disappeared into his room, returning in a moment. Edmund’s feverish eyes were fixed on the pistol in the black man’s trembling hand. He reached for it mechanically and slid it into his pocket. As he ran down the street, his thoughts converged in a burning spearhead. In the press. of action, his resolve crystallized, grew firmer. He would explain it all to Elizabeth, he had not meant to go back to Bob... . He disregarded the curious stares of the idlers at the tavern bar, and pushed his way through the passage leading to the back room, Uncle Henry following him. White aproned, sleeves rolled up over his fat elbows, Bob the

Wheeler was standing braced against the edge of the long table. Elizabeth was facing him. Both looked up as Edmund entered. A few moments they remained silent. Edmund, pale and breathing heavily, came near to Elizabeth. “1 shouldn’t have let you come,” he said to her. A pleased smile softened her features. “There’s nothing to fear,” she said, with a swift glance at the

scowling Bob. “I’m used to situations.”

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“Yes,” Bob agreed in his hoarse voice, “she ain’t needin’ no

protection. She c’n ’andle ’erself, all right.” “How about Zeppy?” Edmund asked, ignoring the man’s flippancy. Elizabeth turned to Bob. The latter looked pained. “He says he'll try to find out about it,” she said doubtfully.

Edmund stepped closer to Bob, glaring into his scowling face. “There’s nothing to find out,” he said harshly; “your men have taken Zeppy.” Bob spat with exaggerated, swaggering carelessness. “Ah, keep yer shirt on. I don’t see the niggers they grab.” “You can’t josh me,” Edmund fumed. “J ain’t joshin’.” “You know what I mean. Talk straight. Better let the boy go!”

Bob fell back a step. Edmund leaned forward, thrusting out his jaw so that his lower lip protruded with a swollen, heavyjowled and threatening look. A moment they eyed each other,

electric, menacing. Then slowly Bob’s scowl relaxed into a broad grin. “T ain’t never seen ye so het up about a nigger, son. Are ye

playin’ brave in the lady’s presence? Maybe she ain’t knowin’ ye like I do.” He spoke in a purring, taunting voice. “Edmund .. .” Elizabeth interposed, extending her arm toward him as she sensed his mounting rage. He shook her off. “You lie!” Edmund fumed. “She knows all about me . and you!” Bob grinned broadly. “Everything!” In a mocking tone, “Even about how ye got drunk when I offered ye a chance to make a million.” He was sneering now.

Edmund paled. His brain felt scorched. “Own up, son. Ye ain’t as pure as ye’re makin’ out. ’Ave ye told ’er about Old Man Kerrian’s gold ye an’ ’er thievin’ brother . the one that was strung up . . . stole the night of the fire?” Elizabeth gasped, her eyes opened wide, her body leaned hard against the table. Edmund swayed, engulfed in a leaping flame. Two shots rang out in quick succession, Edmund stood erect,

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motionless, his right hand gripping the smoking pistol. His feverish eyes strained at the slowly crumpling figure across the table. Bob’s arms swung out, clutching at the air, then at his chest, as if

to stem the spurt of blood that reddened them. He fell, thudding on the floor heavily, and lay still. Elizabeth was on her knees beside the lifeless body, feeling for the pulse. Her bosom heaved spasmodically. She was dry-eyed. She rose to her feet slowly, and gazed curiously at Edmund, still standing dazed and uncomprehending. “Ts he dead?” he whispered, as he surrendered the pistol to Uncle Henry. ““He’s a co’pse,” Uncle Henry’s trembling lips muttered. But Edmund was not listening. He was staring at Elizabeth’s bloodless face, as if to uncover the source of the flame that brightened her eyes. ©)

They looked at each other in silence, the guard watching from a distance. Edmund had braced himself for this moment. He had worried about her. She would be alone again, a widow, nursing the

memory of a husband dangling from the gallows. Life had been hard for her. It would now be harder. And what would be her thoughts, sitting alone in the house where they had planned so much? First her father. Then Joshua. Now ... her husband. He searched in vain for words to console her. And now the moment had arrived. His racing heart did not seem to warm his blood. “Edmund!” It was all she seemed able to say. His hand reached out shyly. If only the bars might vanish and he could draw her to him and feel, perhaps for the last time, the warmth of her heart.

But he knew it was not the bars alone that kept them apart. This woman standing before him was not soft, not as he had known her in their single year of happiness. She gave no answering gesture to his hesitating reach. The lines in her face were sharper, and there

was a flash of unquenchable fire in her eyes. A fire without warmth, a flame that froze.

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When at last she spoke, it was to say, ““God has punished us,

Edmund.” What had God to do with it? He saw the fire flame brighter in her eyes, as her voice continued her bitter utterance: “I should never have yielded. I had promised myself to the Cause!” That was it, eh? Renunciation. The constriction in his throat extended deep down into his chest.

“But, Elizabeth, you hada right todifeand. ..” ““My father, Joshua...” She was rigid against the bars, her face streaked with tears. “Elizabeth!” His hands were touching hers. She came closer to the steel door, clinging, and pressing up against it. The guard approached, and spoke in an agitated but kindly voice, “Sorry, madam. You will have to move back a little. Visitors are not allowed to touch the bars.” Dully she permitted herself to be pushed back, a faint smile on her lips. “Tam sorry, sir.’ The guard nodded semnpathceically® She turned again to Edmund, having regained her composure. “Ts there anything I can send you?” No. She could send him nothing but what she herself had already brought—the realization that their year of love had been an illusion, overshadowed by her sacrificial passion to atone for her father and Joshua. Service, in the only way she understood it, to undo the tragedy of their lives; abstinence for their indulgences; self-denial for his instinct and striving toward luxury; sacrifice for their impenitence. And she would not spare herself, or him. His death on the gallows would be for her a supreme glorification, a sort of fanatical self-flagellation. “Norton Saunders is preparing your defense.” Toneless words. Meaningless gesture. She knew he would hang. Perhaps even hoped. . . . A curious woman. “T will come again soon.” He was not sure he wanted her to come. He listened to the sound of her footsteps dragging along the stone corridor, and

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clung to the steel bars for a last glimpse of her slim figure as it disappeared. He slumped down on the wooden bunk. The immi-

nence of his own peril, the possibility of the gallows, faded utterly before the torment of his bitter pity for Elizabeth. Norton Saunders was a shrewd lawyer. He prepared his case diligently. Uncle Henry and Zeppy who, after all, had not been sold back into slavery, were the star witnesses. The turning point of the defense hinged on whether Zeppy was really a free negro. The prosecutor charged he had never been redeemed. Uncle Henry was on the stand insisting he had bought him from the two southern gentlemen. His right hand lifted high. “The truth,” he repeated fervently, after the indifferent intonation of the clerk. “‘I’se tellin’ de truth.” His eyes rolled wildly. “Who bought him?” the prosecutor thundered. “Nobody but me. I’se his father.” “How much did you pay for him?” “Five hundred dollars in gold, Mistah Distric’ Attorney.” “Where did you get the gold?” Norton Saunders was worried about that point. He did not believe Uncle Henry’s story of buying Zeppy with gold saved on his wages, it was impossible. But he could get nothing more out of him, his zealous questioning brought forth only evasive mumblings that made no sense. Uncle Henry couldn’t be made to talk. But now as the witness tripped over the question, faltered, and came

to a stop, judge and jury straightened up, scenting prevarication, eager to fall upon the witness and take him in his lie. “You swore, before God, to tell the truth, Henry,” the prose-

cutor reminded him. Still the negro hesitated, and floundered. “Must I tell, suh, yo’ honor?” he pleaded. “Tell, of course. The truth, man.”

Uncle Henry shot a frightened glance toward Edmund. “It was de time ob de big fire. . .”

Slowly, faltering, reluctant, he told the story of the gold in the money belt and how he had come into the house after his interview with Bob the Wheeler intent on taking enough gold to buy

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Zeppy’s freedom. And while Norton Saunders sat frozen to his seat, and judge and jury and spectators gaped in amazement, he told of his meeting with Dick Kerrian, the struggle in the dark, the flash of the gun, and Dick’s death. In the quiet that attended the witness’s monologue, the ticking of the clock on the wall over the judge’s bench sounded almost deafening. “So... you killed Richard Kerrian!” Norton Saunders was on his feet, shouting objections. The prosecutor retorted. The judge’s gavel pounded for silence. He turned toward the witness. “How did this defendant come to have so much gold the night of the fire?” Once more Uncle Henry hesitated, his eyes straying. “Was it there before the fire?” The judge gazed sternly across at Edmund in the prisoner’s box. The eyes of the jury swung with him. Uncle Henry, his tall, loose-jointed figure wavering under the judge’s desk in the stress of his uncertainty, had thrown back his white woolly head, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. One of the officers approached him. Uncle Henry lowered his head, and looked down at the prosecutor. “I done talk wid Jesus, Mistah Distric? Attorney. An’ I’se tellin’ de truth like I swore on de Bible. I stole de gold de night of de big fire. Mistah Edmund ain’t knowed nothin’ about it. An’ I killed Mistah Dick ’cause he knowed I stole it.” He paused briefly, then concluded in one final burst of agonizing disclosure, ““An’ it was me shot Mistah Bob! I declare afore Jesus, Mistah Edmund ain’t had no part in dis here killin’. It was me fired de shot at his wicked heart. . . .” Edmund was on his feet, but Norton Saunders pulled him down and held him in his chair. The court officer fell back, amazed.

The judge was leaning over toward the collapsing witness. Uncle Henry sank down on his knees. “[Pse ready for you, Lawd.” The prosecutor strode angrily toward the kneeling figure, and stopped, scowling over toward the judge. “The man’s lying,” he shouted, “or crazy!”

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It was some time before order was restored in the courtroom. At a sign from the judge two officers lifted the praying negro and supported him out of the room.

“Lock him up. We'll deal with him later.” The trial proceeded. The prosecution rested. It was Norton Saunders’ sudden decision not to allow Edmund to testify in his own behalf. The law gave him that right. In the face of damaging evidence a defendant may stand mute. A ten-to-one shot, the courtroom buzzed, as the jury retired

to ponder their verdict. The man would hang. The negro’s effort to clear the accused had not helped his case. Norton whispered words of consolation to Edmund, who appeared to take no interest in his case. There would be an appeal. He would take it clear to the Supreme Court of the United States, if necessary, he assured him. But Edmund only shrugged his shoulders. Once his eyes wandered

over the courtroom,

then looked,

questioning, at Norton. Saunders looked troubled, and shook his head.

“T thought it better she should not come,” he said. Then after hours of waiting, there was a sudden rustle in the rear of the room. The jury was coming in. The judge resumed his seat on the bench. The prosecutor stood at his table, a gleam of triumph in his eyes. The jury filed into the box, each of the twelve men gazing stolidly at the black-robed judge. “Let the prisoner rise!” Edmund rose to face the jury. “Gentlemen, have you agreed on a verdict?”

The twelve poker-faced heads did not move when the foreman announced, ‘We have.”

“What is your verdict?” “We find the defendant guilty . . . of manslaughter!”

The impossible had happened. The jury had rejected a murder verdict, which would have made mandatory the sentence of death. The prosecutor looked pained, the judge astonished, Norton Saunders bewildered. Edmund alone seemed calm. “One week for sentence,” the judge announced. ‘The prisoner is remanded.”

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Spectators, indulging in second sight, were agreed that the negro had saved Edmund’s life. His words had apparently impressed the jury and provided that element of doubt which precluded the verdict of murder. “Twenty years to life,” was the sentence grudgingly imposed on the adjourned day. “You are a very fortunate young man!” 21

Edmund Rolphe, in Sing Sing, was staring at the inscription on the stone wall of cell 202. REBEL.

He wondered about that fellow Wilde. A rebel was a doer. A hater. But so great was his own inertia that he could not muster energy or will enough even for hatred. It was as if all power to assert himself had been consumed, launched against Bob and emptied out like the chamber of his revolver, in the single stroke that severed him finally and forever from the evil power of his enemy. And now he was only a weary, burned-out creature, fallen here like a dropped meteorite burying itself in the earth at random. Forty-eight hours for reflection was the rule of Sing Sing. Prisoners were expected to review their past, in a contrite spirit.

But Sing Sing did not understand, or would not, that Edmund Rolphe, like all other prisoners, from the first moment

of his ad-

mission to his cell was not thinking of the past. He did not give way to remorse or contrition. His thoughts were of the future, and fixed on the day of his release. Twenty years. Eventually they would end, and Edmund Rolphe would emerge. Not caring very much for anything, except to be there and not here. Easy, time! The forty-eight hours were finally over. It was just past the noon hour of his third day. A thousand men in stripes had left as many cells and were marching to their shops. Edmund was stand-

ing by his cell door, in his ears the steady shuffle of the lines of men lockstepping through the corridors. Now and then he heard a keeper’s voice, admonishing his company to correct formation and steadier gait. The marching and the voices grew dimmer. They ceased. The

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prisoners were in their shops, or on the hillside. A loud gong sounded somewhere in the courtyard, it was the signal to begin work. The whir of wheels, the thud of hammers, a shout on the

hillside followed by a blast . . . granite rock being loosened. . . . Edmund wondered how soon he, too, would be marching into the courtyard, one of a long line of shuffling men. If only Sing Sing would build ships. A keeper was standing before the cell door, turning the key. The door swung open, the keeper stood aside as Edmund came out. “Your name Rolphe?” “One of them shootin’ fellers,” the keeper remarked after a few moments of silent observation. “Guess Pll be knowin’ you,” the keeper continued in an impersonal tone. “You picked yourself a long stretch.” Edmund smiled faintly. The keeper nodded and pointed with his cane. They marched along the corridor and out through the steel-barred gate, up a wooden stairway and into a large square room. A number of prisoners with arms folded were standing along the walls, each attended by a uniformed keeper. Edmund’s escort marched him to the far end of the room. “Fold your arms and stand straight.” He complied. The little he knew of Sing Sing resolved into a single admonition . . . obey. One did not ask why. A door opened. Several keepers entered, marched through the room and went into another, adjoining. A few minutes later a tall, gray-haired man came in, his gaze bent sternly on the prisoners lined against the wall. Edmund knew that he must be a high official. He paused a moment, scanning each prisoner’s face. His lips moved, his mouth opened slightly as if to speak, then closed tightly. And he strode from the room to join the keepers who had preceded him.

A hum of voices came from beyond the closed door. It opened suddenly, and a man in civilian attire stood on the threshold. Prisoners and keepers stood at attention.

High forehead, large ears, a long thin nose, a straight mouth— this was the Warden of Sing Sing. Gold-rimmed

spectacles, sus-

pended on a thin gold chain, hung low over his chest. These he

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lifted, adjusting them carefully, and peered at a sheet of white paper in his left hand. “As your names are called, step forward.” The voice was not unpleasant. “Thomas Nannery.” Arms folded, the man left his position by the wall and stepped toward the warden. A short, squat fellow, dark complexioned, flat

nosed, the top of his left ear missing. “Joseph Manheim.” His folded arms resting on his pouchy abdomen, he walked forward with a rolling gait. Partly bald, a fringe of gray over a bulging neck. “Lee Carrol.” A skeleton figure, bony arms seemingly woven into an inextricable knot. Black, disheveled hair hanging low over a narrow forehead. A short torso above a pair of extraordinary long legs.

His stride was stiff, as if he were walking on stilts. “John Hung.” A Chinese, with parched yellow skin and long, narrow eyes. A round head covered with thick, black hair. A hungry stare. “Edmund Rolphe.” Arms folded like the others, Edmund stepped forward. His striped suit fitted him closely. Dark, calm eyes. Firm lips. Wellset chin. The warden stepped aside. The five prisoners marched through the open doorway into the inner room. A dozen uniformed keepers were standing at ease. The tall, gray-haired officer sat in a large armchair by the window. The warden followed the file into his office, stepped briskly toward the desk and slid into a chair. The prisoners, arms still folded, stood facing him. The gold-rimmed spectacles were again hanging over his chest, and his eyes, faintly smoldering under his shaggy brows, searched each face. “Look ’em over carefully,” the warden said, nodding to the

assembled keepers, ‘‘and stow their faces in your minds. Several of them have long bits. Some day they might get impatient.” He scowled. “You'll need good memories then.” ““There’s none ever got by me,” one of the keepers said.

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“Nor me,” said another.

“T could tell ’em in a fog.” The warden smiled. “I don’t know what we’d do without Hank. His eyes are keener than a hound’s nose.” Edmund was beginning to understand the purpose of this scrutiny. These keepers were Sing Sing’s hunters. Human bloodhounds who followed the trail of an escaped prisoner. He remembered the meeting of the Native Americans, when two of them spied Jonathan Peck on the platform and collared him despite that gentleman’s violent protests. “Better study that man Rolphe,” the warden was saying. ‘“He’s got twenty years. And he looks quite active.” Edmund lowered his eyes. No danger of his going, he wanted to tell them. The world outside had nothing to offer him. Surely not, so long as Elizabeth was fulfilling her self-appointed mission. In twenty years perhaps it would be different. “You men might as well understand now that Sing Sing is a prison.” The warden’s voice was still pleasant, but his deep eyes were brighter and his round chin looked suddenly square. “You are here to pay the penalty for your crimes, not for saying prayers. All we ask of you is obedience. Obedience implies discipline. If you obey the rules we shall have no quarrel with you. If you do not...” His shoulders shrugged significantly. “In order that you may not plead ignorance, I shall read to you our methods of dealing with those who transgress our rules. Disobedience may subject you to one or more of these punishments. They are: First, privation . . . you will do with less food, without bedding or books or tobacco. Second, change . . . of work, dress and rations. Third, solitary confinement. Then we have the

shower bath, and finally the lash. “T have made it a practice to explain this to every newcomer, so that he may know what’s ahead of him. You will now be taken to the various departments, to the hospital where you will be examined physically, to the chaplain who will help you spiritually . if you need it. Then you will return to your cells where you will remain for fourteen days. After that you will be assigned to work best suited for you.”

232

GELiIs- 2102 3S DINGronG A sudden

commotion

sounded

in the outer room,

followed

by loud laughter. The warden frowned. The gray-haired officer bounded from his chair and walked hurriedly toward the door. A stout gentleman in civilian clothes entered, dragging behind him a grotesque figure—a hunched, shivering, frightened fellow attired only in a suit of flannel underwear. Stifled laughter from the assembled keepers greeted the apparition.

“What the hell is this, sheriff? A masquerade?” the warden asked. The sheriff stood panting. “C’n I help it if the man’s cracked?” he said apologetically. “What happened to his clothes?” A pained expression crossed the sheriff’s face. ‘All the way up on the boat he gave ’em away piece by piece. Said he wouldn’t need ’em again . . . he got life, warden.” The five prisoners joined the keepers in the laughter that swept the room. ‘““He’s been here before, warden,” the sheriff continued. ‘““He

said he’d rather some of the crew on the boat had ’em than the keepers.” The warden’s face reddened. “JT ought to report you for this,” he told the sheriff. But the unclothed prisoner stepped forward, his lean face working convulsively. “It warn’t the sheriff’s fault, warden. I insisted on it. I been

here six times, an’ you never once gave me the clothes I brought with me. Yes, sir, warden. Sing Sing owes me six suits 0’ clothes. They was all good quality, too. An’ you gave me shoddies for ’em. Yes, sir, shoddies! So I promised meself, next time I came up I’d give ’em to them as needs ’em more’n these here keepers!” The prisoner stepped back from the warden’s desk, breathing

hard, his eyes gleaming. The keepers, showing anger, were advancing toward the unclothed prisoner. The warden waved them away. “Take him inside, sheriff,” he ordered in an ominous tone.

He turned toward the five prisoners who still stood before him, their arms folded.

“If that fellow’s hankering to go naked, we may oblige him

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. . . for a while.” He frowned and shook his head. ‘A poor start for a man with a life sentence.” But Clothesless Harry—the name stuck to him after that— did not seem to agree with the warden. There was a gleam of triumph in his eyes indicating victory. A trump card play. It was a proud, grinning Harry who followed the sheriff from the room, disregarding the hard stares of keepers and officers. When he had gone, eyes met eyes in unspoken but meaningful suggestion. Edmund noticed the silent colloquy. He knew Sing Sing would not forget. Edmund’s formal induction as a prisoner of Sing Sing followed the regular routine. In the hospital the doctor thumped his chest and listened to his heartbeat. “Those fellows inside,” he nodded toward the prison shops, “will be fighting over you.” He peered into his eyes. “Good heart, good eyes,” he commented, as he examined Edmund’s card. ‘“They may last twenty years ..

. if you’re smart.”

The chaplain, a young, mild-mannered man, dreamy eyed and soft spoken, inquired about his religious training. “J am putting you down as a Christian,” he said, smiling. “Any particular denomination?” Edmund had no preferences. “But were you baptized?” Edmund was not sure. The chaplain looked troubled. “Probably not much of a churchman,” he said. ““You men mever are. His eyes strayed from Edmund to the line of men in stripes

Waiting to be interviewed. He rose slowly, ran his hand through his thick, black hair and went thoughtfully across the room. His back toward the prisoners, he remained standing, his head bowed

low, as if in prayer. Then he turned around. “Gentlemen,” he said in a loud voice to the five men stand-

ing with arms folded, “you are about to enter a period of trial. You will find it hard at times, but probably no harder than life

has been to most of you. You will remember, always, that this is a Christian prison. Those are words of infinite promise: ‘Have I not commanded you? . . . Be strong and of a good courage; be

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not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’ ‘Remember, gentlemen, neither the past nor the present is our end. You must learn to dispose of your every day so as to be happy when the end comes. You can use Sing Sing as well as the freest spot on earth as a stepping stone to the Kingdom of God.” Neither the chaplain nor the prisoners noticed the entry of the gray-haired officer. His preachment ended, the chaplain stood with eyes closed. “Preaching again, reverend?” The rough voice startled the chaplain out of his reverie. The prisoners stared solemnly at the flushed face. the officer “Sunday sermons don’t go well on Wednesday, chuckled. “Just a word of encouragement to these men, P.K.” The principal keeper frowned. “Encouragement! Too much encouragement on Sunday gives em fits on Monday. We ain’t looking for ’em to be brave!” he said with a sharp glance at the silent prisoners. The chaplain smiled. “IT am concerned with their spiritual bravery, P.K.” “Oh, well,” the principal keeper said, waving his arms expansively, “that’s your job, I guess. Only the wise prisoner knows that Sing Sing ain’t strong on this spirit stuff.” He walked out of the room. The chaplain had resumed his place at his desk. One of the striped figures broke from the line and hastened toward him. It: was John Hung, the Chinese. He was on his knees before the startled minister, blabbering incoherently. bed

“Me Chlistian, too,” he was saying.

The chaplain rose and helped him to his feet. “That’s fine, John,” he said in a pleased tone. “Were you baptized?” John nodded vehemently.

“In the old country, in my father’s village. A missionary gentleman and lady took us to the river.” “What church?” the chaplain asked with interest.

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“Church?” John looked puzzled. His face lighted up. “A church with a cross . . . I remember.” “Yes, I know, John. But what denomination?” John shook his head. “No denomination. It was a Chlistian church, with a cross.” John Hung, the converted Chinese, was unfamiliar with the fine distinctions of Christian theology. His was a simple faith. One

cross. One church. “No denomination,” he was muttering as he rejoined the line

of prisoners. “Chlistian church.” The chaplain finished with the newcomers. The prisoners were escorted back to their cells. Twelve days more and they would be sucked into the prison maw. Edmund sat on his wooden bunk, contemplating the inscription. 1826-1846. Twenty years. 1846-1866. Twenty years. 34,22,

Sing Sing’s contractors,

always on the lookout

for likely

human material, early became interested in the tall, robust looking

prisoner in cell 202. Before his two weeks’ isolation was ended, the warden was besieged with requests for the new man. Edmund, of course, was quite unaware of the furor he was causing. But he, too,

was looking forward to the day when he would join the thousand men in their daily routine. Not that he felt cramped in his cell, it was no worse than he had expected. Prison was prison. One does not really begin to measure time until it is punctured by achievements or passing events. He did not yet feel himself a part of Sing Sing. Those twenty years would not begin to flow for him until he had become associated with Sing Sing’s intimate life, a unit, marching in the shuffling ranks and working in the shops. The twelve remaining days of his period of induction were in-

tended to acclimatize the new prisoner to his surroundings. Instead, they became a period of prolonged isolation and impatient expectation. He found himself envying the men to whom the morning gong meant another day of activity.

It may have been that his ache for work was in part prompted

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by his desire to forget. But the more he tried to forget, the more poignant memory became.

And then came the day when, surrendering to his longing, he seized the slate and scratched a letter. Nervously, quickly, lest he

recall it, he handed the slate to the gallery runner to be delivered to the chaplain for transcribing and mailing. Then the long wait. Days. A week. Well into the second. And at last, on Sunday morning, the chaplain stood by his cell door. “Your letter to your wife .. .” Edmund strained at the bars. “It was returned, marked ‘Removed ... no forwarding address.” ” “Not living there any more . . . not in the Roosevelt Street house!” The chaplain nodded. “Perhaps you can think of another address where she might be found?” Of course. Norton Saunders would know. Send it to him. But Norton Saunders did not know. “She left New York the day after you were sentenced,” his letter read. “I have not heard from her since. I gather she is somewhere in the South. Probably resumed her work for the Cause.” It was then that peace really came, a submissive, indolent peace

rooted in indifference, feeling that by his imprisonment he was rounding out for Elizabeth her scheme for atonement, knowing,

somehow, that by denying herself love, she had attained the heights of her purgation. . When he was assigned, finally, to the foundry, he slid easily into the prison routine. He became a model prisoner, divorcing

himself completely from the outside world. Seldom did a prisoner toil so willingly. He never complained about his tasks. He fashioned tools and hammered iron with an expert’s deftness. Always he was intent on his job. The keepers never had occasion to admonish him not to look up as visitors passed through the shop. And he did not concern himself with the spasms of emotional unrest that periodically surged through the prison. His tasks done, he made ready for the march to the mess hall where he passed

silently before the window, reaching for the wooden kid containing

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the frugal meal to be carried to his cell, and there slowly consuming it. Mutterings about the quality or quantity of food brought no sympathetic response from him. He was not weighed down by the long week-end hours in his cell—Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, except for the short hour filled in by a long sermon in the chapel on Sunday morning. An ideal prisoner . . . this fellow Rolphe. So he was appraised by those who knew him. He was never sent to the office of the principal keeper for punishment, never felt the pinch of cold iron around his neck, or the sting of the six-headed lash, or the weight of the iron cage on his shoulders, or the strain of the crucifix. He did not even know the location of the dungeons. Changes of administration that occurred with disturbing frequency in Sing Sing did not affect his life. He carried on with his customary serenity.

Had he permitted himself any intimacies with his neighbors, he would probably have confided his own satisfaction with Sing Sing. He was finding life tranquil. What else could one hope for? One needed peace. It was here. In at least one respect, however, he voided a generally accepted Sing Sing tradition. One of the tasks of the foundry was the fashioning of punitive implements. The cage, an iron latticed hood

placed over the recalcitrant prisoner’s head and clamped around the shoulders; the yoke, a flat iron bar, four or five inches wide and

from five to six inches in thickness, with a movable staple in the center to encircle the neck, and a smaller one at each end to sur-

round the wrists, and weighing about forty pounds; the ball and chain, an iron waistband, from which hung a ten-foot chain with ball, and smaller chain attached to the iron band fastened around the left ankle; the crucifix, a long steel bar attached to the shoulders, on which the prisoner’s arms were stretched; the iron re-

ceptacle to hold the water which was dripped on the prisoner’s head, drop by drop, endlessly, until each drop seemed a rushing torrent

on the frayed scalp nerves. All these were built in the foundry, a task which prisoners

generally resented. For tradition had it that those who fashioned the machines were the first to feel their weight. Actually the foundry sent most prisoners to the principal keeper’s office for

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punishment, excepting, of course, those whom the keepers themselves clubbed or lashed without notifying the central office. And so, when the order came through for a new stock of punitive supplies, the fifty prisoners in the foundry became panicky. Tremulously*they watched the foreman’s eyes as he surveyed the silent men. Who would get the job? Edmund was one of ten grouped well toward the center of the shop. He alone seemed indifferent.

. . . Not

so Big Bab, otherwise

known

as Baboon,

a

negro of huge dimensions, whose whistling breath and sucking lips betrayed the nervousness and fear that racked him. His long, heavy arm rose above his head, and there was a look of intense suffering on his face. The keeper, hickory cane in hand, approached. “What is it, Bab?” “Something inside

0’ me,

keeper,”

Bab

moaned,

cringing.

“Seems like Ah belongs in the hospital!” The keeper looked at him suspiciously. “Inside 0’? you, eh?” he growled, grinning. ‘Maybe it’s the devil tryin’ to make his way out.” Bab’s eyes rolled. The air whistled through his thick lips. “No, sir, keeper. The devil ain’t got no use fer the likes o’ me. No, siree! Ah’se a churchman!”

The keeper laughed. ‘““There’s many a churchman full of the devil, Bab.” “Tt’s something I ate, keeper, or . . .” His huge frame shiv-

ered. “Maybe it’s the fever.” But the keeper seemed unimpressed. “T think I'll let the P.K. look you over, Bab. Maybe he’ll take you to the doctor.” The look of pain in Bab’s face gave way to fright. His hands rose in supplication. “Please, keeper,” he begged, “Ah ain’t hankering fer trouble, and Ah ain’t meant no mischief. Maybe Ah c’n throw this here pain off’n me without the doctor. Please, keeper, don’t send me to

the P.K.” The keeper laughed. “There’s no harm, Bab. The P.K.’s a churchman, too.” A novel fellow, that principal keeper. He had been Sing Sing’s

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chaplain whom a freak of fortune had elevated to the office of principal keeper. “T can’t take chances with a sick man, Bab. Better come along.” Bab, still shivering, fell in line beside the keeper. The gray-haired officer listened to the keeper’s explanation. “The pain’s gone, P.K.,” the whimpering negro said. The principal keeper continued staring. “You lied!’ His voice was coldly appraising. Bab shook his head vigorously. “Ah ain’t lied, P.K. Ah’ll swear to it!”

The principal keeper’s eyes hardened. SS8trip|? Bab straightened suddenly. His hand reached for his striped coat and jerked it from his back. The gray-haired officer reached for the steel-tipped, sixtongued lash on his table. For a moment the lash was not raised. Instead the principal keeper, erstwhile chaplain, stood motionless, only his lips moving. “Lord, give my arm strength to do its duty!” The lash descended on the negro’s bare back. Bab did not cringe or shout. Again the lash descended. Six times. Bab’s lips

tightened. There was a look of real pain this time on the man’s face, but he made no sound.

The principal keeper replaced the lash on the table. He gazed sternly at the tall negro. “Thou shalt not bear false witness is one of our great commandments.

Remember

it.” And

turning to the keeper, “Take

him back to the shop. I don’t think he’ll want a doctor now.” Bab didn’t. Edmund listened to his furtive whisperings. He told the story jerkily, daring to talk only when the keepers’ backs were turned and the foreman was busy at the far end of the shop. “The P.K. done prayed before he whip me,” he whispered, a doubtful look on his face. “Ah ain’t never knowed *bout such prayers.” Edmund’s company, Bab among them, was assigned to make the implements for punishment. In the months that followed, every member of the company except Edmund followed the Sing Sing tradition. All felt the pinch or weight of one of the machines they

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fashioned, all were guilty of a specific violation of rules, justifying, in the judgment of the principal keeper, the application of Sing Sing’s corrective measures. Edmund alone did not suffer. He became

Sing Sing’s miracle man, the fellow who was never punished. And then the miracle man became somewhat of a mystery man as well. It was known in the shop where he worked, and among those who came in contact with him, as also among the keepers and officers, that Edmund Rolphe never wrote letters or received any. One every six months was allowed each prisoner. Edmund never took advantage of this privilege. Prisoners were asked to send in the names of intimates, relatives, who might be expected to visit them, once every six months. Every prisoner responded eagerly. Only Edmund did not comply. He did not expect any visits, and did not ask for them. He became known

as the man

without a friend. By neither word nor deed did Edmund show whether or not he was aware of the curiosity he had created about himself. He was content to glide on through the years. The world had receded. The crime that had sent him to Sing Sing was a faded memory. Even the image Elizabeth was blurred in the passage of identical days. In those years he gave little attention to the inscription on the wall of his cell. He had early dismissed it from his mind. That man Wilde had not been able to forget. Foolish business, this hanging on to years that had faded and to people determined to edge out of your life. The thing to do was to carry out Sing Sing’s bidding. Twenty years. They would end. What happened before was as inconsequential as what would happen after. Only the present. was important. The present was Sing Sing, and twenty years. Five years had passed. Fifteen more to come. He was getting on. On Sunday, in December, 1851, Sing Sing experienced a further step in liberalization. Prisoners would no longer stand in line to have their food handed out to them in wooden kids with which they marched to their cells. A new mess hall had been erected, with long tables and benches. The entire prison population was to march into the large hall, seat themselves at long tables, and break bread together, an innovation long advocated by socially-minded penologists.

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The first meal in the new hall was a gala affair. For the first time in Sing Sing history prisoners sat at ease. To mark the occasion, they were to enjoy an epicurean feast. Not the usual Sunday mush,

but a hot chicken dinner; real soup, thick with assorted vegetables, served in tin cups; roast chicken dipped in gravy; and finally the coffee. It was a menu that dug deep into the prison commissary and strained the prison purse strings; but the new warden, flanked by the principal keeper and the chaplain and the prison doctor, standing on the platform at the head of the hall, reflected in their

smiling faces the contentment of the vast gathering of diners. For the first time in the five years of his service, Edmund Rolphe felt close to his neighbors. His companions from the foundry occupied a table well toward the center of the hall. They were eying each other curiously . . . these men who had never before had the opportunity to see one another in repose. In the shops, under the constant vigilance of keepers and foremen, one bent low over tasks not venturing anything but a fleeting glance at his neighbor. In the chapel one’s eyes. were fixed on the chaplain. No turning of heads was permitted. Here, seated at the long table, one

could study the lines in the pale faces, know the color of men’s eyes, return solemn stares. There was a sudden commotion at the entrance. The warden and the officers grouped around him stood at attention. The clatter of dishes ceased. The waiters, prisoners in stripes especially assigned, halted their labors. Visitors were being escorted toward the platform. But not one of the thousand heads turned toward them. Each was raised toward the platform where the warden stood, awaiting the approach of the newcomers. In a few minutes they had joined the prison staff on the plat-

form, six gentlemen attired in the latest fashion. Tall, cylindrical silk hats and long, tight-fitting Prince Albert coats. Gentlemen of importance. There was a slight disturbance as the warden greeted each of the visitors with a firm handclasp. A word or two of welcome. The silk-hatted, frock-coated gentlemen turned toward the

assembled prisoners. A nod from the warden. A sharp command from the keepers on the floor. The waiters continued their tasks. Generous portions of chicken, dipped in gravy, were passed along each table. A thousand pairs of eyes stared, unbelieving. A

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thousand pairs of hands stretched forth eagerly, but paused at the warning whisper of the keepers at their tables. The waiters had done. A tin platter containing chicken, mashed potatoes, beans baked brown, before every prisoner. The waiters were standing in their places with arms folded. A nod from the warden. A command from a score of keepers. yeatli

The thousand pairs of hands grappled with the chicken, biting into it suspiciously, hungrily, greedily, contentedly. The warden was smiling. So was the principal keeper. And the tall-hatted, frock-coated gentlemen. .. . Edmund Rolphe was the only prisoner who did not pounce upon his food. Somehow, with the entry of the visiting delegation

his appetite had been shocked out of him. The food seemed tasteless, even nauseating. Instead of fingering his platter, he sat erect, his eyes riveted on the platform, watching the smiling faces of the visitors, then strayed toward his neighbors, intent on their food.

He felt a curious stirring inside him. Like a sudden puff of air presaging the oncoming storm. A lifting of that shroud of peace and calm which for five years had brought him repose. He would have liked to draw it closer around him.

He was no genius whom isolation could have provoked to inspirational heights of exaltation or prophetic wisdom. His was an ordinary mind, normal in its response to impulse, untrained, as are the minds of most men, in the mechanics of moral restraint.

The contentment he had achieved during his first five years in Sing Sing was not due to any extraordinary mental or spiritual prowess. It resulted from a subconscious sense of futility, a realization that the life he was living was his only by the grace of fate. He had been skeptical about the new mess hall, fearing its effect on his self-imposed retirement, dreading a closer intimacy with his neighbors. He had marched in and sat down at his table, one of a company of twenty. For the first time since his admission to Sing Sing he was conscious of the stripes he wore, and of his closely cropped hair. As he sat watching his neighbors reach eagerly for their food, there came to his mind the night he and Elizabeth had followed

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Bob into Five Points. He recalled his nervousness as, holding her

arm tightly, they trod those dark lanes. ““Masterless slaves,”’ Bob called the creatures that haunted those

byways. He had not quite understood then. He was not altogether sure now. Could there be slaves without masters? Empty platters clattered into waiting baskets. The coffee followed. And then silence. Prisoners waited for the word from their keepers that would permit them to rise from their tables. Instead, the warden stepped forward to the edge of the platform. He stood a moment eying his audience. Then raised his hand to still the clamor of the waiters busying themselves with the clearing of the tables. “Men,” he began, “this is a great day for Sing Sing. The first time in our new mess hall. So we thought it right to celebrate by giving you a holiday dinner.” He paused, and turned to the tall-hatted gentlemen. “We are honored by the presence of a committee from the Senate in Albany. They have come to see for themselves how Sing Sing reacts to its wonderful improvement. No longer will men have to carry their wooden kids to their cells. Hot food will be served here three times a day. You can eat in comfort. Sing Sing

is proud of its new mess hall. . . . And now I am pleased to call on Senator Robert Mason to extend his greetings.” No applause from the prisoners. It was not permitted. There was no audible welcome. The rules forbade it. The Senator came forward. His hands reached up, pulling his

cylindrical hat down more firmly on his head. His ruddy face wrinkled in a broad smile. “T shall report to my associates that Sing Sing likes its chicken.” The warden’s chuckle sounded through the hall. “Seriously, though, this has been a great experience. To see a thousand prisoners gathered in one hall, eating peaceably, is a sight one cannot forget. We hear things about Sing Sing—that it is a hideous place, that its prisoners are ugly, in temper as in

body.” The Senator raised his arms high, and brought them down striking one palm on the other. His voice grew resonant and his words eloquent. “But the sun, as it sweeps across the skies, sends

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its warming rays upon Sing Sing as upon every other spot upon this earth yt”

“Except in the cell block!” The Senator stopped short, a startled look on his face. Keepers stood erect, their eyes darting toward the which the voice had seemed to come. But mained fixed, eyes continued staring. The the speaker’s side and was peering down The keepers poised their hickory canes.

center of the hall, from the thousand heads rewarden had hurried to at the silent audience.

The Senator was smiling again.

“I am hoping that some day we can have cells with large windows...” “And without bedbugs!” The Senator’s face flushed.

He turned

toward

the warden,

sputtering incoherently.

“Find that man!” The warden yelled the order to the keepers, who immediately went up and down the center aisles, eying each prisoner. A thousand heads remained fixed. A thousand pairs of eyes continued staring. Edmund’s eyes looked straight ahead, though he knew that the sound had come from somewhere across his table. Yet not a mouth had opened, and no lips seemed to have moved. The owner of the voice was not to be found. The warden had again stepped to the speaker’s side, his whole body trembling with anger. ‘““You men owe the Senator... “All we owe is time!” Not a mouth open, no lips moving. 39

Edmund

stared

at the face opposite him, and noticed

the

gleam in the man’s eyes. The Senator stamped furiously toward the

rear of the platform, and the warden shouted to the keepers to find the man who had spoken. While keepers stalked through the

aisles, their canes raised for instant action, Edmund was gazing at the calm face fronting him. Keepers huddled together in the center of the hall, pointing to one table then to another, whispering suspicions.

“That man must be found!” The warden was standing rigid, his eyes contracted to pin points, the flush on his face now a deep

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red. The Senator and his guests were grouped toward the rear of the platform, looking on with “I told you so” expressions. The warden was speaking again. “T should hate to see our guests confirmed in the impression that the men in Sing Sing are really ugly in temper. I am sure you have all enjoyed the chicken .. .” “Rather cold mush outside than chicken inside!” The watchful keepers had located the voice now at Edmund’s table. A dozen

of them

surrounded

it, determined

to find the

culprit. Beginning with the head of the table, each man was ordered to rise. They would test the voices. “What is your name? Your crime? Your sentence? Where do you work?” Each man answered. The warden listened carefully. So did the Senator. And the keepers. And the thousand prisoners, staring hard and straight. One after another the men at Edmund’s table rose to answer the queries. Edmund watched the man opposite him. He, too, answered. A cool, soft, rather indolent voice. Edmund felt his heart sink

within him. But the man showed no fear. He resumed his seat calmly, deliberately. Several other men rose and spoke their lines. Then Edmund. The name is Edmund Rolphe. My crime is manslaughter. My sentence is twenty years.” His voice was not as sure as the others. Perhaps it was the

strain of listening and the fear that the man opposite him might have been detected. ‘**That’s him!” The principal keeper yelled it. The warden had

already left his place on the platform and was pushing his way toward him. Edmund was about to protest. He darted a fleeting glance at the man opposite. A slow gies of his eyes was his only gesture. Edmund remained silent. “Take him to the dark eal” the warden fumed. Two keepers seized Edmund and were dragging him toward the door. Visitors and officers glared at the offender. No punishment could be too severe for the man. A loud chuckle came from the center of the room.

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“Wrong again, Sing Sing!”

This time the thousand mute heads could not restrain themselves. A thousand smiles merged into a thousand chuckles, and then a thousand guffaws. The keepers surrounding Edmund paused, and looked questioningly at the warden who had resumed his place on the platform. Even the visitors could not wholly suppress their smiles. “The voice” remained one of the unsolved mysteries of Sing Sing. Edmund alone knew its owner, Big Sol, a heavy-featured, dark-faced fellow, one of his group in the foundry. Big Sol was a lifer, convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging but saved by a last-minute commutation. He was a silent, moody, middle-aged man who shied from intimacies. It was curious that this listless fellow should have dared to express Sing Sing’s inarticulate sentiment. For years afterward ‘“‘the voice” was remembered as a symbol of the unfathomable among the incidents that tried

keepers’ souls. But to Edmund, Big Sol’s ventriloquistic performance was more than a curiosity. It made him keenly aware of a latent emotion that even the new mess hall could not still. Instinctively he felt the tacit approbation of those thousand silent men, and the startled resentment of the group of visitors and the official staff. These prisoners were not appreciative. Hot food, a new mess hall, a grand feast . . . What more?

The cell block was unusually quiet that Sunday afternoon. Perhaps the prisoners were thinking about “the voice,” perhaps brooding over the sunless daylight and the bedbugs. Or comparing the mush outside to Sing Sing’s feast. “Ugly tempers,” the Senator had said. Perhaps so, Edmund

mused,

as he turned

the

pages of Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book. Too bad one could not sleep away the years like old Rip Van Winkle and emerge, refreshed, to mend the broken threads of life.

It was almost midafternoon when he turned the last page. He had been intrigued by the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Ghostlike figures swarmed before his eyes. Unreal they were, but his mind endowed them with the attributes of reality. They seemed to crowd his cell. Their voices, like Big Sol’s, coming from no-

where, echoed through the silent galleries. The dead coming to life.

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For the first time since those early days, five years ago, when he had forced them from his mind, he thought of Elizabeth and Daniel Kerrian and Uncle Henry and all the others who had come into his life. They waited only his call to take on flesh and blood. He let them vanish into space. It was as if he were standing at the edge of a stream, watching them flounder from his view, unable, perhaps unwilling, to haul them to safety. Better that the past should remain buried, hidden from memory under the debris of time. Five years. Fifteen more. Time, alone, was important. He was turning the last page. He strained his eyes in the dimming light at the lines which a reader had scribbled. Closely written words, in a neat hand:

Ugly Brothers, hither fly, With you bring the varying eye. Bring here cockeyes, and eyes askance, That

cannot pass one tender glance.

Bring goggle eyes, and piercers, too; Eyes green, white, gray, red, black and blue,

Bring with you the eagle’s sight, To see your heart and keep it right. But bring shortsighted eyes to spy The mote that’s in your brother’s eye. Edmund smiled as he read. A keen-witted juggler of words. A philosopher deciphering life. A prisoner, apparently familiar with Sing Sing’s secret. Ugly brothers! Ugly tempers! That was how he thought of the men in Sing Sing. It was what the visiting Senator had said, too. Unconsciously his hand reached for his face. Five years since he had seen his own likeness. It seemed smooth to his touch. As

smooth as when he had so meticulously and not without pride stood before the mirror in the Roosevelt Street house, adjusting his neckband, that night when he walked with Elizabeth for the first time on the dollar side of Broadway. The course of time had run swiftly since then. He wished he had a mirror. Had he, too, be-

come ugly? Had time really eaten into his features? He would have to know.

248

CELL-202—STNGISIN G His partner at the forge stared fleetingly at him the next

morning. He waited until the foreman had passed to the farther end of the room, and the keeper had turned away. “Ain’t feelin’ low?” he whispered, glancing furtively from side to side. Edmund shook his head. For the first time in five years he transgressed. And whispered back. “Have you got a mirror?” french Gus looked surprised. “Not expecting a visit?” Mirrors in Sing Sing were contraband. Prisoners were not supposed to have them. Actually, they were not needed. Wardrobes were unchangeable, a single striped suit sufficed. Hair was cut short; and the prison barber attended to bristly chins. Yet prisoners did manage, somehow, with Sing Sing’s peculiar adroit-

ness, to harbor mirror chips which did yeoman service to those who, once in six months, expected visits from the outside world.

Priceless acquisitions, these mirror chips into which one peered slyly—as though to make sure of facial outlines before submitting them to the scrutiny of those who remembered. Edmund shook his head. He was not expecting a visit. His partner looked worried. “Not thinkin’ 0’? swarmin’!” Edmund

smiled, and shook his head.

His partner sighed. He reached into his coat pocket, quickly extracted a small square piece of silvered glass and handed it to Edmund who hid it as quickly. There would be no opportunity to examine himself in the mirror until the night lockup. After the march to the river front for the iron bucket there was the slow, shuffling lockstep to the cell block, the long pause before the thousand men were.garnered into their cells. A myriad clangs as iron doors were clamped shut and keys turned in their

locks. And then he had to wait, his hands clutching the bars, until the keepers passed along the galleries, checking the count. “All here!” He waited to make sure of the keeper’s retreating footsteps.

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Then, slowly, repressing the surge of fire in his veins, he reached into his pocket for the priceless chip of glass. Impossible! Those gray hairs around his temples and extending over his head; the lines cutting deep into his face, running from his nostrils to the sides of his mouth; the eyes staring back at him from unfamiliar depths. And the hollow cheeks. Surely this was not Edmund Rolphe. The hands that held the mirror shook. The old young Edmund was gone. In his place was this stranger, prematurely gray, ravaged by time. Five years! And fifteen more

ahead. The mirror chip slipped from his trembling hand and crashed on the stone floor, scattering into countless fragments. But there was no further need of it. He knew himself now. He sat on his wooden bunk, his eyes on the stone wall opposite. That man Wilde had not succumbed easily to Sing Sing. He had rebelled. Edmund had thought himself different, but he knew now that he was not. And as he sat scrutinizing Wilde’s message, the word REBEL expanded until it covered the entire wall. Not really Wilde’s message, but Sing Sing’s. Its voice. The one neither wardens nor principal keepers could understand, nor the visiting Senator. But a rebel was moved by hope. For betterment, for life. And there was no hope in him. Only virulence. Contempt. Cynicism. He, too, would write his record in stone. He might not live

to complete it. But the next day he would begin. Cynic would be his word.

The evening of the following day found him scratching on the wall.

23 The answer to Sing Sing’s voice was not long in forthcoming. It was planned in the Capitol at Albany where Senators and Assemblymen sat in serious conferences with the men who owned

and operated the shops. The people’s representatives listened with interest to the plaints of the contractors. “We want protection,” was the gist of their demands. “We have large investments at stake. Our machinery and shops represent considerable capital. The wages we pay for prison labor prac-

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tically support the prison. If it were not for us, you would have to add to the taxpayers’ burdens by increased appropriations for upkeep and administration. We know how to handle these men. Clamp down on ’em! Shut ’em off from the outside. Make ’em

understand that ‘hard labor’ means exactly that. Give us a free hand!” Legislators listened sympathetically, especially since they were of an opposite political faith from those who had authorized the erection of the new mess hall. Chicken dinners! Softening convicts’ palates! It must not be repeated.

As a result Sing Sing not only banned the occasional fowl, but became still more indifferent to bugs and cold mush and sunless cells. The drive went further. The prison library was dismantled; correspondence prohibited; visits discontinued. Time and tasks alone remained. The “Chicken Warden,” as he was dubbed by the contractors,

went the way of his unsuccessful predecessors, and was succeeded by a gentleman who was in complete accord with the views of the party in power and the contractors. The foundry worked furiously, fashioning additional cages and crucifixes and balls and chains and iron yokes. Hate, however dormant and inarticulate, inevitably shows its

fangs. The lockstepping lines of prisoners moved more heavily and more slowly despite the promptings of keepers. Rifles in the hands of alert guards stationed at strategic points around the prison—Sing Sing was still without a wall—were poised for action.

More stringent than ever became the rule of silence. Even gestures were severely punished.

In those days Edmund worked feverishly in his cell with his rusty nail, scraping the stone surface, scratching, forming lines. Big Sol was eying him. A calm stare. Edmund dared not whisper. Swiftly Sol’s hand reached for an iron weight and stuffed it in his pocket. The keeper made his rounds of the shop, surveying the toiling men. He walked away. Sol’s hand reached forth again. Another weight disappeared from the table, and was stuffed in another pocket. The bell sounded the end of the day’s labors. Big Sol marched immediately ahead of Edmund toward the mess hall.

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“Ready!” The thousand men in stripes rose from their tables and formed in line. First there would be the march to the river where each prisoner would receive his iron bucket, then the longer march through the courtyard to the cell block for the night

lockup. Edmund was standing just behind Sol, waiting for the men ahead to move on. The river was only a few feet away. A line of keepers, shouldering long rifles, stood guard. Big Sol lurched out of the line. An instant later he was darting into the row of guards which broke bewilderedly before the tall, rushing figure in stripes. “Stop him!”

The

principal

keeper’s Hoare voice sounded

above the shouts of the astonished keepers. Half a dozen rifles rose to as many shoulders. Their shots echoed across the river. But Big Sol had already plunged into the water. Rifles hung low, aiming into the current. The long line of prisoners stood motionless, their eyes fixed on the shore, expecting the man’s head to break through the surface. Edmund, too, was watching. His first shock of amazement had given way to fear. Perhaps Sol could not swim. Involuntarily, he moved from his place in the line, prepared at the first sign of the bobbing head to brave the rifles and jump in after the drowning man.

But the

prisorrers stared, and the rifles remained poised; no head appeared in the lazing current. And then Edmund remembered the iron weights in Big Sol’s pockets. Sol would not rise, he had not intended to escape from Sing Sing. He had planned deliberately to escape from life. And he had succeeded. A few minutes moved by on leaden feet and then, though the keepers still stood guard on shore, the long line of prisoners moved on. Big Sol’s suicide was a staggering blow to Edmund’s already disturbed equanimity. That night he worked long on the etching; when the lamps had been removed, and the galleries were in darkness, he lay on his bunk, listening for the snores of his neighbors. They seemed unusually quiet. The tragedy by the river seemed to have seeped into the cells. Keepers strode warily along the gal-

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leries. But they found it unnecessary to admonish their restless charges. Bodies lay inert, hardly daring, or caring, to breathe. Edmund slept fitfully. He was up at the first streak of dawn, watching the shadows give way slowly before the oncoming day. It was a relief to hear the first gong. Another day. He rose wearily from his bunk and examined his work of the night before. Keepers were passing along the galleries, taking the count. There was the usual morning stir. Then, above that stifled activity,

was heard the sound of hammering at a cell door, close by Edmund’s cell. Suddenly a similar hammering sounded in the gallery overhead, still more in a distant part of the building. The clamor increased, accompanied by shouts of warning and threats.

The noise ceased suddenly. Silence deeper than ever descended on the wondering galleries. Edmund’s hands remained glued to the bars of his cell. He did not understand how he knew. It was as though an unseen spirit had whispered it into his ear. They were not laggards who did not rise, they would not feel the fury of Sing Sing. They were beyond it. They were dead. Suicides. It was a night long remembered in Sing Sing, a night of horrors. Three prisoners strangled by their own hands, four men dead in less than twelve hours. The voice of Sing Sing had, indeed, spoken. A desperate, irrevocable answer to Albany and the contractors and the new regime. From somewhere overhead a shout reverberated through the silent building. “They kicked the bucket!”

All Sing Sing knew it, though no one had announced it. The shout was taken up and repeated in every gallery, heedless of the warning cries of keepers and officers. In an instant the galleries

became a fury of sound. Shout after shout echoed through the building. Taunts. Yells. Banging on cell doors. The exhausted keepers stood by helpless, unable to stop the tumult. “Good luck, stiffs!” a voice, louder than the others, shouted

lustily. A chorus of laughter.

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“That’s beatin’ Sing Sing!” another voice yelled, followed by a wave of jeers.

There was no breakfast that morning, no removing the iron buckets. The men did not seem to mind. The shouts and yells and jeers and laughter continued unabated. Then, in an ebbing moment,

a thick, stentorian voice from

somewhere in the center of the hall called out: “Seems like we owe them guys a prayer, fellahs. We c’n do it better’n Broadcloth. Down on yer knees, boys!” The noise ceased. There was the muffled sound of falling bodies as men knelt in every cell. Keepers stared in astonishment, unbelieving. Edmund, also, went down on his knees.

Low voices sounded through the galleries, followed by a few minutes of silence. Nothing stirred, not even the amazed keepers. “Let’s make

it regular, boys,” the same

voice called, ‘tan’

sing ’em right to heaven.” Hesitating,

faltering,

then

more

sure,

the chorus

swelled

through the galleries, a thousand voices following the voice in the upper tier.

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee... .” It was nearly noon before the cell doors were opened and

the prisoners marched from the cell block. Lines of grim-looking, silent men, swinging their buckets. Heads turned toward river where lay Big Sol, borne down by his iron weights.

the

Keepers hurried the men on.

24 “A stiff-necked tribe” . . . those prisoners at Sing Sing. So Albany legislators dubbed them, and made ready to bring down upon them the full weight of their displeasure. The night of horrors was a challenge to their sense of duty. “No more suicides,” was the edict from legislative halls and executive chambers. The warden was warned to enforce the order. Sing Sing’s official staff

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would be augmented, if necessary. The men would have to be watched more carefully. But the warden shrank from the task assigned him. He resigned several days later. With him went the major officers, the principal keeper, erstwhile chaplain who prayed for God to give strength to the lash with which he chastised recalcitrants, the captain of the guards and several others. A new regirne was installed. One that adopted literally the philosophy of old Captain Elam Lynds who had conceived prisoners as chattels of the state, physically and mentally, expected only to carry out the objective of their confinement . . . “hard labor.” The new warden was a sharp-eyed man recruited from the police department of one of the fast-growing towns in upper New York. He discarded the idea of officers in civilian clothes and appeared before the prisoners, on Sunday morning at chapel services, in a brand

new

uniform

in which

his erect,

broad-shouldered

figure showed to advantage. Immaculate in attire as he was precise in speech, he sat on the platform during the chaplain’s sermon,

attentive, immobile in body and countenance. With him sat the new principal keeper, bigger, taller, more corpulent than the warden, with small, beady eyes that roved restlessly around the hall. “Our new warden will talk to you,” the chaplain announced at the close of the service. The warden rose quickly, advanced to the edge of the platform, and stood, straight and solemn, as if gauging his audience. “The sooner you men understand that this is a prison and that you are prisoners, the quicker we will have things running smoothly. There will be no change in the rules . . . that is, not for the present. You men must do your tasks, refrain from talking, except in the course of your labors. There will be no visits and no correspondence. Infractions of the rules will be dealt with severely. That is all.” He resumed his chair. The score and more of keepers took their stations in the aisles. The prisoners rose. The lines formed. The monotonous shuffle began.

Changes in assignments followed soon after. Prisoners, oldtimers, who had achieved the rank of trusty, were sent back to the

shops. Others were transferred to their jobs. In the general re-

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found himself assigned to the cell block, a

runner on one of the galleries, supplying water to the men in their cells after lockup, carrying messages, attending to the intimate needs of the prisoners. His record during his five years in Sing Sing apparently merited the trust reposed in him. The new assignment fitted in perfectly with his recently acquired interest in his fellow prisoners. His novitiate was ended.

He was no longer Edmund Rolphe, the individual, doing twenty years; he was a prisoner of Sing Sing, one of a thousand answering for their crimes against society. Rolphe the individualist had been content to swim along with the tide of time, thinking only of the day when he would emerge. But as the man of Sing Sing he acquired a curious interest in those among whom he lived. He began to feel a sense of kinship with the striped figures among whom he worked. He found himself trying to read their impassive features, wondering about their curiously shifting eyes, speculating about their thoughts and dreams, and their intimate emotions. A keeper accompanied him on his first tour of duty. Timothy Bramley was his name, an old-timer in the service who had won his spurs in the days of Captain Lynds. It was said that during Sing Sing’s construction days one of the prisoners he was guarding had deliberately run a knife into his left eyeball. So for twenty-five years One-eyed Tim had been equipped with a glass eye. It was said—some of the prisoners swore to it—that Tim could see better through his glass eye than his real one. At any rate, prisoners cringed before the steady stare of that gray, lifeless orb. One-eyed Tim escorted Edmund along the gallery as he raised his nozzled water pail, stuck it through the bars of each cell and filled the tin cup held up by the prisoner within. No word passed between Edmund and the man inside, only a curious look of appraisal. Twenty-five years in the service had mellowed Timothy Bramley. The loss of his left eye no longer irked him, and time

had softened any thought of revenge. Besides, the lifer who had attacked him had long since died, his unclaimed body being consigned to the surgeons at Bellevue Hospital. At fifty, and snow white, One-eyed Tim was the ideal keeper. Alert, brusque and, except for the necessities of his office, uncom-

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municative. It was his first week in the gallery. Under the old regime he had been on yard duty, one of a score of keepers guarding the long lines of shuffling prisoners as they marched to and from the mess hall and the river shore to leave and retrieve their iron buckets. His short, sharp commands sounded above the noise of the shuffling feet. A new batch of prisoners had arrived. Edmund and Keeper Tim were passing along the tier of cells, stopping before each grated door. The new men would need water. Edmund’s iron pail poked its nozzle into the waiting cup. Prisoner and keeper passed on to the next. There was no response from one of the new prisoners. “Water,” Keeper Timothy Bramley announced shortly. Edmund waited, his pail poised. But the prisoner gave no sign of having heard. He remained seated on his bunk, his head buried in his hands. “Water,” Tim repeated, louder. Still no response. “Stand up here,” was Tim’s command. The prisoner slowly raised his head, rose heavily and advanced toward the cell door. He seemed to be young, not over thirty. He had a round head, and he stared out at them with red, heavy eyes. | “T ain’t thirsty,” the prisoner explained in a tired voice. “You will be before we come around again,” Keeper Tim said,

scrutinizing him keenly, and added, ‘Feeling sick?” The prisoner shook his head, and reached for his tin cup. Water spouted from Edmund’s pail. The man turned away. “Come back here.” Keeper Tim’s voice was softer. The prisoner returned.

“Sure there’s nothing ailing you?” The prisoner stared out at him. Finally he spoke, his voice as heavy as his eyes. “Ain’t this the twenty-fifth .. . Monday?” alteiss’? The prisoner clutched the bars of his cell door. “?Tain’t me that’s ailin’,” he whispered.

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Edmund had lowered his water pail. Keeper Tim was standing close to the door. “Worrying about somebody on the outside?” “Not on the outside,” in a listless tone.

“Speak up, man. Maybe there’s something . . . I can’t help

if you don’t tell...” “It’s the wife, keeper.” Tim looked relieved. And amused. “Oh, it’s that. Well, too bad there’s no accommodations here

for the women. You'll have to get over it.” But the hands still gripped the bars. The prisoner’s face worked convulsively. “She’s up there on the hill . . . in the women’s prison.” Keeper Tim whistled softly. “So it’s that!” He shook his head sadly. “Too bad . . . you here and her up there. Well, it’s happened before.” “She’s carrying a baby . . . an’ I figgered it out maybe she’s took sick today, an’ the baby’s gonna be born up there . . . today bein’ the twenty-fifth . . . she said it would be today.” The words came quickly, in a gasping voice. Edmund’s water pail slipped from his hands, spilling its contents on the floor. Keeper Tim’s face was a study. He turned from the prisoner, and glancing quickly at Edmund, remained rigid. “Wait here,” he said, and walked hurriedly away. Edmund and the prisoner inside the cell looked at each other in silence, neither of them daring to speak. The man’s grip had relaxed, his body eased away from the cell door.

“I was hopin’ the baby’d come before she got here,” he whispered after a while. “’Tain’t nothin’ to be proud of ... bein’ born in Sing Sing.”

Edmund could think of nothing to say. Suddenly the prisoner’s hands reached for the bars, clutching them tightly. “T’m hopin’ the child’s born dead!” he said hoarsely. Keeper Tim was hurrying back, a grin on his face. He approached

the prisoner’s

door, paused,

and smiled.

‘*There’s a child born up there this morning. . . . I guess it’s

Vours....0 ssaboy.”

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A pair of long, slim hands reached out from behind the bars, and clutched the keeper’s sleeve. The heavy eyes brightened. “Ts she all right . . . Imean Madge . . . the mother?” Keeper Tim brushed the prisoner’s hands from him. “Both doing fine, the doctor said. Nothing to worry about.” “Say, keeper,” the prisoner begged eagerly, “‘ain’t there a chance fer me to see her . . . Not that [ll even talk to her... just peep at ’em.”

Keeper Tim tugged thoughtfully at his cap. “Nothing more’n human, I’m thinking,” he said after a while. Edmund had stooped to raise his water pail. The prisoner stood

gripping the cell bars. “Just to see Madge,” he pleaded. “It'll make her “Tl ask the warden about it,’ Keeper Tim said edged away. “Only,” he added, “don’t bank on it too Edmund refilled his water pail and completed the cells of newcomers.

feel better.” slowly, as he much.” his tour of

His task done, he was about to return to

his own cell. The mess gong would sound soon. He would have to join the lines in the courtyard for the march to supper. But Keeper Tim made no motion to leave him. Instead, he stood eying him. “How long you been here, Rolphe?” Edmund told him. Almost six years. “Worked in the foundry all them years?” Edmund _ nodded. “Your record pretty clean . .. you’ve never been sent to the P.K.?”

Edmund smiled. “It’s not because you’re a sniveling snitcher.” Keeper Tim shook his head jerkily. “I’d have heard if you were.” The supper gong sounded. Tim smiled. “Better get going . . . or your record won't be so clean.” Edmund faced about and, with Keeper Tim following him, went toward the yard. The incident weighed heavily on his mind. He hardly touched the food set before him. This infant who breathed its first breath of life in Sing Sing, both parents prisoners. What could life have in store for such a child? He was thankful that he had been saved that sorrow, glad Elizabeth was childless. As for Keeper Bramley,

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One-eyed Tim was not as hard as he seemed. There was something human about him. Daily, the prisoner who had achieved fatherhood in Sing Sing stood at his cell door as Edmund arrived with his water pail. He waited until his cup was filled. Then his eyes opened wide upon the silent keeper, who shook his head, and passed on. “His name is Bob.” Keeper Bramley whispered the information to Edmund as he was filling the water pail, the last day of Bob’s reception period. ‘“He and the missus did a wallpaper job.” Counterfeiters. The keeper shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe the poor woman wasn’t in on it at all. They shouldn’t have sent her up.” He looked sharply at Edmund. “Is your hearing good?” The keeper laughed. “I mean c’n you be deaf when you’re minded?” Edmund was mystified, but did not answer. “Tf I know my men, I think you c’n be trusted.” Edmund heaved the full water pail without answering, and again they passed along the gallery. of the novitiates. Bob was standing at his door, as usual. “You’re going out today,” Keeper Bramley told him. “You’re a short timer and maybe you'll be assigned to the hill, digging

stone. When you return tonight, look your cell over carefully. There may be something to interest you.” Bob stared at the keeper, his eyes wondering. “Use your head,” the keeper said, as he walked away with Edmund. Bob was assigned to the quarries on the hill as Keeper Bramley

had anticipated. For several weeks thereafter, when

the night

lockup was over, Edmund filled Bob’s tin cup. The prisoner no longer pressed the keeper with questions. He seemed anxious to retire from the cell door. Once, when Bob had turned to reach for his cup, Edmund

peering into the darkness of the cell was surprised to see the floor close by the inner wall littered with strands of straw. Bob gave no explanation, and Keeper Bramley only nudged him and said, “Move on. The same afternoon, while all the prisoners were busy in the

shops or out with the road companies, Keeper Bramley came

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sauntering along the gallery where Edmund was engaged with his daily mopping and sweeping. “Seems like you’re needing a new tool,” the keeper remarked casually, his eye on the broom. “Better go down to the storehouse and get yourself one. Tell ’em I sent you.” Edmund was sure he did not need a new broom, but an order

from a keeper, especially from Keeper Bramley, was not to be disregarded. The keeper was just coming out of Bob’s cell when Edmund turned the corner of the tier. Bramley locked the door carefully behind him, and for a moment he stood looking at Edmund.

“Mighty fast legs,” he commented, as he moved away. Edmund busied himself with his work. When the keeper had turned the corner and disappeared from view, he went over to

Bob’s cell and looked inside, straining his eyes in the darkness. He could see nothing but the bare fixtures, the tin utensils hanging on their accustomed nails. Perhaps it was only imagination, but it seemed to him that the bunk was not pulled flat against the wall. Probably strung up hurriedly, he thought, and dismissed it from his mind. Still, One-eyed Tim’s mysterious visit and furtive exit from Bob’s cell were certainly puzzling. But “chew your own tongue” was a safe and sane guide for Sing Sing’s prisoners. What went on between the keeper and Bob was no concern of his. He

had heard of strange tie-ups. He went on with his work. The Monday night following was no different from any other. When the night shift came on duty at the usual time, a keeper passed along the tier, holding up his lantern before each cell door. Every bunk was occupied. All seemed well. But in the morning all was not well. There was a banging on a door. “Get up there,” the keeper shouted. “This ain’t no time to be dreamin’. ’ There was no answer, the figure on the bunk did not stir. The inmates of the galleries heard the keeper’s peremptory sum> 99

mons, and men paused to listen. Edmund knew that the hammering was at Bob’s door. Another suicide, was the unspoken message that ran through

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the galleries. Prisoners heard the key scrape in the lock and waited, hushed, until the door swung open. “A dummy!” a keeper yelled. “An escape! Sound the bell!” The entire cell block was astir. Keepers and officers hurried

to the cell. The report was true enough. A life-sized figure was lying as if in sleep . . . a striped suit stuffed with straw, a head shaped from bread crumbs. Edmund, standing at his cell door, watched One-eyed Tim go through the gallery. It was he who climbed the stairs to the topmost tier and pulled at the bell to sound the news over the countryside. ““Watch out for an escaped convict!” Men in the fields surrounding the prison straightened up,

startled. Others reached for their shotguns. A prisoner at large! It was right to be careful. Besides, fifty dollars, the fixed reward for the man’s capture and return, was not to be scorned. But the bell tolled in vain. Bob was gone. He apparently had

had a good start, and left no trace. One-eyed Tim stood as usual. by Edmund’s side as he filled the water pail that afternoon. The keeper’s face was solemn. But Edmund noticed its peculiar tension. He returned the keeper’s steady stare. His water pail filled, they began their tour of the galleries. “Water!”

Prisoners responded as usual. The cell on the lower tier, the one where Bob had been the day before, was vacant. Edmund felt drawn more closely to Keeper Bramley, as if he

had somehow pierced the man’s hard exterior. Except for the necessary routine comments,

however, no word passed between them.

Prisoners were not permitted to address their keepers unless invited to do so, and Edmund did not attempt to break the rule. But he could not help wondering about the emotion masked behind the uncommunicative

face, the occasional

flash of life in the right

eye that seemed somehow reflected in the inanimate glass in the left socket. The usual investigation followed the escape. How had the prisoner managed to secrete in his cell the material necessary to shape that dummy?

There

was

negligence somewhere.

He had

probably had an accomplice. A formal hearing was held in the

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warden’s office. One-eyed Tim was interrogated. He could shed

no light on the subject. Edmund was questioned, though he was hardly expected to tell even if he knew. Apparently he knew nothing. The “dummy” escape was put down as another of those Sing Sing mysteries which must remain forever unsolved, against repetitions of which the prison would have to be guarded. It seemed odd to Edmund, as he reflected over Bob’s “dummy” escape, that the man had preferred to go rather than to remain in closer proximity to his wife and newly born infant. At least, there

was the chance for a furtive glance at the house that sheltered them. Even that was denied him now, a fugitive fleeing his own shadow. It would hardly have been Edmund’s choice. A week later, One-eyed Tim asked for and secured a month’s leave of absence. Another keeper was assigned to his place. News from the female prison on the hill filtered slowly into the main prison. There was little, if any, contact between the two divisions. Many heads in the closely formed lines of shuffling men turned furtively to steal a momentary glance at the Ionic columned building squatting on the hillcrest. Perhaps smoldering fires burned more fiercely, quickening sluggish pulses, as eager eyes sought to pierce the granite structure for an imaginary intimate glimpse at the several hundred female prisoners within as many cells. But neither Edmund nor any of the other male prisoners knew about the resplendent carriage drawn by two spirited horses that drove up to the entrance of the women’s prison. It was several weeks after Bob’s sensational escape. A silk-hatted, gray-uniformed coachman sat beside a heavily veiled woman. The carriage stopped. . The woman looked up at the iron gate behind which stood a male keeper, one of six who made up the protective squad of the female prison, and bent her head to whisper to her coachman. The coach-

man

nodded. With a quick movement, the woman alighted and hastened up the high stone steps. At the gate she paused, turning to gaze at the Hudson, whose wide sweeping current more than a hundred feet below mirrored the blood-red sphere of fire moving slowly down the west. A moment her glance seemed to rest on the opposite

shore, fully three miles distant, and presenting to the naked eye a steep wall of green extending to the very edge of the river. She

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watched a tiny boat being lazily paddled along the eastern shore, just above the bend where the river disappeared toward the south. Then she confronted the waiting keeper at the gate. “I have a letter from the Governor,” she said, speaking huskily through the thick veil that hid her features. The keeper’s keys rattled. The door swung open, and as she passed in the woman acknowledged with a slight bow the keeper’s respectful greeting. “T will show you to the matron’s office,” the man said courteously. The bearer of a letter from the Governor could be no mean personage. He escorted her through the hall, and knocked at a massive wooden door. “A lady with a letter from the Governor,” he announced. A woman in a drab blue uniform looked up. She rose hastily and came forward. The visitor did not remove her veil. She had already taken a large square envelope from her handbag and was holding it out to the matron, who scanned it hastily. The matron lifted her square-chinned face to the veiled woman, a thin smile on her, lips. “Of course,” she said in a hearty tone which belied the nervous shift of her gray eyes. ‘““We shall be glad to have you look us over. Though,” she added apologetically, “we had no notice of your coming.” “His Excellency has asked me to report to him personally,” the veiled woman explained. The matron smiled coldly. “You will be able to disabuse the Governor’s mind about the malicious things that have been said about us, Mrs. Varick. I welcome the opportunity.” Rumor and gossip were indeed working havoc with the matron’s reputation as an administrator. It was being said in Albany that she was a she-devil; that she used the gag and the straitjacket indiscriminately; and that not infrequently her prisoners were starved into submission. And there were whisperings about male keepers tarrying unduly, and clandestinely, in the women prisoners’ cells. Indeed, one such visit had come to grief through the clever artifice of one of the prisoners, a young, comely woman whose impatience with the legal bonds of matrimony had won from an unfeeling jury a

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conviction for bigamy. How could the keeper know that Mary’s soft glance and lowered eyelids meant anything more than acquiescence to his whispered suggestions? “Tonight at eight,” he said in a hopeful undertone as he passed along the corridor flanking her cell. “P’Il have the key to your door.” The corridors were quiet. The matrons were at supper. Eight o’clock found the keeper at Mary’s door. It swung open to his push, and he stepped in quickly. Mary was standing against the inner wall of her cell, her back toward him. He approached her eagerly, yet with caution. She turned around, and the same instant there came to the keeper’s startled ears the sound of a match scratching on the stone wall. The keeper, his eyes bulging, watched the lighted match transfer its flame to a candle, and he looked into the grim features of the principal keeper. “You’re a disgrace to Sing Sing,” the latter growled. Mary’s eyelids fluttered, and she wept softly. “T ain’t a bad woman,” she said, sobbing, with a pleading look

at the principal keeper. “An’ I ain’t whorin’ with no measly keeper!” She glided toward the principal keeper, her hand reaching up to his ruddy face, and her head with its braided hair no higher than his broad shoulders. The officer pushed her from him. “Get back to your corner. Don’t try no tricks on me he commanded gruffly. The keeper followed him sheepishly from the cell. The next day he resigned. The incident would have passed unnoticed, though Sing Sing was hardly proud of it. But the principal keeper’s wife was an inquisitive shrew, and garrulous. The news got about. So,

considering everything, the matron was hardly surprised at the visit of the veiled emissary from the Governor. “TI will find an escort for you,” she told her, and left her

waiting in the office. There was a sudden scurrying along the corridors, and in the shops. Word flashed through the prison. “A representative from the Governor is looking us over. Clean up, spruce up . . . shut up.” Gags were unbound, strait-jackets removed, punishment cells emptied. Prisoners were not to look up from their work as the visitor passed through.

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made a leisurely inspection. She asked

questions and seemed satisfied with the answers. It was curious, the way she insisted on keeping her face covered, but there was no question about her authority. There was the letter, on the Governor’s stationery, and signed by His Excellency himself. Queer people, these hifalutin gentry. But powerful. One needed to be careful. “Td like to see the nursery.” The visitor seemed anxious to explore everything. The three months’ old infant howled in terror as the veiled woman bent over the crib. “It doesn’t like me,” the visitor chuckled huskily, her gloved fingers smoothing the child’s cheeks. “Perhaps if you will send the mother in...” The matron complied obligingly. A tired, pale-faced young woman was escorted into the chamber. The visitor looked at her through the veil, and remarked in a SAM Gere tone, “You don’t seem very well.”

The matron tugged at the visitor’s sleeve, and bent over to whisper in her ear. The veiled woman nodded her head slightly. “Of course... he escaped and left a dummy in his cell. The Governor told me about it. They’re hoping to find him. Almost any day now.” The prisoner-mother’s body swayed. A frightened look came

into her eyes. But she remained silent. It was already dark. The prisoners had been locked in their cells. A bell sounded in the building, the call to the prison staff for supper. The matron politely invited her guest to dine with her, and the invitation was as politely declined. “But don’t let me keep you,” the visitor urged. “You go. T’ll remain here with the mother and child. Perhaps I can make friends with the little thing.” The matron hesitated. Then with a glance of inquiry and warning at the thin-faced prisoner, she left them, saying, “I'll be back in a very little while.” “Please don’t hurry on my account,” the visitor said, “I’m afraid it will take some time to coax a smile into that darling face!” bP)

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So the matron tarried at her supper, discussing with her staff the impressions acquired by the Governor’s emissary. ‘“Hadn’t you better return to the gate?” the matron suggested to the gatekeeper, as the last course was served. The gatekeeper, the only male officer on the night shift of the women’s prison, grinned and jingled the keys dangling from a long chain. “There’s no one gettin’ in or out while I’m here,” he said. ““No need to hurry until the lady upstairs is ready to leave.” Finally the matron pushed back her chair, sighing. “Tl see if I can get rid of the nuisance,” she announced, as she left the room. A few minutes later they heard her cry of alarm. ““They’re gone!” Pandemonium broke loose in the dining room. ““Who’s gone?” The prisoner and the child, and the Governor’s emissary! The carriage, which had waited outside, had vanished, too.

A few minutes

later the bell atop the main prison began

tolling. A prisoner had escaped—two,

in fact, counting

the in-

fant. The first break from the women’s prison. Consternation in Sing Sing soon gave way to hysteria. Male officers fumed. Matrons literally tore at their tightly knotted hair

when the hoax was discovered. The veiled woman was an. impostor, her letter from the Governor a forgery. On the second day, when the messenger returned from Albany he brought back an ultimatum from the Governor. “The visit by the veiled woman was well timed. Undoubtedly someone familiar with the prison’s routine had a hand in it. Either that someone must be found and dealt with, or resignations will be demanded.” Down in the main prison, the warden combed the list of keepers and civilian aides for possible clues. On the hill, the matron pleaded and begged for information from her score of subordinates. No one seemed able to help her. Among the prisoners, also, speculation was rife. An inarticu-

late counting of noses occupied the minds of the silent ranks, and the galleries. Who had turned the trick? Edmund, pursuing his tasks as water boy alongside his uni-

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formed escort, invariably paused by the cell that had been Bob’s, as if expecting the vacant cell to solve the puzzle. And at night, after the lockup, his fingers would drag the long nail along the stone wall while his mind was picturing the furtive meeting of a little group. A pale woman clinging desperately to her grim-faced husband, with the infant babbling close by. Perhaps they were already over the state line, well on the road to some still uncharted destination. Undoubtedly, Bob had planned well. Edmund smiled inwardly, thinking of One-eyed Tim. He was due back in a week. Would there be light in his glass eye? Edmund hugged his secret like a miser his hoard. The next morning the prisoners stood at their cell doors waiting for the familiar sounds of keys scraping locks. The count was over, followed by the usual cry, “All here.” Yet keepers made no move to open the cells. In the yard groups of uniformed men stood whispering together. In the warden’s office a curious scene was taking place. The warden, his face unusually stern and solemn, was fingering a small, egg-shaped glass ball. The principal keeper, his jaw set square, a deep frown on his face and a glint of steel in his eyes, stood over him, staring down at the agate-like object. A young man, apparently a civilian, faced them across the warden’s desk. “Are you sure you’ve told us everything?” The warden was eying his visitor keenly. The young man nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir. I ain’t holdin’ out on you. I seen the skiff pulled up on the shore. I knew it didn’t belong to any of us folks, so I kinda

thought it: queer. I was thinkin’ maybe someone rowed across durin’ the night and was aimin’ to go back in the mornin’. So, thinkin’ since I was aimin’ to cross over to the east shore, the fellah, whoever it was, would have room fer me, I waited. Two

hours I waited, an’ nobody came to claim it. So I took it in my head to chance it myself. I dragged the boat into the water, an’ while I was rowin’ over I sees this glass piece. An’ then when I reached this side an’ heard *bout the getaway, I thought maybe

this had something to do with it.” The speaker breathed deeply. “So I brought it, thinkin’ maybe it would get me a reward.” Before the man had finished the principal keeper’s face had

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lighted with a sudden inspiration. He reached over and seized the round glass ball in the warden’s hand. He was hardly listening to the man’s concluding words. His massive hand pounded on the warden’s desk. “Bramley!” It was the tone of a man who had made a worldshaking discovery. “I'll give my life on it. It’s his glass eye!” “Am I gettin’ the reward?” the visitor asked hopefully. The principal keeper scowled. “A hundred dollars . . . if that’s what I think it is. That eye’ll bring back two prisoners, and,” he added, winking, “maybe give us a third.” The visitor smiled. “When do I get it?” “Patience, man,” the principal keeper replied, “this will have to be looked into. Come back in a week.” A half-hour later the cell doors were opened, and the prisoners marched to their belated breakfast.

25 One-eyed Tim wore a black patch over his left eye socket. It was said that his glass eye reposed in a vault behind the warden’s

desk. Rumor had it also that, as he was being dressed in his striped suit, he pleaded for the return of his agate optic. “It can’t be done,” the principal keeper said with a cain “That’s the evidence. You'll get it when your time is up. Besides,” the officer’s tone sharpened, “that black patch is your badge of shame. To show how you ruined yourself and disgraced Sing Sing.” Curiously enough, the one-eyed prisoner showed no evidence

of shame or self-incrimination. The erstwhile keeper took his place in the line of striped, shuffling prisoners, his shoulders no rounder than those of the others, his gait no slower. Neither was there about him any air of bravado.

He submitted

calmly, without

pitying show of resignation, to the customary prison.

any self-

routine of the

A strange fellow, Bramley, keepers and officials said of him.

Old-timers among prisoners called him a fool. It was generally agreed by those who dared to discuss the matter at all that he

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must have succumbed to the temptation constantly dangled before Sing Sing’s keepers . . . gold. Timothy Bramley’s confession—wiseacres said he could have done nothing else in the face of the damaging evidence, the mute testimony of that glass eye—had stirred Sing Sing to its depths. To the outside world it confirmed that which had theretofore been merely conjecture. Beneath its surface calm, Sing Sing seethed with all the vices destructive of soul and spirit. Even keepers were not immune. Hard exteriors hid unmoral and unrestrained

passions. Graft was the rule. Favors were bartered. One-eyed Tim’s confession was definite proof of the unholy communion between prisoners and keepers. But to the thousand and more prisoners of Sing Sing, the men with whom Tim now marched through the yard and worked in the shop, his black patch was an insignia of hope. What happened once could happen again. Eyes which had lost their keenness came alive, sullen faces grew softer. Prisoners responded as submissively as always to sharp commands and bent over their tasks with their accustomed silence, but minds were more alert; men glanced

furtively at their keepers, trying to fathom their hearts. Which of them were Bramleys? How many would hearken to the call of gold? If a man was smart, might not the prison gates open for him,

as they did for Bob? Men became restless. The black patch moving in their midst became a symbol of promise. The warden and the principal keeper, the entire force of guards, were not slow in sensing the men’s reactions. To them Oneeyed Tim and his black patch stood out as a challenge. Watching him they doubted themselves, and became suspicious of each other, so that after a while keepers not only eyed their prisoners, but scrutinized their comrades, wondering how many prisoners were

already forging ties that would end in additional escapes and disasters. To them, the one-eyed prisoner was a constant menace,

his plack patch a symbol of their weakness. Few, among either the prisoners or the keepers, knew exactly

what had transpired in the warden’s office on the morning of ‘Tim’s return from his month’s leave of absence. The warden and the principal keeper were alone with him. The officials heard with astonishment his instant acknowledgment that the glass eye was his.

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“It dropped out as we scuftled out of the boat,” he smiled, “and I didn’t stop to look for it in the dark.” ‘You mean you rowed Madge and the infant across the river?” the warden

asked, incredulous.

Tim nodded. “That was the reason you asked for leave of absence?” the principal keeper bellowed. Tim shrugged his shoulders, and smiled again. “You went to collect your bribe,” the principal keeper continued. It was then that Tim’s body straightened, he stepped forward to grip the desk behind which the warden sat glowering; and his right eye flamed with sudden animation. “There was no bribe,” he said passionately, ‘“‘at least, not the

kind you mean. No gold or silver, or other favors.” “Just a good Samaritan,” the principal keeper sneered, “risking your neck for a poor convict!” Tim shook his head, smiling. His hands had relaxed their grip on the warden’s desk. He was again standing erect. “Of course, you wouldn’t understand, P.K.” He spoke slowly, his features relaxed and, except for the bright gleam in his eye, unusually calm. “It came on me suddenly when you refused to let Bob see his wife and baby up there in the women’s prison.” “Rules are made to be obeyed,” the warden muttered. “Ips the only way to handle convicts.” “Funny you should feel that way,” the principal keeper jeered, “after them convicts cut your eye out of your head.” “Tt made my right eye sharper!” The principal keeper thumped the desk.

“Talk ain’t getting us nowhere. If it wasn’t a bribe, what in hell was it?” “Yes,” the warden echoed,. ‘we'd like to know.” For a few moments Tim’s one eye stared at his inquisitors. His lips twitched. His mouth opened. Then, apparently thinking better of it, his teeth snapped and his lips tightened.

“Pm thinking you and I don’t talk alike,” he said finally. “I ain’t denying the charge. Better let it stand that way.”

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There was nothing else to be done. Or said. Timothy Bramley was indicted. He pleaded guilty. Five years was the sentence he drew. Edmund,

of course, knew

nothing of the interview

in the

warden’s office. He was on the tier, attending to his usual duties, when Tim was escorted into a cell after his conviction. He watched the barred door swing open, saw the gray-haired figure straighten, heard his deep breath. The door clanged after him. The key scraped the lock. Edmund waited until the keeper left the hall, then he busied himself with his broom. He worked slowly, still more slowly as he neared Tim’s cell. If only the keeper remained at his post at the far end of the gallery, there might be a chance for a few whispered words. It was difficult to maintain that slow listless movement, with

the blood racing through his veins, and the nervous tremor in his hands. After interminable minutes, he reached the space fronting Tim’s door. The keeper was still at his post. Edmund was alone on the gallery. But he hardly dared turn his eyes toward those bars, fearing not for himself, but to discover in Tim’s face and eye the look of despair that must surely be there. Of all the prisoners and keepers of Sing Sing, Edmund alone understood the urge that had prompted Tim to “aid and abet” the escape of Bob, his wife and child. The man had achieved his purpose, but at the cost of his freedom. A family had been reunited. But he, himself, was cut off from the world.

Liberty for others. Slavery for himself. Edmund’s brow creased in a momentary spasm of memory. Had not the same impulse driven Elizabeth? And was it not, perhaps, still driving her

on as she pursued her self-appointed task of liberating southern negroes? Elizabeth, too, had suffered bars and imprisonment. That

was one phase of her experiences that he How she must have suffered! As Tim must He was staring at the face dug into iron bars. Tim’s right eye sparkled, as if

had not often recalled. now be suffering. the space between the it focused not only its own strength but also that of the eye that was missing underneath the black patch. His lips were open in a wide smile. Not despair at all. There was no resentment in Tim’s face. Edmund smiled back.

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The keeper had already left his post and was making his rounds. Edmund bent to his slow, leisurely sweeping. The keeper paused, stared sharply at the impassive, expressionless face of the man pushing the broom. There was no smile on the man’s face, but neither Sing Sing nor the keeper could detect the lightning strokes of his heart. That night Edmund worked long hours etching on the stone wall of his cell. A futile thing, this Sing Sing. Hammering down at human emotions. Suppressing every symptom of love. Fashion-

ing hate. He would carve the word that all might read, and perhaps understand. Cynic. It was natural that Tim’s presence in Sing Sing as a prisoner should have brought on the hardship that followed. Keepers vied with each other in impressing their wills on the striped men. The prisoners were driven more furiously in the shops and in the quarries. The slightest infraction was punished severely. Keepers forgot, or did not take the time, to report violations to the principal keeper’s office. Foremen insisted on greater production. Whips, long forgotten and, in fact, prohibited by law, were taken out from hidden racks. They cracked incessantly, a reign of terror resulting from the suspicion with which keepers eyed each other, and the desire to impress upon the cowed prisoners that One-eyed Tim could have no successor. In those days the foundry worked at a furious pace to provide yokes and crucifixes and balls and chains and shower baths. All went into immediate service. Yet the necessity for them continued. It seemed as though the hardening process could have no end.

It was

not long before Tim experienced the fury of his

former comrades. He had been assigned to the stove factory. “You won’t need more than one eye making stoves,” the principal keeper told him. But it was not Tim’s eye that impeded his work. His twenty-five years as keeper had softened him physically. He lagged behind in his tasks. Fhe foreman complained. Tim tried

to explain. But “rules are made to be obeyed,” the principal keeper said. Tim was sent to the foundry, and when he returned his waist was circled with an iron frame from which a long chain dangled, and he carried in his hands a big, round iron ball. Tim’s every step

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was accompanied by the clank of the long iron chain. Prisoners stared at him, pitying. Yet Tim’s face seemed unworried. He shuffled heavily into the stove factory, and made for his usual work table. There was no safeguarding against unavoidable accidents, Tim’s tripping over the metal tub filled with melted tin was certainly an accident. Yet, somehow, the iron ball was jerked from his hands and dropped into the mass of liquid tin. The cold iron and the hot tin made instant contact. The tin cooled, and the iron

ball held fast. There was no loosening it. Tim was unable to move. The foreman fumed, the keeper stared suspiciously at the prisoner. The report went over to the principal keeper. Meanwhile Tim’s iron ball remained imbedded in the mass of cooling tin. Prisoners grinned. The entire shop was disorganized. Order was restored only when the chain dangling from Tim’s iron waistband was hacked and torn apart. That night a group gathered in the warden’s office. They talked for hours. The conference over, the keepers separated. 26

“A draft!” It was inconceivably mysterious, the way the galleries learned things. The very silence settling down on them after the night lockup seemed at times to become a transmitter through which rumor and fact seeped into the cells. Certainly the keepers made no mention of it, having been bound to secrecy. Yet all Sing Sing knew plans were being perfected for a transfer of prisoners to Auburn, several hundred miles distant, in central New York.

The “draft” was the administration’s answer to the unmistakable signs of unrest. Key men among the prisoners, those considered most dangerous, were to be transferred. Their identity was not disclosed. It was a remarkable phase of prison psychology, that dread of the draft. One would think there could be no regret at leaving the memories of trial and torture that were so intimately associated with Sing Sing, and that prisoners, especially old-timers and men facing long terms, would welcome the change. Auburn could be

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no worse. Some thought it better. It was older, its policy more settled. Not like Sing Sing’s, which changed with each incoming administration, reflecting the personal preferences and philosophy of the new warden. Yet there was in Sing Sing an inexplicable terror of the draft. Perhaps, despite the lack of visits and mail, there was still a feeling of proximity to home, New York being only thirty miles distant; or the hope, remote, intangible though it was, of a turn that would bring back those privileges which for several years had been denied them, when relatives would again be admitted for visits and letter writing be restored. However that was, the imminence of the draft served to make eyes harder, lockstepping feet slower and heavier, minds more moody. Edmund was thinking of the rumored transfer. But he was indifferent, half hoping that he would be among the elect. He had no thought of restored intimacies. Elizabeth had doubtless swept him from her life, immersed as she was in her work somewhere in

the South. His earlier resentment against her had faded with the years, she no longer disturbed him. When he did think of her, it was as the strange woman who had stood outside his cell in the Tombs, in the days preceding his trial, a cold, austere woman suppressing her instincts and emotions before some deep-rooted consciousness of her self-imposed mission. He could no longer imagine her as soft and pliant, yielding to ecstatic passion. He was convinced that she was right. Love and wifehood had not been for her. There were moments, stretched through the early years of his imprisonment, when he had imagined himself in the role of a savior. Perhaps he would accomplish in Sing Sing the things for which Elizabeth was striving in the fields of her own choosing, make freemen of slaves, lead them to new horizons, break down

the barriers that held them fast. It was then that he had begun to scratch on the stone wall. But that urge had not been deep; it remained a vague dream that*became constantly more nebulous. He was no longer concerned with what went on about him. He had become a drifter, content to pass each day doing the tasks assigned to him; sweeping dust from the tiers, pouring water into tin cups held by eager hands inside the steel bars. But he kept on etching into his stone wall. Dulled, indolent as he had become, in-

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different to time, there was one single flare of vivid consciousness that spelled cynicism. Elizabeth would fail. Slaves could never be made over into men. Sing Sing would fail. Freemen could never be pommeled into slaves. Edmund Rolphe knew. He could afford to be the cynic, jeering at the world. From his station on the tier, Edmund watched the daily arrivals. Every day brought its quota. “If they keep on comin’ this way,” the hall keeper grumbled, “we'll have to double them up.” Edmund would have been glad to have a companion in his cell. He would be able to learn about things outside. Not that they mattered much. Nothing was changed, he was sure. The stench in Five Points was probably as strong as ever. Bob the Wheeler was dead, but doubtless there was a new Bob. No, nothing was

different. But he would have liked to hear even that. He was staring hopefully at the line of new arrivals being escorted into cells. He counted twelve. Pretty soon they would have to begin doubling up. The top tiers were filling up, and not enough prisoners were being discharged. Twelve. Most of them young, not over eighteen. Smooth faces. Terrified eyes. Solemn expressions. A few were gray haired. Dull eyed, sad looking. Listless. They were marched along the corridor, each man stopped before an empty cell, doors swung open, the men stepped inside, and the doors clanged behind them. It was a daily occurrence.

Edmund was hardly impressed. “Fill the water pail.” The hall keeper’s familiar order. He was passing along the tier, pausing before each cell.

“Water!” The hall keeper kept pace with him. Invariably, the man in the cell reached for his tin cup and held it up for the flow from the nozzle. “Water!” The man inside was holding his tin cup close to the bars. Edmund noticed that his hair was gray and that his eyes stared out with piercing sharpness. A thin-faced fellow, whose striped suit hung loose over his narrow shoulders. “By the livin’ hokey, Sing Sing’s gone soft! Givin’ water with no askin’ fer it.” “Here. Seems like you’re achin’ for somethin’ hard,” the hall

keeper warned the grinning prisoner. “Better hold your tongue.”

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The water from Edmund’s pail flowed into the man’s cup, and over, until it streamed down and ran in a rivulet along the gallery. The keeper nudged him. But he did not lower his pail. The water flowed on. He was staring at the grinning face, looking into the piercing eyes. His hands went lax, the pail clattered to the floor. “Edmund Rolphe!” “Jonathan Peck!”

Neither knew which spoke the other’s name first. But the sudden whirling pain in Edmund’s ears was like that of a man long submerged in deep water risen to the surface, and the smart in his eyes like the terrifying sight of the onrushing shore through a constantly thinning wall of water over which he was being catapulted to an unknown fate. “Get going, Rolphe.” The keeper was nudging him with his cane. He passed along. The keeper grudgingly and grumblingly permitted him to refill the pail. The arrival of Jonathan Peck altered Edmund’s attitude toward the draft. Though he remembered the man only with hate, he was anxious to remain with him in Sing Sing. Jonathan would have news of Elizabeth. Not that he wanted news of her, he told

himself as he sat in his cell that night, yet she was still his wife. It was his duty ... In the two weeks of Jonathan Peck’s reception period, there was no chance to talk to him. The hall keeper was on the alert. He had noticed Edmund’s shock of recognition. He said nothing to Edmund, but Jonathan Peck explained with eloquent emphasis, as he walked beside the keeper on his usual introductory rounds. The keeper discovered that Edmund was the man’s son-in-law. And

the records of Sing Sing disclosed that Jonathan Peck was doing his third term, having once escaped. A man to be watched. Jonathan Peck was an old hand at this prison business. The years had not altered his shrewdness. The Yankee was resourceful. His two weeks’ isolation over, he was assigned to the weavers. Edmund saw less of him now. They watched each other from a distance, in the yard, as their respective companies marched in the

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daily routine, and in the mess hall where a dozen tables separated them. Jonathan had been moved to another tier, into a cell well to-

ward the top of the cell block. Joe the Ape was the gallery runner, a black man with arms extending below his knees and misshapen legs twisted inward. They justified the appellation given him by the prisoners whom he served. No one, not even the keepers, paid

any attention to Joe’s gibbering. At first he had been flogged for it. But soon it was ascertained that Joe was not really bad. His talk was harmless, the words meaningless. He became the object of the keepers’ mirth, one of the few prisoners with whom they took light liberties.

Edmund had paid little attention to the negro. But one afternoon, about a month after Jonathan Peck’s arrival, Joe sidled close

to Edmund at the water trough where the runners had gathered to fill their pails. As usual, Edmund was intent on his own task and not listening to the mumbling words. But the negro kept nudging him. Edmund was annoyed at first. Then he sensed a purpose in it. “My pail’s yours, an’ yours is mine.”

It was like a chant repeated over and over again. Joe glanced furtively around. The hall keeper’s attention was elsewhere. He stooped down quickly, reached for Edmund’s pail and replaced it with his own. “The paper in the nozzle. The paper in the nozzle.” Joe chanted it in his gibbering tone. Edmund filled his pail. Then as he walked toward his tier, he slid his hand furtively up the noz7le. His fingers felt the paper crumpled into a ball. His hand closed over it. An instant later it was secreted in the single pocket of his striped coat. The keeper seemed to tarry longer than usual that afternoon. Edmund listened to the slow step that indicated the final count. After the shout, “All here,’ he waited a few moments longer to make sure that the keeper had taken his place at the far end of the gallery. Then he walked quietly toward the cell door and held up the paper to the fast dimming light. It was some time before he could make out the hurried scrawl.

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If you still want to know about Elizabeth, she’s down south working for the niggers. I writ her about my troubles but she never answered. Seems like she’s one of them wimmen that’s so

took up with black men as to forget about her own father and her husband and her own child. If yow’re still thinking about her, better save your thinking and forgit her, like I done. Edmund had mastered the scrawl. He reread the words, slowly,

carefully. Then suddenly a thick mist seemed to cover them. His fingers were crumpling the paper into a small round ball. But there was something he must make sure of. He unfolded it carefully. It was there. No mistake about it. “Her own child.” The mist cleared away. Now he saw clearly. Elizabeth was a mother, and he had not been told. No one had written him. Per-

haps the letter had not been delivered. Better hold on to himself. No use letting go. Jonathan Peck was a scoundrel. He would not hesitate to crucify his own daughter. This was his way of rousing Edmund against her. It was impossible that she should have kept it from him. He scrutinized the paper again, reading each word slowly. “Took up with black men as to forget about her own . . .” Yes,

that was Elizabeth, a fanatic who had drained herself of every emotion except the one that had become her life. The Cause. But she ought to have told him. He should have known. Not that it would have mattered. He could have been of no use to the child. No comfort to her . . . He stared down at his trembling fingers. How cold it was, though outside the sun was hot. July. Yes, he was

sure it was July. Only a few days since the men had been kept in their cells all day. Independence Day, the keepers said. The shops were closed, Sing Sing was celebrating. The prisoners were idle, not allowed to leave their cells even for mess. He shivered with cold, watching his fingers twitch. His trembling hand reached up and stroked his chin. A week-old stubble. Tomorrow he would ask to be shaved. He felt over his cheeks. It was some years since he had seen his face. Too bad about the mirror chip, he should not have let it fall to the stone floor and be shattered. He wondered if his hair was grayer. Perhaps white. And the lines. Perhaps deeper.

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The child would be quite grown up. He counted on his fingers. Six... seven... it must be eight. Or was it nine? Was it tall, like Elizabeth?

A look of wonder crept into his eyes. Then he

laughed. A quiet laugh that ended in a chuckle. He, the father, did

not even know whether his child was a boy or a girl. He was holding fast to the slip of paper, his fingers tearing at it. Strip by strip. Long, then short, small particles. He stuffed them into his mouth.

Peculiar taste the paper had. He gulped hard. And reached for his cup and washed them down. The evidence was gone. Boy or girl, it didn’t matter now. It never did matter. Jonathan Peck was a fool. He turned to scratch on the wall. Joe the Ape was again at his side by the water trough. His lips were moving, and he was gibbering. “Change your pail... change your pail.”” But Edmund had already filled his own, and was walking away. He was afraid of those messages from Jonathan Peck. And he did not relish the taste of paper. Joe the Ape stared

after him, shrugged his shoulders and went on with his gibbering. 27 It had taken two months for Sing Sing to perfect plans for the draft. The messenger had been to Albany, then had gone on to Auburn partly by steam train and stage. He returned with the information that Auburn was prepared to accept a hundred men. They were to travel by boat to Albany, then by rail and stage to their destination. They would be shackled in pairs. Three-foot

chains around the feet, handcuffs on wrists. A score of keepers, well armed, would accompany the human consignment. It would not do to take chances, not with the gang of desperadoes who had been picked to go. The draft was well timed. The steamer tied up at the wharf would suit the purpose. Its cargo of explosives, intended for the quarries, was being rapidly moved. Another day, and it would be ready for the trip north. On the morning of the day fixed for the transfer, a hundred cells would remain locked. The rest of the prisoners would be sent out as usual. The hundred prisoners would know, for the first

time, that they had been chosen to make the trip to Auburn.

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They would be marched to the office of the principal keeper, then to the mess hall for a belated breakfast, then shackled. Finally, they would be escorted to the shore and driven on board the steamer. A few minutes more and it would cast off, back out into the river, set its nose north against the current, and begin the

journey. Everything had been worked out in detail. There could be no hitch. The draft gone, Sing Sing would be able to settle down to a more peaceful existence.

In the meantime the minds of the prisoners had not been idle. The earlier rumor of the impending transfer was the occasion for considerable speculation as to the identitiesof the men booked to go. In the shops names were whispered banteringly. Men checked up, nervously, on the frequency of their visits to the principal keeper;

on their difficulties with

foremen;

on their records

for

attempted escapes. All these items, they were sure, would be taken into consideration in making up the draft list. It was astonishing how closely the prisoners’ judgment coincided with the names actually listed on the warden’s desk. Curious, also, how accurate was the choice of One-eyed Tim. The latter apparently was indifferent. Edmund was not sure about himself. He could figure out no reason why he should be picked to go. Perhaps it had something to do with his being on the tier when Bob made his famous “dummy” escape; he was suspected of having a tie-up with Tim. Yet there had been no intimation that he was in bad favor. It was Joe the Ape who confirmed his suspicions. ““You’s booked to go,” the negro whispered as he stood beside Edmund the morning of the messenger’s arrival. Edmund was certain he did not want to go. “So’s grandpop,” Joe whispered, meaning Jonathan Peck. That day keepers and foremen found it hard to maintain discipline. The lines of marching men did not seem to respond to the warning shouts that usually speeded them up. Men lagged at their tasks in the shops. On the hills, prisoners paused to gaze at the steamer tied up at the quay, resuming their work only when threatened by their guards. Keepers were glad when the workday was done. They, too, were nervous about the draft. Well, tomorrow

it would be over. The ship would be unloaded that night. The prisoners were lined up in the yard, each company stand-

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ing at attention by its shop building, waiting for the order to begin the shuffle to the mess hall. One-eyed Tim stood with the stove builders, Jonathan Peck with the weavers. Edmund

with the hall

company. It was a hot, humid day, with the sun beating down unmercifully on the ranks of striped men. An air of somber listlessness hung heavy over Sing Sing. “March!” The order came clear and loud through the yard, initiated by the principal keeper and repeated by the keepers guarding their respective companies. The lines began to move. The route lay across the yard, within a hundred feet of the shore. A dozen keepers, shouldering rifles, faced the lines of prisoners. “Keep moving!” Keepers were nudging the men with their

hickory canes. “Faster!”? A keeper stuck his cane into the ribs of one of the marchers. The man’s single eye flamed, his face flushed a deep red, then paled. “It’s the head of the line that’s holding back,” One-eyed Tim protested. The keeper stepped closer to the black patched face, his eyes blazing furiously. His arm reached out, grasped the man’s shoulder, and hauled him from the line. “Maybe you’re forgettin’,” he shouted, “you ain’t wearin’ a

uniform now!” His hickory cane rose high and came down with a quick and heavy slam on Tim’s head. ““You’re a convict now, an’ this’Il remind you.” There was a sudden movement in the line behind Tim. It became a shapeless, tugging mass of men. There was no holding it. Keepers roared and swung their canes desperately, but their cries were drowned in the rising tide of oaths and curses. The offending keeper was on the ground, trampled by numberless feet. One-eyed Tim had retreated from the frenzied mob. He did not seem to mind the blood dripping from his head. “Make a good job,” a voice yelled, “kill ’em all!” A chorus of yells approved. Keeper after keeper went down before the fury of the milling mob. The armed keepers by the river front went into instant action. The hills beyond the river

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reverberated with the volley of shots that came from their rifles.

A dozen prisoners fell. It did not stop the tumult. One-eyed Tim had worked his way to the edge of the crowd. A moment his eye rested on the steamer tied to the wharf.

“To the boat, men!” His voice sounded clear and sharp above the yells of the disordered crowd. There was a momentary lull. It seemed that the men were weighing their chances. Then, heedless of the volleys from the keepers, the crowd bulged toward the river. Keepers fell back. Led by One-eyed Tim, the mob pushed on. Keepers were disarmed. The yelling men climbed aboard the ship. Some leaped into the water and clambered up the sides, others pushed their way up the gangplank, driving helpless keepers before them. The first yell of fury found Edmund at a distance from the scene of disorder. He was being pushed forward by the advancing prisoners. “They’ve floored One-eyed Tim,” he heard someone shout. He saw the sudden fury of the stampeding mob. “Kill the bastards!” “String ’em up!” “Put ’em in irons!” “Throw ’em in the river!” Edmund’s one thought was to reach One-eyed Tim. He fought through the struggling mass of men, his arms pommeling backs and heads, his body edging constantly forward. A keeper blocked his way. Edmund bent his head low, using it as a battering ram against the keeper's chest. The latter fell back. Edmund paused to tear the man’s cane from his viselike grip, and ran on. He did not hear the rasping voice of Jonathan Peck behind him. He stood on the poop of the steamer by the side of One- an Tim, staring at the prisoners crowding the deck. “Better stop ’em coming on, or they’ll swamp the boat.” Edmund turned and eyed the speaker. Jonathan Peck was grinning. “You an’ me c’n be in command here,” Peck was saying. “It'll take two eyes and a cool head,” he added, nodding toward Tim. The tumult was increasing. The prisoners on deck, sensing the danger of overcrowding, were repelling other prisoners.

“Better cast off,” Jonathan Peck yelled in Edmund’s ear. The

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latter glanced toward One-eyed Tim standing beside him, his face grim, his eye flashing. Tim’s arm rose suddenly and pointed toward the prison. The warden and the principal keeper, followed by a large company of keepers, all armed with rifles, were approaching. “Cast off!” Jonathan Peck yelled. But Tim’s arm remained outstretched. A sudden silence descended on the maddened crowd of prisoners. Every head turned toward the advancing officers, who halted a hundred feet from the shore. The warden came forward. “Come off the boat quietly,” he called, “or we'll shoot!” There was a moment of silence. The prisoners turned toward One-eyed Tim, as if waiting for orders from him. “There are at least a dozen keepers in the hold with the explosives,” he called back. “If you shoot we’ll blow ’em to smithereens!” The warden consulted the principal keeper. “What do you men want? This won’t get you anything but trouble.” There came the immediate answer. “Restore visits and letters. Less driving in the shops. And no

draft!” The principal keeper shook his head, and turned to whisper to the warden. “We'll not bargain with convicts,” the warden shouted. “Come off the boat, and then we'll treat with you.” “Yeah?”

a voice called. It was

Jonathan

Peck’s. “It’s fine

treatin’ you'll do with us in irons.” The prisoners roared their approval. “Cast off!” Jonathan yelled. Willing hands tugged at the rope that held the steamer to the quay.

A number

of prisoners,

apparently

regretting

their

escapade, jumped from the boat to the shore. One of the keepers raised his rifle. A shot whistled by Edmund’s head. He swayed, and swung around in time to see Oneeyed Tim slump at his feet. From somewhere on deck came an answering shot. Then, as if a giant hand had struck it, the boat rocked suddenly and a billowing sheet of flame shot into the air, followed by a roar that echoed through the hills and across the river.

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Hundreds of convicts were struggling in the water. The steamer was a mass of flames. Keepers were driving back the prisoners from the shore. Others had hurried to the quay encouraging survivors to hold fast to spars and timber. That night every cot in the hospital was filled. A dozen bodies lay in the prison morgue, Jonathan Peck and One-eyed Tim among them. » The prison doctor was bending over a silent figure. The man was breathing hard. The doctor examined his list of wounded, the principal keeper standing beside him. “Rolphe is that fellow’s name. He was booked to go on the draft.” The doctor was examining the unconscious survivor. He stood up and stared grimly at the principal keeper.

“The man’s in a bad way. There’s a slight chance he may pull through.” He walked away. Other cots demanded his attention. Edmund Rolphe did pull through. A month later he was dis-

charged from the hospital. 28

“Do you think it’s safe?” The warden’s face wore-an anxious look. It was two months after the riot. Sing Sing had settled down to the customary routine. The shops had resumed work. The prisoners were again docile. There had been no compromise. A dozen men occupied as many dungeons. Scores were in irons, dragging balls and chains as they went about their tasks. In every shop were evidences of the blast that had killed and maimed. The keepers had come out miraculously whole, they had suffered only one casualty. And except for the damaged boat, there was little property damage. The warden’s official report to his superiors gave meager details. “I refused to deal with the frenzied mob of prisoners,” the report stated proudly. But in the concluding paragraph was this

significant item: “I suggest that visits and letters be restored to the |) men. These privileges will undoubtedly help greatly in keeping | the prisoners docile and contented.”

4

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There had, as yet, been no response to the warden’s suggestion. “It’s queer about that fellow,” the warden said thoughtfully, addressing the prison doctor who sat facing him across the desk. “You tell me there’s nothing wrong with him, no physical injury, yet it’s certain his mind is gone.” The doctor’s hand smoothed his chin. He coughed slightly,

then squinted his eyes. “It may be a temporary aberration, resulting from shock. I’ve watched him closely. He is obedient, takes orders. He handles

his job on the gallery well. He answers calls for water from the cells.” The doctor paused, as if to weigh his professional judgment. “There is one curious thing about him.” “His loss of speech?” The doctor shook his head. “That may be due to his general mental condition. It’s what he does in his cell. ’'ve caught him scratching on one of the walls with a large nail. It’s something he began years ago, SRN And it’s the one thing that he retains mentally.” The warden sat up with sudden interest. “You don’t think he’s trying to loosen a stone—not planning

things?” The doctor laughed. “Hardly. It’s some writing. If he were all there,” the doctor pointed to his head, “it would be interesting to question him about it. It must have meant something to him . . . probably still does.” The warden’s face lighted. “You don’t think a good old-fashioned flogging will help?” “No, indeed,” the doctor said emphatically.

“But still you think it safe to keep him on the gallery?” “In fact, I recommend it. Reason may return to him as sud-

denly as it left. Continuing his usual routine may help.” The warden sighed. “Tt’s your responsibility, doctor.” “J accept it, warden.” Edmund Rolphe was permitted to continue as water boy and general utility man on the gallery. At first prisoners jeered, then grimaced, and finally pitied the quiet, retiring imbecile. He walked with a slow, plodding gait. His sagging shoulders seemed to fit in

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with his snow-white hair. The deeply lined face indicated advancing years. “Old man,” keepers and prisoners called him. Only the occasional flash in his eyes was not in keeping with his general physical aspect. The prison doctor alone knew his age. The man

was prematurely aged. He looked seventy, and he had not yet reached his fiftieth year. Edmund did not know or, if he knew, was wholly indifferent to the changes that altered Sing Sing’s routine. It did not matter to him that the warden resigned and the principal keeper was reduced in rank. Nor that the riot had accomplished its objective. The draft had not gone out. Visits, once every six months, were restored. Letter writing, once every three months, was permitted. Changes of administration or personnel did not affect him. He remained on the gallery, sweeping, carrying water, doing errands. The doctor saw to that. He was watching his patient, and followed with increasing interest the man’s progress with his etching. The word Cynic was done. Edmund had begun the fourth line. Numerals. The doctor found it an interesting study.

“It’s the man’s only remaining spark of intelligence,” he told his assistant. “It might in time restore his mind.” But the mind remained blank, the tongue speechless. And finally the doctor planned to resign his post. “T would have liked to stay, if only to watch that man Rolphe,” he told his successor. He recounted, in minute detail, the

man’s history as he knew it. The new doctor, a young man, was interested. “Did it occur to you that it might be advisable to searcn out the man’s family history? Perhaps someone on the outside could help. A wife . .. or perhaps a child.” It had not occurred to the older man. And the records did not indicate any kinship. There had been no visits or inquiries, no letters. But the young prison doctor was an energetic fellow. At his insistence inquiries were instituted. They seemed to lead nowhere. But gradually the trail was uncovered. Faint at first, then more distinct. The man was married. The search continued. The trail was elusive, leading the pursuers through every southern state. Rumor associated the wife with the underground railroad that

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harassed slaveowners and piqued northern pacifists. Here and there was the hint of her surreptitious leadership in the movement, intangible though it was, aiming to arouse the southern negroes to open rebellion, her name being joined to that of John Brown, the visionary, upon whose head North and South alike heaped malediction. It was several years before Elizabeth was located. She had come to New York on an urgent mission. The doctor, sensing victory, ingratiated himself with her associates and was permitted to attend one of the secret conferences of the Abolitionists. At last he saw her, a tall, thin-lipped, black-haired woman whose eyes looked steadily into his as he introduced himself. If Sing Sing meant anything to her, she gave no hint of it. Perhaps the momentary

lowering of her eyelids was evidence of emotion. The doctor could not help marveling at the woman’s iron self-control. “Are you one of us?” she asked, her voice cold, disregarding his mention of Sing Sing. The doctor nodded, a mechanical gesture. He was searching her eyes. It was a small meeting. There were only a score of men, whose eyes were glued on her as she rose to make her report. She spoke quickly, her face had lost its hardness, softening with the flow of her words. She concluded with an impassioned appeal. “John Brown is dead, but our cause is won. The slaves must be free. There will be war, a long, desperate war. There will be much suffering. But it will bring us victory!” When the meeting was over, she listened calmly to the doctor’s

description of his patient. When he had finished, she remained seated, staring down at the desk that separated them. *There’s a child, I understand,”

the doctor said.

She looked up at him quickly. Her eyes widened, gleaming, and a single gasp escaped her. He could feel the self-imposed restraint that hemmed her in. “The boy is being well cared for,” she said, in her cold, calm

tone. “Did Rolphe know?” Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders. “Tt would have made things harder for me . . . to have kept

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in touch with him. I needed freedom. My work came first. Besides, it couldn’t have mattered to him . . . not with twenty years in Sing Sing ahead of him.”

“But didn’t it occur to you that his term might have been shortened . . . a pardon perhaps? Such things are always happening.” She stared at him, frightened, then rose suddenly and paced the floor. He waited for her to become calmer. “There was no chance for a pardon . .. no chance, I tell you!” Her words rang hysterically through the vacant hall and lost themselves somewhere in the rafters. The doctor smiled grimly. Elizabeth promised to come to Sing Sing. “Seeing you... perhaps your voice . .. might bring him back,” the doctor said.

She kept her word. The doctor led Edmund into the warden’s office. She rose as he entered. He advanced

toward

the center of the room,

folded his

arms and stood still. Her eyes were fixed on the deeply lined face. She was breathing hard, choking with every gulp of air. He looked about him, inquisitively, curiously. Finally he raised questioning eyebrows at — the doctor. “Edmund!” It was like a cry for help. “Don’t you know me—Elizabeth!” He turned toward her, the blank stare in his eyes giving way to a momentary flash of life. His mouth opened. A terrific force seemed to be convulsing his body. His hand, fleshless and tight-skinned, rose to smooth his white hair. He seemed by an effort of will to be forcing the air from his lungs, and it came out whistling through his nose and mouth. And then, in the doctor’s presence, he uttered the first word he had spoken in five years. “Elizabeth!” He stepped toward her. And stopped suddenly. His head jerked forward, his lips opened in a grin. “Elizabeth!” “I came to see you, Edmund.”

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But he was standing, staring, his arms folded, the blankness

covering his eyes.

Edmund lay in his cell, staring at the writing on the wail. The last line had been finished. 1866. His fingers traced the letters. “Your time is up tomorrow,” the keeper called to him. The stare in Edmund’s eyes remained unchanged. And the next morning, after the count, they took him out of his cell. Dead!

Three INAS INKOME IB) BRANDT—SKE PTIC

Three ARNOLD

BRANDT—SKEPTIC i

oNpDayY, the fourteenth day of May, in the year 1866. | 71

muNext!’2 The black-bearded, sharp-faced officer in the brassbuttoned uniform beckoned to the calm fellow who headed the line of new arrivals. He shot a keen glance at the man approaching him slowly, then looked down at the document spread open before him. His lips widened into a grin. “No wonder you’re in no hurry.” The prisoner had reached the table where the uniformed officer sat, and stood waiting. “It’s a long stretch you’ve picked. Twenty years!” The officer’s eyes dropped before the cool stare of the prisoner. “We'll get to know each other,” he said. His voice slid over the words. Then, as he again scanned the official paper, he frowned. “Murder. Your first crime. A fine start for a softy.” The uniformed man raised his head and gazed curiously at the silent figure. “A lawyer,” he said with thin sarcasm. “Supposed to know

right from wrong. A lawyer... and a killer!” His fingers drummed on the table. “I’ve heard of your kind talking people to death,” he continued jocularly, “but it’s not often you take to shooting. Must have been a very provoking circumstance.” The prisoner stood mute. The officer lurched forward in his chair. His manner was more intimate.

“It’s not that I’m curious, man,” he remarked. “But it helps me judge my prisoners. I’m the warden here And I have my own method of weighing men. I don’t always follow the record. It’s 293

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not so much what a fellow did that interests me, but why he did it. Not the excuse his lawyer made in court to the judge and jury. Or even to his friends. It’s how the fellow explains it in his own mind. To himself . . . and to me,” he added after a pause. His shrewd eyes held those of the prisoner. “Understand?” The officer’s face was suddenly grim. “Why did you fire that pistol?” His voice had the ring of steel, a dry, chill bite. He waited for the answer.

Arnold Brandt remained silent. He frowned and his pale face became paler. Veins stood out in his forehead. His eyes were suddenly alive, but as suddenly the fire in them died. The veins disappeared, his face relaxed. He stared at his inquisitor and shrugged his shoulders. “TI wish I knew.” The warden of Sing Sing Prison gazed thoughtfully at his newly admitted prisoner and nodded. “It’s what I expected.” He leaned back in his chair, musing, with eyes half closed. “T wonder if you'll find the answer in Sing Sing. I'd like to ask you that . . . twenty years from now.” Arnold Brandt also wondered. . . . And still wondering he was led away. 74

In the early morning of a mild, radiant day in the spring of 1886, a portly, medium-sized man stood waiting in the office of the warden of Sing Sing Prison. He faced the door with eyes strained and staring. It was Sing Sing’s busy hour when prisoners began their tasks of the day, and keepers tested shoulders and searched the faces of their ness or mutiny. Through the half-open shuffling feet in incessant monotony; of

their canes, squared their wards for signs of weakwindow came sounds of sharp commands; mufiled gongs; the echoing clang of steel on steel; and the whirling whistle of the wheels of prison industry.

The portly man heard none of these. His eyes were fixed on the door. With each swing, his body stiffened; he looked eagerly into the face of each newcomer, then relaxed, frowning. His hand rose, trembling, to his brow, and his twitching fingers plowed

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through the tufts of iron-gray hair that hung from his broad skull. He brought his hand down and, for the twentieth time that morning, fumbled in the pocket of his vest. He dug out a gold watch and held it up in front of him, puckering his forehead, and sighing audibly. The door swung again, and a tall man strode into the office. He was young, not over twenty-five, brown-haired and eager. Hesitating an instant, his eyes roved up and down the room; an instant more, and his strong hands grasped those of the waiting, gray-haired man. Another moment they stood silent, attempting to sense each other’s thoughts. “Gosh, father, it’s good to see you . . . this way.” The young man’s voice was husky, his eyes shining. “You’re late, son,” Arnold Brandt said in soft rebuke. “It’s

been a long hour . . . longer than the time that’s ended.” The younger man frowned. His eyes were gentle, his voice

apologetic. “I missed the first train,” he exclaimed, and added, ‘tI wanted

to make sure about Mother.” He smiled. “She hasn’t been well, you know. But she’s all right this morning. She’s at home . . . waiting.” “Waiting,” the older man repeated in a low voice.

A carriage took them to the station. Arnold Brandt did not look back at the gray-stone building that had been his home for twenty years. During the hour’s ride to New York he sat silent. He seemed unconscious of his son’s questioning, considerate eyes. And when they were seated, finally,

in the carriage he gave an order to the coachman, and in reply to his son’s look of astonishment, “Something I want to do,” he remarked quietly. As they rode downtown he sat with eyes closed, not speaking, relaxed against the cushioned seat of the carriage. It seemed his wish to shut out the new world through which they were traveling, a world that had changed much in the twenty years of his confinement. Fine residences now

lined the Avenue

beyond Forty-second

Street, right on up to Central Park! Brownstone, reddish-chocolate brick with iron cornices, and areaways fenced round with garniiLE ect ttt ei

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tures elaborate in wrought iron. How much bigger and more florid and more expensive everything had become! He saw, with amazement, the now solidly filled-in rows of buildings along the avenues in the Murray Hill section. And in odd half-glimpses he received an impression everywhere of bulk—unfamiliar, astonishing, as of elephants dozing in front yards and very large men in plush overcoats, with pushed-down hats and no necks. It was, indeed, as if the kings of the gilded age—the railroad czars, the oil moguls, rulers of timber and steel, real estate

and merchandise—as if they, emperors of husky abilities who could polish off a meal of thirty courses and not turn a hair, had come along and changed the landscape, having decided to adapt their architecture to the scale of their appetites. He shut his eyes... . Brooklyn Bridge—an amazing engineering feat! And then—

a spiked iron fence, an entrance between stone pillars. Arnold Brandt sat up, blinking. He got out of the carriage, waving aside with an air of impatience the supporting arm of his son. He walked to a flower stand opposite the entrance and picked a wreath. Holding it before him, like a suppliant bearing an offering, he led his wondering and perplexed son through the lanes of granite and pink marble—tawdry evidence of the peace and Sag the security and permanence of death. It was not a large cemetery, and the lanes were few. Arnold Brandt walked with a light, quick step along the paths, pausing to read names on occasional tombstones. He passed over the more elaborate monuments of the wealthy dead. Only those of poor and plain appearance engaged his attention. At length he stopped before one whose mound had disappeared, leaving no trace, weathered away and leveled flat into the ground. It had obviously been a long time since its covering of grass had known a blade. The small narrow headstone was sunk in the earth, leaning at an angle, with a woebegone appearance, as if grown tired of vigil. Arnold Brandt bent over ‘the stump of stone. He lifted the wreath gently and placed it over the sunken grave. Then, disre-

garding the amazement in his son’s face, he removed his hat and sank to his knees. The young man’s eyes found the name on the marker. A

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troubled look clouded his face, and, his gaze shifting to the kneeling figure, he seemed vaguely puzzled. Then all at once, his eyes grew sullen, his body stiffened. He gazed speechless and not without horror into the calm eyes of his father, who remained interminable seconds kneeling on the ground. Then Arnold Brandt rose, said with a curious smile:

“You were a child then, son. You’d hardly remember.” He did remember. The years moved backward in a monstrous

shifting. He was a boy of five. He heard-loud voices in his father’s study. Then a crash, like a sudden peal of thunder. He ran to see. His father stood stiff and straight, staring down at a man lying limp on the floor. The man did not move. And the room was filled with smoke. His mother ran into the room. Other people entered. There was tumult and loud talking. Then the hush. Everyone talked in whispers. He was led away. From the window of his room upstairs, he had seen his father leave the house. He was

walking between two men in uniform. He never came home again. And his mother had cried. He ached, shivering, from the look in her eyes as she held

his hands and sobbed, ‘Poor child, poor child. Your father is a murderer!”’ And he had felt a crushing need, which he suppressed, to ask her the meaning of that word “murderer.” “Your father will be coming home soon,” his mother had told him, not long ago. “We'll forget the past. And try to gather the little happiness that’s left.” He had looked forward to this day. He had been granted a full week’s leave, his uncle had been kind about it. Grave with

his importance, he had warned his mother against undue excitement, and about mentioning the past. “ve forgotten,” she assured’ him. And now this! His father’s first act had been to resurrect the past. It was to pursue them through life. The young man’s heart grew heavy, his brain burned with anger. He faced his smiling father with brooding, sullen eyes. “T thought you’d want to forget,” he said heavily. The smile left Arnold Brandt’s face. He shook his head slowly. “You don’t forget. Not the mother who gave you birth nor

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the spirit that gave you vision. This man I killed, twenty years dead, has lived with me in Sing Sing. He went in with me twenty years ago and stayed with me till I came out through the gate. It was he who gave me the strength to endure and the power to see. No, no, you don’t forget. To forget him is to forget life... and God.” “You never told me about him,” the young man said accusingly. “To

tell about him,’ Arnold

Brandt

answered,

“‘is to tell

about me. His death and my life are woven together too closely to be torn apart.” The younger man’s face had softened. There was a flush on his cheeks. “T’d like to know, father,” he said more eagerly.

His father smiled. “All right. Tonight, I'll tell you the story. If you have the patience to listen.”

“It’s good to be alive.” Arnold Brandt sighed as he said it. It had been a day of exhausting emotions. The visit to the cemetery. The meeting with his wife.

All his most thoughtful allowance for the physical changes produced by time proved inadequate to blunt the shock the sight of her wrought upon his feelings. He had expected her hair would be gray. It was white. And that stark unfamiliar whiteness smote him like an accusation, reminding him all over again of his guilt’ toward her, which seemed now much greater, more appalling even that it had appeared to him in the long hours of self-communion during his imprisonment. And her figure! That shocked him most of all. How was he to forget the light young body he had known, how persuade his senses that this stout woman lumbering across the floor to greet him was the same, the Mandy of their young love who had borne him their son? A fat woman now. Big-bosomed, heavy-gaited ... she seemed to have grown shorter, too, sagged down.

And when he looked into her face, noting the dark rings in

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which her eyes lay soft and limpid, he felt so much pain on her account that he could be glad of what he, too, had been made to suffer in his body . . . corporal punishments added to confinement. The lines in her face, the withered skin . . . he knew time

could not have done it all. Only her eyes retained their original vivid life—unconsumed, in their dark depths. And something else . . . maturity, perhaps, something obscurely related to suffering. It gave her expression a subtle, transforming tenderness and serenity of which he had no recollection. And when he kissed her, that same elusive development which so affected him was communicated from her lips.

“Good to be alive!” he repeated, his voice sunk almost to a whisper. He was alone with his son in the living room of their fourroom apartment, on the top floor of a four-story brick tenement in upper Manhattan. Amanda was resting. There was wine on the table, a single bottle of sherry, a luxury provided by the son, the first in his memory, in honor of the father’s homecoming. Arnold looked with pride at his boy, a tall, good-looking fellow on whose face was the flush of life and youth. “Alive . .. and free,” he added, sipping his wine. The young man waited for him to continue speaking. After a long silence he leaned forward and touched his father’s knee. “You're tired, father,” he said gently. ° ‘“Hadn’t you better get some sleep? It’ll keep till tomorrow.’ “TI was just thinking how to begin,” Arnold said, moving his chair. “You see, I hardly know whether the story is mine or that man’s... I killed. Perhaps you'll be able to tell better. “It’s a strange thing to have killed a man. And to have gone to jail for twenty years for it. And at the end of it all... to feel whole and at peace with yourself! “There were a good many times,” he went on after another pause, “when I was ready to call the thing finished. Through with life . . . I wanted to die. Because to be alive meant to go on suffering. Physically and mentally. I saw hate in men’s eyes. And there was hate in mine. The only meaning in anything—if there Was a meaning—pointed to destruction and fatality. And night

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was better than day because you could hide in it from the world, from yourself.” Arnold Brandt had risen from his chair. His right hand reached up and plowed through his thinning hair. For several minutes he paced the floor in even, thoughtful strides. Presently he stopped, turned around and with hands clasped behind his back and a slight smile on his face, went on with his story. So he had stood, formerly as a pleader before the bar, measured his juries and held the eyes of judges. Unconsciously he fell into the familiar attitude as he talked to his son. It was not a confession. There was no remorse. But in his manner, in his tone, in the pensive moods that broke his narrative

and in the occasional smile softening his eyes were serenity and poise. He spoke calmly of what had happened to him, of the confused and floundering impulses that had led him finally to commit

murder. The impulses had been his own, they had been human. But he had not been aware of them at the time. They had not become conscious in his mind until long after his own blundering and misdirected actions had swept him into Sing Sing. From the beginning of his time in the big house, Sing Sing had begun to knead him into a patterned prisoner. The damp absence of light, of his cell, had marked his cheeks with pallor that whitened with time. His blood had thinned to water, his soft hands

turned brown and yellow with calluses in wielding the hammer and pickax in the granite hills of the prison. His fingers had thick- ened in the foundry, where he welded iron caps and yokes and fashioned links for chains. And his feet had forgotten their native stride in the constant shuffle of the lockstep. Then no word had reached him from the outer world; he had felt utterly alone, helpless, stolid. Every dawn brought terror to prisoners; the first rays of the sun were a signal for new revelations in oppression, and bloodletting, and driving. “Ie wasn’t that I was indifferent to life,” Arnold Brandt ex-

plained. “But I actually hoped for death, I cursed the moment of wakening that restored me to consciousness.”

A smile returned to his face, seeing the horror in his son’s eyes. “But Tm alive,” he repeated, with a kind of equanimity of survival that he meant to sound reassuring, the effect of which

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was infinitely more horrifying in his son’s ears than the episodes of his recital. ““Those years seem far away. As far as the first years of my life seemed to me then.” So many new thoughts had lighted fires in his brain. But it did not dawn upon him while he discoursed, as it had not done even in prison, that his life and the story he was telling did not begin or end with himself. That the range and significance of his experience reached out beyond his physical self; the life he lived was the life of his era; and that mentally, emotionally, morally, he was no worse and no better than the epoch in which he was born and matured. “I was thirty-five when I entered Sing Sing,” he said. At thirty-five his life was full. He was married, the father of a son for whom he hoped great things. His wife was five years younger. They had been married eight years. It was a bright morning in June, 1857, the first time he saw Amanda Graham. She had come to him about a case.

“It’s a friend of mine,” she said, lifting her dark eyes that were full of trouble and womanly sweetness. Daughter of a professor of philosophy who had been the friend and disciple of Robert Owen in this country, she was reared in an atmosphere of humanitarian ardor. A devout worker in church guilds, advocate of temperance and woman suffrage, she attended meetings and busied herself with reform movements in which other studious-minded young ladies of her generation won to a happiness regularly denied their sex outside the matrimonial field. Still, in spite of her habit of venturing where it was understood women were not wanted, she could never be quite bold, or completely reject persistent qualms when she ventured into an office or any of the public places where men discard respect for

‘ womanhood. Accordingly, she gave Arnold a glance of such stirring appeal, overcome by the weight of what she was about to ask and further embarrassed by that form of shyness most flattering to men, that it made him momentarily quite giddy. “Your friend?” he repeated sympathetically.

Amanda nodded, and lowered her head. They were sitting in his office. Recently, in the course of her activities in behalf of prison

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reform, she had heard of Arnold Brandt. She spoke in a low voice, hesitating often. Arnold watched her talk. “You'll take the case?” she inquired anxiously, when she had finished her explanation. “Yes,” he answered gravely, still under the spell of her pres-

ence. “But I have no money,” she explained next. “And I don’t know how much I can raise . . . by appeals. Probably not very much.” “That’s all right. That makes us even.” He laughed. “Neither have I.” Arnold Brandt’s liberality toward his criminal clients was well known. “This ought to help you get along until you find yourself,” he said to men dazed by the good fortune of unexpected acquittals. “Don’t count on me if you’re nabbed again!” His clients took him at his word. He never saw any of them again. Some mended

their ways. Others, professionals, repeaters, steered

clear of him. He showed them no further sympathy, refused retainers.

Amanda Graham stood up and faced him. Her hand reached out impulsively, and she permitted it to remain between both of his. “It’s kind of you,” she said, overcome by her gratitude. “I do begin to feel . . . safer.” She groped for the right word. He escorted her to the door. They smiled at each other, then she turned and walked out. Arnold went back to his desk. There was no one else in the

office. His clerk had already gone to lunch. He fumbled absently with the documents tumbled over the desk. Presently his eyes, wandering from the papers, became fixed on the door through which Amanda Graham had passed. His face was thoughtful and severe, his jaw hard. With a sudden motion he reached for his hat,

left the office, and was soon making his way rapidly through the midday throngs of lower Broadway. He did not slacken his pace until he stood in the animated, gesticulating and curious crowd milling around the entrance of the Tombs, on Centre Street. The massive iron gate swung open to let him through. The guard nodded to him.

ARNOUD

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““He’s in the murderers’

row,” he volunteered.

303 ‘“He’s been

sayin’ as you'd be takin’ his case.”’ The guard stared at him, grinning. “It'll be yer first murder case. You sure picked a bad ’un to start!”

Brandt frowned and passed on without answering. He knew the Tombs. He had gone there often to interview clients. The prisoners in murderers’ row stared at him now, men and women from all walks of life. Others in the Tombs had faced him through the bars of their cells, swaggering, boastful, penitent,

cringing, pleading. They poured their stories into his patient ears. He

smiled

at their

exaggerations,

their

egotism,

their

fancied

wrongs; and frowned at their perjuries. But he had never before visited murderers’ row. He had never defended a man for murder. He felt a peculiar repugnance toward the man who killed, whether in a fit of passion or deliberately. He had never felt competent to do him justice. His reason understood the temptations that led to crime, the weaknesses, the obstinacies, the emotions. But he had never taken kindly toward carelessness or disregard of human life. Always, as he watched a man on trial for murder, his eyes were drawn toward the hands of the accused, as if he saw blood still on them. No cir-

cumstance, however justifiable, no verdict, however sympathetic, could make them seem less foul. Even the possibility of a false

charge left him cold. In every trial for murder there was an allpervading, overpowering stench of human blood. Imaginary, of course. But the aversion was real. Now Arnold Brandt, the man who hated murderers, was in murderers’ row, about to interview the first man he was to defend

for a capital crime. He peered into every cell and saw faces, cold,

heavy, hopeless. Eyes peered back at him. Figures crouched against the steel doors, watching him silently. He walked unsteadily, over* come with nausea. He did not know why he had consented to undertake this defense. The plea of a girl he had never seen before! A guard pointed out his man, the last cell in the row.

In the dim light he could barely made out the slight, sickly bulk of the man standing flattened and tense against the door of his cell. His cheeks were shrunken, his eyes sullen. Arnold pon-

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dered his shabby clothes and the hands gripping the steel bars. He waited for the man to speak. “So you’re Brandt,” he said. “She said she’d send you.”

They eyed each other. Prisoner and lawyer. Murderer and Arnold Brandt who hated murderers. His practiced eye saw guilt in the eyes before him, the nervously twitching mouth, the voice dissembling and asking for sympathy. “It was self-defense. I c’n prove it. All I need is a lawyer who’s got sense. Like you,” he added, with a leer.

Brandt listened to the man’s story. “It’s the truth, so help me,” the prisoner concluded. He held up his right hand. He remained silent, furtively searching the lawyer’s face for the impression he had made. “It’s the truth,” he repeated, urgently, and, reaching one hand through the bars, he caught hold of Brandt’s coat. He freed himself and stepped back beyond reach of the hand. He looked coldly into the smirking face. His tone was bladed with

ice. “Is that the story you told the girl?” Jim Reynolds laughed, a boisterous, whinnying laugh that surprised the inmates of the cells in the vicinity. Brandt turned away, frowning. He knew what to expect.

4 The case of Jim Reynolds, alias Windy, along the water front and in the dives of New York’s underworld attracted little attention. It was a foregone conclusion that: the man would be con= victed. A drunken fight, the papers reported and called for speedy justice, not in the spirit of vengeance but to rid society of another hopeless degenerate.

The water

front, of course,

saw

the other

side of the thing. He had fought for his rights. It was a quarrel about swag. Jim was merely enforcing his views, asserting himself in the only way that talks in that game. But even his associates in crime held out no hope. The evidence against him was too strong. He would surely hang. Amanda Graham alone remained hopeful. He was one of her beloved charges, rescued from ways of error and reborn with a

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shining new Christian soul, and for the sake of the life of service now open to him in rescuing other lost and floundering souls, she would spare no effort to get him off. “They are telling lies about Jim,” she complained sadly to Arnold Brandt. Jimmy had kept his promise to her, she was sure. He had reformed. He was clean and honest. The man he had shot had threatened to expose his past. Jim had explained it all to her, and she believed him. It was a very great sin, of course, to have killed a

man; but Jim was sorry, and he had paid for it in the terrible mental suffering he endured. Jim Reynolds was the living justification of her work in the slums, among the miserable erring creatures who existed in frightful darkness outside society’s stockade. Arnold Brandt listened to her nervous tirade. She would sit in his office for hours, eagerly awaiting the word of hope that came reluctantly from him. “You'll save him, won’t you?” she asked repeatedly. Brandt smiled. “T shall do my best.” The luster of her eyes overcame him completely. Deeply af-

fected, he watched the long black lashes moisten and veil them from view. These visits were a new experience in his life. He had never known any women intimately; he went little into society, feeling that the exigencies of his law practice left him no leisure for frivolities. His life was lived entirely in his work. His temperament was strung to the pursuit of one object at a time, and he gave himself up to that with an excess of abandon peculiar to intense and retarded natures in whom the capacity for feeling has remained greater than the power of thought. So it was, with his hungry and easily inflamed sensibilities, that he succumbed quickly to the small delicate teeth of her loveliness. Her confidence in him,

her feminine trust, spurred him to effort, passing into his blood like strong liquor and rising to his brain in the form of a new and conquering belief in himself. He began to look forward to her visits with a fierce, unassuaged craving; though always remaining outwardly calm in her

presence, a little cold and formal, betraying in his slightly abrupt

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bearing no sign of the inner tumult. And this curtness of manner, his cool clipped speech that said what she wanted to hear, impressed Amanda with a sense of unusual abilities and of enormous power. She believed he must be the greatest lawyer in New York. And except for her own father, not even—but, yes, the greatest man she had ever met! For him, now,

the prospect

of a murder

trial had lost its

horror. He no longer cared about Jim Reynolds’ guilt. It did not worry him, he did not think of it much, nor of Jim himself. The fact had only a circumstantial importance, the man, with his dirty,

lying dissimulation, less than that. Of what use were such people in the world? Brandt’s mind worked readily in abstractions—the attribute that made him such a conspicuously successful pleader. Laying his plans for the greatest battle of his career to save Reynolds, he concerned himself little with the actual murder. The path of his research led him into the slums of the city. And into a certain tenement dwelling. A middle-aged woman opened the door to his knock. Her stringy hair was a dingy blanched gray, her face ravaged, with bloodless skin and protruding cheekbones. Her twisted, gaunt shoulders were covered by a plaid shawl. She stared at the visitor with a kind of blank hostility and waited, holding to the door. “Tt’s about Jimmy,” Arnold Brandt said. The woman stood aside and let him enter. Inside was a greenish darkness like the color of dirt, so thick that it was a minute or two before his eyes found the wails. Then he saw them streaked with brown stains, unexpectedly close, and the room not much larger than the cells in murderers’ row. A tousled cot stood in one corner, and on it lay an inert figure under a tattered quilt. A blast of the rum-sour interior smote Arnold’s nose. The figure on the cot stirred, put forth a pair of misshapen scabby hands, and pulled the quilt down, exposing a face bloated and inflamed. The face turned outward, and a voice mumbled thickly, “Ts it the charities?”

The woman dragged herself over to the bed. “Tt’s about Jimmy,” she said.

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The hands moved, clutching the quilt, and the face plunged out of sight. “He’s drunk,” the woman said indifferently. ‘““He’s been drunk these ten years.” She set a chair for Arnold. It lurched and squeaked dangerously when he sat on it. She drew up another for herself and sat down with a sudden slump. Rheumatism, he supposed, having observed the skin drawn tight around her swollen fingers clenched over the back of the chair. Pain showed in her face, momentarily. “It’s about Jimmy?” she asked. And waited for him to speak. But it wasn’t about Jimmy that he wanted to know. It was about her, and the man who had been “drunk these ten years.” He encouraged her to talk, helping her with questions. And she looked at him, now, with a slightly more confidential enthusiasm than had appeared in her reception from the threshold. A wan and draggled beam suggestive even of friendliness crept into her glance, as she conveyed with a sigh, in a thick brogue, “We was Kerry folk. Ah! The sweet, grand country! “We was poor, but there was sun and light in our cottage home. And we owned our cow and pig.” Wearily she turned her eyes toward the motionless figure on the bed. “And he drank milk instead o’ rum!” Brandt stayed a long time with the woman, the mother of Reynolds. She talked brokenly, between pauses, her thoughts coming slowly, her mind constantly zigzagging off the track. But by degrees he got all the story of their emigration to America and the black times that came later. She did not object to his questions, as prying. On the contrary, he saw by the transient and feeble animation wavering on her face that she secretly was pleased, flattered by such a show of interest on the part of a stranger. And something came back to her as she conversed, some obscure and flickering resurrection. As if across a measureless boundary of time, she became inter-

ested in the subject of herself, her woes and misfortunes; enlarging on them, doubtless, sometimes offering excuses and pleas in selfjustification for the condition to which she and her besotted partner in matrimony had sunk. Tearfully she spoke of the old home, and of the priest who had married them.

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“When we was young an’ in love, ye’da never known him. He was that dashin’ an’ lovin’.” Her voice had grown soft; the emotion she felt came back to her, it seemed, like a lonely reverberation of far-off romance.

She spoke of America.

“We heard of free land over here. Rich an’ virgin, waitin’ for the plow an’ the folk to cultivate it. An’ my man he swore to go, he was that strong an’ ambitious.” She told of the trip across the Atlantic and the ship with spars so tall.

“Seemed like they reached right into the heavens, and God himself was sweepin’ us on. The water so calm and even.” When the vessel came in sight of land, they knelt on the deck and gave thanks to God and the blessed Mary. “But there was no free land,” the old woman went on in a resentful voice. “At least, we was told there was not.”

And so the young husband found work in New York as a laborer. For a time all went well. The baby was born then. Jimmy. And then the christening. “There was a great crowd o” folk. An’ the grand celebration, ah! Singin’ an’ feastin’. Himself was a proud father.” She sank into meditation. ““He had the boy dancin’ afore he was a year old.” The child was golden-haired. The laughter in his voice! And sturdy like a young colt. “Himself was a steady worker,” she said, nodding her head. ““An’ we was savin’. We put the money in the bank.” So, for a while they prospered, Jim Reynolds’ parents. And they thanked God for America. Then came the panic. Banks closed, | savings were wiped out. There was loss of work, hunger, cold. “Himself was never the same. His heart became as cold as that fireless hearth.” Jimmy was sent out to gather scraps of coal for the stove, and to borrow money from neighbors. “T cried about it. An’ was whipped for me tears. In those days, oh! He forgot how to smile. His hands lost their caress. An’ he slugged with his feet.” Jimmy feared those feet. “Then one day Jimmy went out and never came back. That

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was when he took to the drink. He’s been drunk ever since.” Arnold sat quiet after she had concluded, pondering the next move. Then, as though recollecting in the sudden silence the true purpose of his visit, the woman leaned forward and said anxiously, “Tt’s about Jimmy ye was speakin’ the moment before. He’s well?” Arnold knew then that she knew nothing about her son’s

predicament. He would not tell her. He nodded affirmatively. “Blessed Mary,” she said softly, her face lighting, “‘ye’ve been carin’ for him like I asked. The saints keep him in their charity!” ““He’s well,” Arnold repeated. “He asked me to tell you.”

The figure on the bed stirred. The covering moved, and once again the bloated face came forth to view. “Ts it the charities?” The woman rose and walked painfully over to the bed. “Tt’s Jimmy,” she said. “He’ll be comin’ home.” The man took no notice, but only pulled the quilt over his head again. The woman returned and stood beside Arnold, who had risen.

“He’s been wantin’ money for drink. He’s like dead without ice

Arnold put on his hat, after telling her his name. “Brandt,” she repeated after him. She followed him to the

door. He stepped out into the sun. And breathed deeply.

5 In murderers’ row, Jim Reynolds cursed his lawyer. “This fellow Brandt,” he complained to Amanda Graham, “‘is not interested. He hasn’t seen a single witness! And he doesn’t seem

to care about talking to me.” Amanda carried his complaint to Arnold. For answer, he only gave her one of his remote smiles. “Tl do my best,” he assured her. “You must trust me, be patient.” Once he detected worry in her eyes, misgivings.

“Is he, do you think ... Jim... what they say?” His lips tightened.

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“I don’t know. But even if he’s guilty . . . he won’t hang.” “But if he killed deliberately?” “You want him acquitted, don’t you? Isn’t that what you came to me for?”

“T had faith in him,” she said, in a faltering voice, barely audible. “Now . . . now I don’t know.” She went back to the Tombs and saw Jim again. He stared at her out of his feverish, frightened eyes. Then with a suddenness and violence that astonished Amanda, he burst

out, “You and Brandt are fixing it up so I’ll hang! The man don’t like me!” He paused, drew breath, blazed out again in a tirade of wild accusations and bitterness. “Maybe he’s took to you! With his whiskers, and strap pants, and I’m too-good-for-the-likes-o’-you smile, and the rest of it. Some women like ’em holy. Maybe he told you about me! Maybe he told you I lied to you. That I fooled you. Maybe he told you that I’m the same old Jim Reynolds, Windy of Water Street, a thief, a

burglar and a killer. Maybe.

. .”

She did not wait to hear more. Horrified and overcome, she

made her way out of the building. The prisoner was brought guard who surrounded him like one behind, the other two each odd irregularly skipping step, incredible unconcern that was

into the courtroom with a double a corps of pallbearers, one in front, taking an arm. He walked with an which produced an impression of almost jauntiness.

Amanda Graham sat in the first row outside the rail. She was’

dressed in green, with a short taffeta cape, and a small hat from which hung clusters of flowers. Her eyes drooped. Only when a stir near the door announced the arrival of the defense attorney did she look up in time to intercept Arnold Brandt’s glance sweeping the long murky-ceilinged courtroom. He bowed imperceptibly and, passing along the far side of the room, took his place at the counsel

table next to Jim Reynolds. The prisoner and his lawyer did not speak together. Reynolds sat heavy-faced and sullen, his eyes fixed on a point in the distance, midway between the crown of the judge’s thickly shocked gray

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head and the American flag looped above a portrait of Washington. From time to time an expression of sarcastic amusement flickered on

his face, as if his thoughts found the scene of justice about to be done more humorous than awe-inspiring. Brandt watched, passively, the drawing of the jury. The questions of the prosecutor as to their fitness to serve fell upon his ears with tedious familiarity. “Are you opposed to capital punishment?” One man abruptly answered, “Yes.” The judge and the prosecutor both frowned. The juror was a large, heavy, red-faced man, slightly taller than his neighbors in the jury box. His round head sat low on broad shoulders. His hands were thick and hairy. “Why?” the prosecutor bellowed at him. The juror remained silent. “Tell the court why you are opposed to the death penalty,” the prosecutor demanded. “Would you place a murderer above the law?” The man fidgeted in his seat and turned his eyes dumbly toward the judge. “Answer the question,” the judge commanded sharply. “We cannot permit jury applicants to use this provision of the law merely as an excuse to evade their duty.” The rotund juror lumbered to his feet. For several seconds he continued staring stupidly at the prosecutor, and blinking his eyes. The judge leaned forward to catch the answer, his elbows planted on the table in front of him. The man sighed, cleared his throat, and said in a tired voice,

“They hanged my boy. Right here in the yard of the Tombs.” A murmur of shocked amazement waved through the courtroom. The applicants in the jury box stirred uneasily. The prosecutor sat down heavily in his chair. The judge leaned back. “Excused,” he called out brusquely. His voice, ringing out in the cavernous room, sounded tight with irritation, as if the incident

had annoyed him, particularly because he did not know what to make of the thing. The man who did not believe in capital punishment stepped

down and made his way out of the courtroom. Heads turned and

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shoulders moved, curious eyes following his exit. A low buzzing circled the room, as if all present shared the judge’s annoyance and likewise were momentarily nonplused by the realization that there was nothing in the statute, no precedent to guide them, nothing at all about a thing like that. Arnold Brandt did not turn his head or move as the dismissed juror passed close to him, walking up the aisle. Only the imperceptible glimmer of a smile showed on his face as he finished arranging his notes in a neat stack in front of him on the counsel table. The people’s case was short. Brandt sat stabbing idly with his quill pen at the table before him. He did not once turn his head or look toward his client, who sat apparently equally unmoved through the first half of the proceedings. The corpus delicti was identified. Eyewitnesses swore to the quarrel that preceded the shooting in a Water Street dive. With a bored air, the prosecutor presented evidence of the crime that had resulted in the murder—a quantity of silk stolen from a fast sailing clipper that had just reached port from China. Jim had taken no part in the actual theft, but indirectly he had been a party to it, and he had insisted upon his share of the booty. Amanda Graham’s figure was seen to droop and falter, as she heard the testimony of the prosecution. And Jim Reynolds’ face began to show strain as the evidence against him piled up. He smothered an oath, and leaned over to speak to his counsel. “T can prove they’re lying,” he said in a hoarse whisper, ‘“‘if you'll let me bring my witnesses.”

Brandt paid no attention. He did not seem at all impressed by the damaging testimony. ; The people rested their case. Eyes moved with easy and indifferent confidence toward the defense. The prosecutor smiled

amiably. His case seemed sure. The man would hang. The judge leaned toward the lawyer for the defense and waited for the customary motions. Invariably at the close of the people’s case, regardless of its strength, there was the motion on behalf of the defense for a dismissal. Invariably, it was denied. But lawyers, as a rule, were keen about the sufficiency of their records. Appeals courts were strict about such things. The failure to ask for a dismissal might jeopardize the lives of clients.

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The murmur among the spectators died suddenly, as Arnold Brandt stood up at the counsel table. Taking his characteristic posture when on his feet in court, he folded his hands behind him. “The defense will offer no testimony,” he announced in a clear voice. Jim Reynolds’ face went pale. He scraped his chair, struggling in the grip of the two deputies. Glaring at his lawyer, his eyes blazing with venom,

he swore

at the top of his voice, long and

vindictively. The judge looked startled. The prosecutor glanced about in astonishment. In the first row of spectators, Amanda Graham sat up stiffly, in bewilderment and indignation. The judge leaned over and spoke to the defense. He looked across at Brandt with stabbing directness. He pronounced his words with slow, cold precision, giving them time to sink in. “This is a trial for murder, with the possibility of a death sentence. Counsel must appreciate his duty to his client, this defendant. The court will grant an adjournment, if time is needed to summon

witnesses.”

But Arnold Brandt passed over the rebuke. “The defense is ready for the summation,” he told the judge.

His Honor sat back. The prosecutor stared. The courtroom was tense. And Amanda Graham sat stiff and cold and helpless. Counsel turned to the jury. “It is my duty,” began Brandt in a low voice, swinging into

the florid eloquence and emotionalism by which juries and public are theatrically swayed, “it is my duty to speak for the prisoner. I regret that the defense has not been placed in other and better hands. I have no lips for that

Soft rhetoric Which steals upon the ear and melts to pity The heart of the stern judge. It is not in me to

Make madness beautiful, And fling o’er erring thoughts and deeds A heavenly hue of words.

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Ican promise, gentlemen of the jury, is to present a plain

and simple statement in behalf of the defense, and leave to your consideration the fate of my unfortunate client. “I feel most deeply the obligations which rest upon the counsel charged with the defense of liberty and life, and my duty to bring forward everything that might tend to the acquittal of my client. A duty, no less responsible, devolves upon the court who will instruct the jury in the application of the law, as well as for guidance in their deliberations. But the responsibility of the jury is paramount—the fate of this prisoner is in your hands. And the solemn interrogatory that will be propounded to you on your return to the bar with your verdict, when stript of its forms, will be nothing more or less than, ‘Shall the man live or die?’

“The desire of your hearts and your prayer to God should therefore be that you perform your duty with a just regard to the sacred obligation imposed upon you by your oaths. You must see to it—you must see to it, above all things—that if perchance you err, that your error be on the side of mercy and charity and good

will.” Arnold Brandt turned toward Jim Reynolds, whose face had now relaxed somewhat;

and who, like the rest of the courtroom,

sat in motionless concentration as the lawyer’s voice rose and fell with the gusty stage eloquence of his presentation. “The life of my client, humble and obscure as he is, is of little

comparative value—a heap of dust which the wind might scatter, leaving but little vacancy in the throngs of men. If the unit of that life should be withdrawn from the great sum of human existence, few hearts will bleed, few tears will fall. “But, gentlemen, please to remember

that he is one of the

great family of men who sprang into life from the hand of the great Lifegiver to us all, stamped in the image of His person, with whom God has deposited a living soul. You must deliberate long and well, ere by your decision you mark him for destruction and sentence him to die.

“Gentlemen,” Arnold Brandt bowed “we do not deny, we cannot deny that pistol which fired the shot and killed the Arnold paused, as if to let his words

over toward the jurors, this defendant held the unfortunate victim.” sink into the conscious-

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ness of all. Then he straightened suddenly, and in a voice that filled the courtroom and reverberated through the adjoining corridors he hurled his words into the stunned ears of his audience. “But in determining the guilt of this man, we must trace the power that pulled the trigger of that. pistol. Jim Reynolds’ hand held that weapon. Yet Jim Reynolds is no murderer!” He turned toward the prisoner: “Prisoner, look upon the jurors—jurors, look upon the prisoner. For you will see by your own practical phrenology, without the aid of books, the dispositions of the heart beaming through the eye, as from the windows of the soul. ““Are there any of the Furies’ serpents twisted in his hair? Do

you discover anything that shows a taste for human blood? Do you find the mark of the first great murderer upon him? Do you see there the features of Barabbas? On the contrary, do you not find the indications of an innocuous disposition without the heart to conceive, or the will to execute, such a damning butchery? “Contemplation of the crime of murder is not of an ordinary character. It is an awful thought and well described by the great master of the human heart as A suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix the hair, And make the seated heart knock at the ribs Against the use of nature. **And she who planned the murder of the good King Duncan invokes the infernal deities to fill her, from the crown to the toe,

top-full of direst cruelty; to stop up the access and passage to remorse;

to make thick her blood; she asks that night should pall

herself in the blackest darkness, that the eye of heaven might be veiled from the scene of blood; and he by whom the assassination

was perpetrated and who of himself says he could look on what might appall the devil, maddened by the agonies of his guilt, sees the ghost of his murdered victim, and fancies . . .” “Your Honor, I object to this as out of order! It is outrageous!”

Every person in the courtroom had for some minutes been

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expecting a protest to put a check to Brandt’s theatricai pilferings from lay literature. It came when the prosecutor, red and infuriated, leaped up, shouting his objection. “The defense offers no evidence, nothing but an oration to the jury. Never in all my experience at the bar . . . I shall ask for a mistrial!” “The motion is denied,” the judge replied calmly. ““The defense has the right to offer a plea in extenuation. But the defense will modify its language and confine itself more closely to the facts of the case.” With a bow in His Honor’s direction, Arnold Brandt resumed.

“Murder commences with the lower and inferior category of crimes and is graduated through the several degrees of wickedness and depravity, until the instinct or impulse toward criminal action infuses the moral constitution of the subject and makes him ready for deeds of blood. “T offer no justification for the crime of Jim Reynolds. It is a sad circumstance that leads a man to kill. It is a sadder circumstance when that murder is committed under influence of passions of intemperance and greed. But to speed the hand of death in

vengeance, when murder was accomplished with cunning and deliberation, is not less unconscionable, unmoral.

“Time was when the act itself was the sole criterion of a man’s guilt, when every conceivable instrument of torture was used to establish the charge against the accused. In those early days burning plowshares and boiling oil, stone presses and spiked iron maidens were the instruments by which confessions were extorted, and the accused, in capital cases, were denied the privilege of witnesses to

testify and counsel to speak in their behalf. In those days many innocent victims bowed their heads as martyrs to the inhumanity of common law. “It was not until the reign of the good Queen Anne that these rights, so necessary to the protection of subject and citizen, were

allowed and secured in criminal cases by the personal command of the sovereign to her judges and ministers of justice. “Thank

God that we live, we and our fathers, in other and

better times, when the savage features of the feudal laws and institutions have been wisely rejected—when reason has pressed her

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slow but steady advance over these forms and customs and preju-

dices— Thank God that the cruelties and barbarities of our ancestors have sunk under the ameliorating and enlightened spirit of Christian humanity. “The sanguinary injunctions of the Old Testament—which demanded an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, making blood in all cases answer unto blood—have yielded to the force of forgiving mercy which, instead of condemning the woman taken in adultery—to be stoned to death by the terms of the Levitical law —dismisses the penitent offender with the simple entreaty to ‘go and sin no more.’ “Thank God for the advance we have made since the days of Tinville, the national executioner of France, whose countenance

radiated an infernal beauty at the prospect of shedding the blood of his victims. Shall we not give thanks to the Divine Spirit for the tone of our laws and their administration, that know no vengeance,

but are characterized by much of that divine charity that punishes only in sorrow and not in anger?” -

Arnold Brandt squared his shoulders and moved closer to the jury box. His voice sank to a whisper, as if he were taking the twelve men into his confidence. “But we have not yet reached perfection in our judgment of crime. We are still on the threshold of greater and better advance, an advance that will lead us beyond the fact of crime into the realm of motive and origin. It is there I would venture forth this moment, to guide you through the labyrinths of human impulse and motivation, an adventure that must make clear to you the shortcomings and deficiencies of our own civilization.” “Object!” boomed the prosecutor who was on his feet instantly, angered by what he considered another senseless and unfair digression from the material of the evidence. ‘““We are not here to listen to a lecture on civilization—but to consider the guilt of this defendant, which counsel admits.”

Once again the court cautioned the defense to refrain from immaterial generalization and eccentric departures into theory. As defense counsel proceeded with his summation the judge attended, sitting slightly forward, with that complex mingling of inscrutability, endurance and boredom that, from the bench, masks

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the judicial countenance. The prosecutor remained bellicosely vigilant, his jaw set in unwilling forbearance. The jury was obviously impressed by Brandt’s flow of eloquence, their eyes fixed upon him steadily, ears cocked, their minds straining to grasp the complicated structure of flowery persuasion and logic that had not as yet assumed more than an equivocal shape in words. The prisoner, meanwhile, pulled himself up in his chair, his countenance brightening with faintly dawning hope. “In that adventure, Jim Reynolds, the pale-faced prisoner who sits before you, hardly conscious of the life that is his only by the sufferance of your judgment, fades from our view. In his stead, there is Jimmy, the sandy-haired infant, born one year since to John and Ellen Reynolds, recent arrivals on these shores from County Kerry, Ireland. “It is the day of the christening. There is joy in the Reynolds’

household, and gladness in the strong heart of John, whose tall, straight figure moves among the guests and whose booming voice sounds welcome. There is joy in the eyes of Ellen, who sits in their midst, tinged deep with health and happiness, gazing down with a mother’s pride at the infant suckling contentedly at her breast. “Tt is a carefree crowd. There is merriment and good-natured banter. Men pound each other’s backs. Women smile. They surround the mother, and peering down, examine the nursing child. “““He’s the image of his mother,’ one gray-haired woman declares. But the mother shakes her head. ‘No, no,’ she says, ‘he’s

more like his father. It’s when he laughs and calls for his food you see it best. I want him to grow up like his father,’ she says softly. “But a small woman,

bent and old, totters to the mother’s

side. She bends over, her sharp eyes brightly peeping, gazing at the cherubic face pushing against the mother’s breast. She turns to the circle of chattering woman. ‘He’s the image of the Infant Christ!” At these words of the old woman they all make the sign of the cross. The mother, dreamy-eyed, touches the child’s head with tender fingers, and smiles. “And now, gentlemen, let us don the magic boots that will enable us to stride rapidly through the subsequent years. We span twenty-three years. New York has grown in wealth, in importance,

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in population which has more than doubled since that day of the christening. “America, too, has become strong and rich and has begun to tap its unmeasured resources. The spirit of adventure is high in the land. Argonauts have gone forth, with spade and pickax, to seek gold on our western shores. And they found gold—they dug it out of the dark earth and panned it from shallow streams. “But with expansion and wealth new responsibilities came, and new problems. America became a land of restless, jargonic people whose glorious ideal was freedom, but who found no cohesive bond to mold them into a solid and purposeful nation. “In the enthusiasm of its youth, America had beckoned to millions of human beings. ‘Come to the new world where you will find peace and comfort and sustenance. Opportunity is here. And food and independence.’ And they came, millions of them, seeking

what they dreams—of corn grew for brawn lakes along

could not claim in the old world. They dreamed new wide horizons and endless plains where wheat and thick, and trackless forests whose virgin depths called and honest toil, and wide flowing streams and broad whose shores a man could make his clearing and build

his house and relax, smiling at life, and be at peace with his soul.

“America promised that, and more. They came, these simple people. Millions of them. And they are still coming, strong in their faith in the promised land. They came and found the real America very different from the dream. A larger edition of oldworld follies. It became to them a land of mirages where men hunted happiness at the cost of liberty and life. The chase was

hard and swift; the prey elusive. There was no kinship of birth and class in the struggle for existence and the means to personal power. “Tn their bewilderment, thousands of these newcomers set out on foot and in caravans, drawn by the mirage in the western skies.

Many of them are still wandering aimlessly, seeking the goal that is at best unattainable, and to most nonexistent. Others have fallen by the wayside, victims of their hopes and material ambitions. Still others, unable to move on, have remained with us in the cities

of the eastern seaboard, enfeebled by despondency and poverty,

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sinking gradually into the mire—the dreary depths of poverty and degradation.

“To these people, in their ignorance, America’s boast of freedom and opportunity and a living for all has been a great delusion. Perhaps they came too late, when the opportunities had already been seized and divided, the wealth gathered into the hands of a few. At any rate, America has created a government of laws and forgotten that it is a government of men. It has neglected to consider man’s relation to God’s law. “Alexander Hamilton had the fact brought to his attention during a conversation with his bishop, the Reverend Dr. Rodgers. ‘How do you like the Constitution?’ Hamilton asked the clergyman. ‘Not so well as I hoped I should like it,’ replied the bishop. ‘It has this great defect. The name of God is not mentioned in it.’ ‘I declare,’ commented Hamilton; ‘I declare, we forgot it.’ “America forgot not only God but man, too, when it built its house!” Arnold Brandt paused, breathed deeply. “Tt was an omission, gentlemen, that has borne its fruit in

human misery. It has brought discouragement and despair and degradation and bitterness to untold numbers of human souls. “Not many days since I looked into the eyes of a woman blasted by the devastating tragedy of life. It is to her humble dwelling that I would lead your magic strides. We saw her, you and I, twenty-three years ago. She was the smiling, hopeful mother, gazing down into the solemn countenance of the infant nursing at her breast. The day of the christening.

“Twenty-three years—and her form is bowed, her hair gray, her step halting. The skin of her face is withered, scarred deep. America has done that to her. She talked to me, although her speech was slow and her tongue thick. I would transmit to you the

story she told me. She would have done better herself. But it would have been pitiful to have her here. child, coming back to her after ten Brandt paused, bowed toward with emphasis: “And Jimmy must come back

For to her, Jimmy is still her long years of absence.” the jury and said slowly and

to her. Let her tell you why.” Shifting his role from that of the eloquent pleader, he became

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the clever actor. In the manner and tone of the old woman, he told

the story of Ellen Reynolds, recreating the sudden flashes of her dull eyes, her figure languid and contorted with pain pausing beside the drunken figure on the bed, the besotted voice fretfully inquiring, “Is it the charities?” And then her anxious question, ‘Is it about Jimmy?” The sarcastic, contemptuous smirk, meanwhile, had left Jim Reynolds’ face. He shrank in his seat, his head bowed. Amanda Graham sat white and tense, turning frequently and looking across at the jury and then at the huddled figure of Jim Reynolds, her hands clenching and unclenching nervously. “And so Jimmy has become Jim. The sandy-haired infant has grown up and matured into the hollow-featured image of a man. In Jim Reynolds we see the incarnation of the follies and inconsistencies, the weaknesses and cross-purposes of America,—idealism run to seed, hope degraded to listless despair. “The force that pulled the trigger of Jim’s pistol and took the life of his victim had its origin in the power that drove him from the roof of his parents, making him forgetful of his mother’s tears and the longings of her heart, the blind power that transformed his father from a robust man to a foundering hulk. . . . “Remember, gentlemen”—the lawyer paused dramatically, lowering his voice—‘‘Jim Reynolds stands before you accused of murder. A most heinous crime. It would be a simple judgment to declare him guilty as charged, and to send him to the gallows. “But there was no blood lust in the heart of Jim Reynolds when his hand aimed the pistol at the heart of his victim. There was no cunning in his brain, no deliberation in his mind. “In Jim Reynolds’ person is the sad reflection of the shortcomings of our government, which has neglected the welfare of its people in its purpose to confer power and wealth and protection on the few. “But you cannot kill that which your own hands have created.

Search your own consciences and ask yourselves whether it is not really you who aimed that pistol, you who killed that victim. You, who represent the might and strength of law in its manifold perspectives. “Death can have no terrors for Jim Reynolds. He is but a

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shell from which the soul has fled. It fled over ten years ago, when he severed all ties of love and affection for those whom the normal heart holds dearest. Would it not be the nobler act to return that soul to the stricken human being? Would that not retrieve, in a measure, some of the errors of our decade?

“America gave nothing to John Reynolds and Ellen, his wife. It gave nothing to Jimmy, their child. But it took much. It sent Jimmy out early in life to pursue the happiness that was his due, guaranteed him as to all men born free and equal under the Constitution of the United States. But it did not equip him for such an odyssey. And in the whirlpool currents of his unfolding adolescence he fell an easy victim to the immoral influences that surrounded and swamped him as he staggered along, confused and neglected—a prey to every unnatural emotion and temptation. “Jim Reynolds knew America, by hearsay, as the country of fabulous wealth and boundless acreage of unpeopled land, but he

felt the pinch and cramp of the hovel that was his home during childhood and early adolescence. It was wrong to steal, he was told. But the law seemed powerless to check the machinations and thievery that had deprived his father of his meager savings. America was the land of opportunity, he was taught. But his father had trudged wearily and unceasingly in search of work that would provide food for his dear ones.

“Small wonder that Jim Reynolds carved his own morality, and grew up in total disregard of law as it was written. Small wonder that he sought companionship that made life easier and freer. Small wonder that he learned to imitate, in his own way, the fury and practices of those higher in the scale of society who seemed above law and statute. “We watched Jim Reynolds grow and develop, as we watched and are watching thousands like him grow and develop in our midst. Yet no voice among us spoke a sympathetic warning. “Jim Reynolds deserves something more than hanging at the hands of his peers. They owe him life—the life which has been denied him in his youth, a life of opportunity and of service. And,” he hesitated, “and love. A life that will give him a share

in the bounties of America. Jim Reynolds deserves that chance. “Let us send him forth, not in the old tradition, branded and

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cursed, but in the spirit of Jesus Christ, reclaimed and penitent,

to harvest the good things of life so that he may become a symbol of wrong made right. “Remember,

gentlemen,” Arnold Brandt concluded, “‘the life

of a fellow citizen hangs trembling upon your decision. You are not only his examiners, but also his judges and his executioners. The court has no control over your decision, no authority but to fix the day and hour of execution. The officer has only to arrange the fatal scenery and spring the drop of the scaffold that may be erected upon your verdict. “Take counsel of your own bosoms, certain in the conviction that the laws of men are but the injunctions of mortality, fluctuating upon the changeful billows of human opinion. Certain, too,

that the promptings of your own hearts are the echoes of a voice from heaven within you.” Arnold Brandt bowed to the men in the jury box and then, inclining his head to the judge, returned to his place at the counsel ‘table. For a few moments a deep silence filled the courtroom. The audience appeared to be waiting for something to follow—unwilling to break the suspense that had held them during Arnold’s peroration.

A chair scraped, harsh and loud in the stillness, and the tension was broken. Faces relaxed, an excited humming flew around the room. Then, as the tall, gaunt figure of the prosecutor stretched upward, facing the jurors, the humming subsided, the courtroom sank again into silence.

“A curious plea,” the prosecutor commented, beginning his

reply. “A plea that admits the guilt of the accused and, at the _ same time, asks for his acquittal at your hands. A frivolous plea, it seems to me, that would plunge our system of law into chaos of individual preference and motivation... . “The law is not concerned

with peculiar notions of social

responsibility for individual acts. The law deals only with accomplished facts. The law tells you that a murder has been committed, and that this man, this defendant, fired the pistol that brought death to his fellow being. The law implies that the accused knew

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wrong from right. The law decrees that he is guilty of murder and must pay the extreme penalty. “Granted the imperfections in our social setup, granted that America has not proved the promised haven for thousands of immigrants seeking the ease and comfort—and, perhaps, luxury—denied them in their old homes; granted that unexpected hardships have brought them pain and suffering and disappointment. Yet the fact remains that each of us is responsible for his own acts. Otherwise there can be no order in our midst, no peace in our homes, no security in the land. No man can be a law unto himself. Nor may any man become the self-appointed avenger of fancied

wrongs. “If the law is imperfect—and none can claim perfection for any human effort—the genius of America calls for orderly evolution. The processes of law must prevail over passion and prejudice and self-interest.” For an hour the prosecutor hurled invective and ridicule and denunciation at the theories of his adversary. Then he turned to face Jim Reynolds, who had once more slumped down in his seat with the weight of his despair. The prosecutor’s eyes blazed with the fury of his eloquence. His long forefinger pointed toward the sagging figure of Reynolds.

“Mr. Brandt called Jim Reynolds a product of our imperfect social order, a symbol of America’s failure toward its masses, and the victim of economic slavery. However he may have developed and whatever the sources of his evil nature, Jim Reynolds is today a desperate criminal who knows no law but that of violence, no authority except the insolence and bluster of his twisted brain.

He has violated the highest laws of God and man. He has shed human blood. His own must pay for it!”

The prosecutor resumed his seat. And in the tense silence that followed, the judge began his charge. ... He reviewed the evidence. “There

is no denial of the homicide,”

His Honor

told the

jury, “and no denial that it was the act of the defendant. There is, furthermore, no question raised as to the sanity of the accused. There is, however,

a plea in extenuation.

It is claimed

that the

prisoner’s morale was dulled by circumstance; that his course of

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conduct resulted from forces beyond his control, and that early in life he was deprived of those wholesome influences which mold character and make for good citizenship. And that the murder is a natural consequence of such neglect. It is to that plea that you must address yourselves. May I say, in passing, that the law and the statute do not recognize the validity of such a plea. But since you gentlemen are the sole judges of the facts, you may take it into consideration in determining the degree of guilt, if any.” “Manslaughter,” the jury said. The judge imposed the maximum sentence—twenty years at hard labor in Sing Sing Prison. Jim was grateful. “You did a fine job,” he said to his counsel, his voice unsteadied by his emotion. ““They’d have hung me sure!” “Twenty years in Sing Sing may be worse than death,” Brandt answered with cold realism. “You'll be cursing me before long.” Jim shook his head, smiling. His hand reached out and grasped. Amanda’s as she stood talking to Brandt. “Don’t think too hard of me. It was like Mr. Brandt said. Something kept pulling me the other way. I knew it, but I couldn’t fight it off.” “There’s good in you, Jim,” Amanda said emotionally. The strain and ferocity of a trapped animal had gone out of Jim’s face, leaving it softened. His eyes looked out with new brightness and force. As he was led away, between the guards,

he waved to them, smiling. He walked erect, willingly. Jim Reynolds’ “old man” died a month after the son was brought to Sing Sing to begin his prison term. ‘Death from alcoholism and starvation,” the coroner wrote on his report card. The woman, Reynolds’ mother, was declared mentally incompetent and

- taken to the Paupers’ Home. Amanda Graham took charge of the burial, and made arrangements for the old woman’s admission to the Home. Even with all the resources available through Amanda’s connections with philanthropic organizations, there was an enormous amount of institutional red tape to be overcome in the final commitment of a damaged member of society. Amanda had a great deal to see to, in the course of it. And she found herself quite often in need of legal

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advice in disposing of the multitudinous detail. She sought counsel of Arnold Brandt. After one of these conferences in Brandt’s office, she lingered a few minutes, serene in the unconcern of sheltered women for time

and she the the

pressing business. Glowing in her aroused interest in the man regarded with reaffirmed belief in his endowments, she broached subject of an appeal to have Jim Reynolds’ case reviewed, in hope of obtaining a pardon. “It’s a little soon,” Brandt said dryly, with a smile for her earnestness. “But isn’t there a chance that the Governor might do something?” ‘““A chance, yes. He might.” “You asked the jury, you know, to give him a chance.” “So I did. But you’re not the jury.” ‘You're! betage:2s. “Yes? What?” She stood up in sudden embarrassment. He saw that she was provoked by his teasing, yet she enjoyed it. He went over and stood near her, close enough to observe the unbelievable downy softness of her eyelashes that curled back like the stamens of a flower. An instant their eyes were together. Then she left, abruptly, without a backward glance. He walked over to a window and stood looking out. In a few minutes, he saw her emerge from the building and walk rapidly up the street. Not long after, they were married. “Are you sure of yourself?” he asked in the church, waiting for the minister to don his robes and signal them out of the vestry. She smiled. “Are you?”

Her hand was in his. It lay there comfortably. He looked at her soberly. He was always somewhat grave when they were together. Life to him was a serious matter. And love, the most sobering thing of all. And so, neither of them having answered the other’s question, they were made man and wife. When he heard the minister speak the words in a sonorous, impersonal, churchman’s

voice, he felt

confidence flowing into him from the words of the ritual. They

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conveyed a sense of the mysterious and everlasting relationship of man to woman, approved and made public by marriage, put be-

yond question. “I feel as though I’d been born again,” Amanda said afterward. “Come into a new world.” But it was Arnold Brandt who was actually pristine in his innocence.

6 The decade that preceded the Civil War was the most restless period in American history. Leaders on both sides struggled to avert the break between the States. But the passions of extremists unleashed the forces of intolerance and cupidity, and made the conflict inevitable. Arnold Brandt, like most of his colleagues, viewed with dis-

may and increasing alarm the approaching cataclysm. He thought it had come on that autumn day of 1859 when they heard the news of John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. But guns did not open fire. Frenzy spent its force in oratory.

Brandt maintained his aloofness from the tumult and partisanship of those heated days. He settled down with his bride in the quiet of a comfortable home. His professional reputation had gained by his successful defense of Jim Reynolds. His practice grew, his fees were larger. Clients came to him from all ranks and occupations of life. Keen-witted men worried by the fear of exposure in transactions that could not bear official investigation; women with consciences

gnawing, seeking escape from unscrupulous blackmailing paramours;

parents who sat before him, uncomprehending, unable to

grasp the confused, deep-buried impulses that dragged their sons from home and brought them into conflict with authority. And youths came to him, harassed and wild-eyed, with confused gibberings about fate and luck. And there came to him Mary O’Dogherty of Shantytown. Mrs. Mary O’Dogherty of O’Dogherty Place was the un-

crowned queen of Shantytown, in the neighborhood of the Croton Aqueduct, which at that time was at the northern limits of the city. Mrs. O’Dogherty was expansive in speech as in body. Her

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short, squat figure waddled energetically along the narrow, beaten, mud-bottomed lanes that bisected the scraggy, Micktown, squatter settlement. Housewives leaned out of doorways as she passed, gesticulating, calling out feudal homage. At sight of her, habitually, their spouses woke out of lounging rumination, halted their masticating jaws, spat copiously, and with grins of abashed joviality proffered respectful salutations. Mrs. O’Dogherty’s broad freckled countenance creased in smiles of benevolent cheer whenever she looked at her female subjects; but for the men her expression contained warning and rebuke, discernible in the twin perpendicular folds between her angry brows. They understood each other—the queen and her liege lords. Most of the latter had felt the impact of the broom which gave physical emphasis and direction to her eloquent, scathing harangues. A tearful whisper from a desperate, sorrowing woman whose children were going unfed, her shiftless lord and master having transferred his abode to the corner saloon since the preceding Saturday night, brought Mary forth equipped with her scepter, the freckles on her wide face invisible in the rich vermilion of righteous fury, her gray hair flying, her underchin swinging to the rhythm of her determined gait, sleeves rolled up ready for effective action. “Lazy bum!” That was the perpetual war whoop with which she went for the befuddled miscreant. _ The man always fled, if his condition permitted, before these onslaughts of tongue and broom. And it was only in a state of solemn contrition, swearing everlasting abstinence, that he was permitted to return to his home in the colony. Mary O’Dogherty despised all men except her boy Pat and the

lawyer, Arnold Brandt. Her love for Pat was fiercely maternal. Upon him she lavished the turbulent affection which almost ten years of celibate living had unsexed. Pat was the spittin’ image of his father, the hero of her own young love. Tall, muscular,

black-haired,

with

restless

eyes—that

was

Patrick O’Dogherty on the day he told Mary good-by, and started for the West with the first crowd of argonauts in the gold rush to California. Mary was sick with mourning and desire for his strong

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hands to fondle her in love-making, the first years of his absence. Then she mourned him for dead. Young Pat was consumed with restless energy like his father. And he was just as reckless. It got him into a scrape with the city police. He led his Irish companions in the greatest of all the street fights of New York against a mob of patriotic hooligans on the Bowery who had taken up arms against the “foreigners.” Mary O’Dogherty appealed to Arnold Brandt to get her son out of trouble. Arnold’s customary eloquence persuaded the jury to turn him loose. And Mrs. O’Dogherty’s gratitude was reverential. Brandt became the hero of Shantytown. Mary would have led her subjects to damnation in his defense, if need be, and they would have followed enthusiastically. Then on a day in the early summer of 1859, Shantytown was shaken to its dubious foundations. The sun had dried up the spring freshets, caking the lanes with mud, and the women hung their wash daily to the soft blowing breezes, a sudden alien hush descended over the settlement. Women’s voices no longer shrilled; lounging males lurched up on unsteady feet, and the children stood idling, subdued, gaping in the unusual quiet. Then the news burst like a cyclone. The queen’s Patrick was back! Mary O’Dogherty’s long-missing husband had returned to the bosom of his love. And he came back with gold . . . heaps of it. Patrick O’Dogherty was a rich man. Nobody dared approach the door of the O’Doghertys’ shack, pent in thick silence. People loitered at a respectful distance, gossiping, waiting, making up tales. Then about noon the door opened.

The queen came out wearing her best calico dress. Her hair was combed straight, and her sleeves were pulled down. Her face was smiling. She stood there a minute, between her two stalwarts, . Patrick and Pat. The crowd rushed forward. Children whooped and pranced. Shantytown determined upon a royal welcome to the queen’s consort, a grand costume ball. The Mayor of the City would be there, and the entire Board of Aldermen. And other high officials. Heading the list of honored guests were Arnold Brandt and his wife.

The festival of welcome staged for the royal prodigal took

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place on a Monday evening in Shantytown and lands adjoining,

including the extensive common along the course of the Croton Aqueduct. The cabbage ground, the potato patch, the pigsties were bedecked with banners and streamers, and so great was the number of guests, invited and uninvited, that the place was overrun. At least three thousand attended, every person in some costume or other. The invitations, in a spirit of liberality in keeping with the age, seemed to have traveled as far around the globe as New Zealand, as one or two interesting maoris from that country were present. Others, apparently despatched to Botany Bay and China, were likewise accepted. The Siamese twins were requested to be present, but as the invitation was directed only to Chang, and not conjointly to Eng, the latter declined, in behalf of both himself and his brother. Malays, Russians, Portuguese, Spaniards, sailors from every foreign vessel in port apparently were the recipients of invitations; almost every nation under the sun was represented. Other guests came as loafers, robbers, Jim Crow, Jane Crow, Peter Simple, Auctioneers, Green Grower, Old Clothes Man, Devil, Pie Baker, Bulldog, Othello, Ghost in Hamlet, Soothsayer, Dustman,

Satan, Defaulter, as well as in the garbs of a host of characters of the contemporary scene. It was whispered that the costumes worn by the guests were all of them paid for by Queen Mary. No one on this occasion found it necessary to pawn his plate, his valuables, his honor or his credit to buy a dress. A great many of the gentle-

men came in their own carriages or carts, and many of the ladies accepted the escort of these gentlemen in order to seem picturesque. Every room in every shanty was thrown open, including mansards and cellars; the former were appropriately used as dressing rooms for the ladies, while in the latter rum and whisky flowed in natural rivers. Gentlemen dressed in the stables and smoked in the pigsties.

The shanties were lighted with tallow candles placed in glass bottles. The musicians sat in the open, so that their dulcet strains could be heard at a great distance. The company did not assemble until after nine o’clock in the evening, an earlier hour being unfashionable, and none of them retired until daylight, with the exception of a few who, overcome

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by the rigor of celebration, slept peacefully in the stables until sunrise. The attendance of the police was entirely unnecessary, for though several appeared in the character of pickpockets, no one had anything in their pockets worth picking. The few fights that came off were all in character and were connected with a beautiful tableau representation of Donnybrook Fair, which formed part of the evening’s entertainment. Irish jigs were featured in the dances, and there was a mock trial tableau in which a baker was charged with putting dead dog’s meat in a pie.

The refreshments were loaded on long plank tables, hastily knocked together out of old lumber salvaged from factory yards and refuse heaps. Smaller individual tables, of the same makeshift manufacture, were at the service of guest parties whose interest in the victuals and beverages required their sitting down. Mary O’Dogherty and Patrick went among the guests, bearing good appetite to all. In a little while they came up with Arnold and-Amanda, sitting with a group which was making merry at one of the small tables. Arnold Brandt was made up as a swashbuckling pirate of the Spanish Main. A man in the business could hardly have done better, for, aside from the cutlass and brace of pistols, the excellence

of the imitation was enhanced by the bloodthirsty countenance. The whole expression of his face was changed. There was a sadistic glitter in the eyes, quite terrifying to look upon. He acted the part with such cleverness and so striking a sense for realistic detail, keeping up an elaborate pantomime with facial twists and gesture, that he would have done credit to Captain Kidd or the artful Lafitte brothers. Amanda, watching him, was quite terror-stricken. “Arnold, you do give me the creeps!” she cried, laughing

nervously. Her comments gave him the greatest amusement and satisfaction in the whole performance. Brandt was deeply pleased with the success of his costume. And very pleased also with his pretty wife, who bore herself with

suitable modesty, in spite of the admiring glances she drew from all the men in her role of a shy little goosegirl. She even had the goose along on a lead with a string around its foot. She was compli-

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mented by the Mayor. But especially agreeable to Brandt was the respect, really amounting to homage, shown him by these simple, warmhearted people who looked up to him as a great man—a man of superior knowledge, who could accomplish miracles by his command of that mysterious thing known as “education,” and yet did not hold himself too much above them to be “a derned good feller.” Some of them had heard of his reputation and his bigheartedness to poor folk like themselves. All of them knew what he had done for young Pat. And as their rough appreciation was borne in to him, his natural reserve began to be melted. He felt himself yielding to a slightly mawkish, yet blood-warming, commendable

brotherly feeling; an emotionalism he distrusted in other moods, knowing it for sentimentality. And as this mellowness stole upon him, it inclined him more and more to exaggeration. “Wonderful people!” his feelings declared. And he asked him-

self were they not, after all, the real stuff of the nation? “The people is a great beast!” Hamilton said. Hamilton, a man with nigger blood who elevated himself into a colossal snob! What did he know of the people on whom he wanted to put his foot in reprisal, except loathing? “{ heard what you did for my boy,” Patrick said, thrusting out a hand as big as an oar. “‘An’ I wanta thank you!”

Brandt laughed, protesting, and invited Patrick to sit down with them. Mary and Amanda plunged into talk about the domestic affairs of Shantytown, while Arnold listened to the tale of Patrick’s

ten years dians, in “Yd I’m fixin’

in the like fer

the mountain ranges of California, among the Ingreat wide untrammeled lands cf the West. to go back,” Patrick said, after a pause. “In fact, it. I’m aimin’ to take Mary an’ Pat.”

“The ornery sons o’ bitches!” exclaimed Mary, excoriatingly.

“Whin the drink’s in thim they’ve no regard fer their own grandmother if she was to say prayers to thim!” Patrick soared in his description of the west country. He was

lifted on the surge of his tremendous enthusiasm, his great knobbed cheeks glistening like varnish, brightening to waxed vermilion as the tides of his primeval energies heaved in his bulk with a kind

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of electrifying force one might almost expect to become visible. He leaned forward and gazed into the face of his listener, an in-

spiration ignited in friendliness and naiveté that moment dawning in his eyes. “Tt’s the country for you, sir. You could help build . . . do something really worth while! There’s freshness there. It’s all so

grand and big and . . . all just like God made it! You'd like it.” “You think so?” Brandt was thinking, his eyes pinioned under Patrick’s eager stare, “Out there, it’s every man

for himself.” And there would

be room enough for principles, because action—action means something different than in this part of the world. Something more deeply involved with morality than interpretation of the law to

make plunder and crooked dealings look like the exercise of common rights. Here in the East, the row over the slavery question and the innumerable other conflicts winding around vested interests have made us putrified—the whole place stinks like the land of Egypt! “T don’t know but what you're right,” he answered slowly.

if “Maybe we can fix things right before it comes,’ Arnold Brandt suggested, smiling. “You mean war? It'll not come here!”’ Patrick shook his head

solemnly. “At least, not now. Maybe later on. Only when them Injuns starts to raisin’ a rumpus!”

They stood together at the entrance of the cabin on the side of the mountain that dropped down on them, white capped and green breasted. Arnold and Patrick and Mary and young Pat. Patrick was pointing to the deep valley that fell away at their

feet, a broad fertile stretch of land that seemed to their eyes an endless succession of small prairies and wooded knolls. “All virgin,” Patrick was saying. “Waitin’ for stout hearts and the heads to match ’em, to bring to seed.” He waved his arm in an outflinging gesture. “Land that c’n feed the world.”

Patrick breathed windily, his tremendous chest expanding as if

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to suck into his vast body all the freshness and vitality of this new realm. “And now [Il tell ye a secret-—” He chuckled, uttering the word “‘secret”’ in a tone of boundless and stirring mystery, with a certain sly deliberation as though he were mentioning it for the first time. Not once, but fifty times since they had put the Mississippi behind them, he spoke of the secret, always with the same teasing air of surprise under questioning, as if it were a brand-new subject. Patrick enjoyed himself greatly, baiting their curiosity. And to all of young Pat’s attempts to worm the delicious information out of him, he replied with winks and

equivocation, his head cocked like an incorrigible gander. “God forgive me, if I’d such a thing in mind as to breathe a word of it! It’s ye are mistaken. And ye’d better be learnin’ patience for the rough time ahead. Choppin’ an’ breakin’ ground an’ keepin’ peace wid thim Injuns. I’m not after tellin’ ye more now. Ye’re young, an’ it might put harm in ye head!” It was, however, precisely to witness on the spot the momentous revelation of his pious secret that Patrick had led them all out here to the western country, and even prevailed upon Arnold Brandt to come along. Brandt had decided to take a vacation. He was tired, a little groggy. Could not seem to get hold of himself to do his work. He needed a change. And who knows, there might

really be something in it? Certainly no harm could be done, and it was a good thing, anyhow, to have a look at this country before everything blew up in the East. Patrick’s long muscular arm pounded Brandt’s back, as they stretched at ease on the ground after a day’s jolting over the rough trail and rutty wagon tracks zigzagging through deep timberland. Or sometimes, while Mary bent over the pots and pans at the fire, he would run his hands in large, jovial, bantering caresses over her gray hairs that were screwed into a shapeless knot such as

would have brought any maiden tresses to the stiffness of a mule’s tail, until she pushed him off with brusque commands to, “Stop yer coddin’! Go along now and bring me some water to cook wid. Ye lazy gossoon!” “Are you really going to come across with that secret after

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all this time, Patrick?” he asked with jocular skepticism. “I don’t

believe it.” “Begod, it’s the truth, man. An’ this is it. ““As far as the eye can reach,” Patrick waved his arm in a great circle, “it’s Patrick O’Dogherty’s. I’ve put my money in it. There’s gold an’ silver in these mountains . . . maybe copper an’ iron. An’ those bottom lands’ll grow corn and wheat in abundance.” Patrick grew eloquent with the fine plans in his head. “I saw Abraham Lincoln at Council Bluffs when he promised to .ay the rails for the new steam road straight across Iowa to the coast. He’s a great man, Mr. Lincoln. The West is for ’im. He’ll be President yet.” “Yes, I’ve heard of him. He’s the man who would free the

slaves. The South won’t stand for him.” “He said he’d rather let the slaves be than split the country.” Patrick spat on the ground. “The West don’t give a damn fer slaves. What it wants is railroads, to bring it closer to the world.

The man who sees that clearly and brings action will win support from the folks out here. An’ Lincoln made a promise he’ll keep, if he’s ever in power.” It was not entirely clear just how Patrick had acquired title to so vast a property. “It’s all done regular,” Patrick assured him. “Legal doodads an’ all.”’ He mentioned deeds filed with the Federal Government in Washington for certain Spanish grants that were transferred to him by the original owners, “fer a heap o’ dust!” The papers had been drawn by the local officials and sent to Washington by the overland express. “My name was on ’em,” Patrick said proudly, “printed in big letters!” Then Patrick, rambling on in a reminiscent mood, told how he had worked placer claims in the stream beds, how he had talked with men who had traveled the length and breadth of the California country, and became convinced of the wealth of ore and produce open to every man willing to work. He had learned of the belief among the miners that for every placer mine there was a mother lode of infinite richness in the mountain heights. When he made his strike, he prospected up the valleys until he came to a

place of great promise—a broad valley of rich land backed by a

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towering mountain range that he hoped held the mother lode that all men were seeking. The land was an old Spanish grant held by several Mexicans growing uneasy under the rule of the American conquerors, and Patrick’s gold tempted them to a quick sale. But Patrick could not bring himself to occupy the houses of the Mexicans in the valley. He wanted freedom and air, so he built on the mountainside; from

there he could look out over his possessions. Night came quickly on the mountainside. Far above, the snow peaks reflected the apricot glow of the sinking sun. It was briefly over. But around on the eastern side of the slope, the indigo shadows crawled, slow-paced. To Brandt, deeper in his imagination even than the mountains he was looking at were the sky-boundaried plains they trayersed in their wagon on the journey out. Level to the limits of earth,

or sometimes gently undulating, varied by smooth low swells of ground that rose and fell, it seemed, with the slow, calm sweep

of eternity. They awed and overcame him with a mingling of terror and release. Neither bird nor animal made any sound, or moved in sight. Impregnable vastness of being hushed and arrested! He felt himself wandering, pigmied and overborne, in an ocean hardened from its liquid state in the processes of time and rolled out under the deep star-dropping sky. Brandt and the O’Doghertys sat around the blazing campfire. The three men sat with muskets at their sides. Mary drowsed in forgetfulness of smoke-seasoned hardtack and singed hands. “We'll keep watch an’ relief every two hours. Keep the fires high. It scares away the mountain lions,” Patrick said. “If you hear timber crunchin’ and see two round balls shinin’ at ye in the trees, don’t wait—shoot!”’

Brandt’s was the first watch. He sat by the cabin door, listening to the animated snores of Mary and the hard, deep-drawn breathing of the two men. From time to time, he saw the incandescent eyeballs glowing on the other side of the darkness beyond the fire. Gooseflesh stood up along his spine, and he reached for the gun. But he did not shoot. He got up and threw more wood on the fire which shot high with flame. The phosphorescent

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balls faded into the darkness. Silence, thick-leaved, absorbed the

stealthy pads. Sitting there on the first evening of their arrival, alone, in

the tremendous silence of the night, he questioned himself .. . why had he come? He knew it was not just a plausible and sudden excuse to see the country. There was more to it than that. Amanda had been against it all the time. And she had refused flatly to come out with him as far as Council Bluffs; that is as far as travel was without discomfort and reasonably safe. “To be murdered by those horrid, greasy Indians? They’re all around, the place is filthy with them!” “Js that the talk of a missionary to souls in darkness? Or the daughter of a philosopher?” “Why go west,” she flared, ignoring his malice, “when there’s so much to be done here at home?” They had been married almost a year. He loved Amanda. His love was the first smiting discovery of himself he had ever made. That first visit, when she sat facing him across his desk pleading for Jim Reynolds . . . he was drawn to her, overwhelmed. And it was forever. But what incorrigible irony! Her guileless sentimental faith in the man, despite all the indications of his evil nature, actually had added something to the power of the attraction, some inexplicable thing that cast desire upon him like a drowning sea. Pride now |. . se He had always been alone, he told himself with self-pitying bitterness. Nevertheless, now he knew that in spite of his previous solitary existence he had never really been alone with himself. Out here in the wilderness it was happening for the first time in his life. He experienced a sense of guilt. And he felt again the sudden contraction of his heart that had pierced him when he had watched the twelve men of the jury file back into the courtroom with their

verdict—the fear that his eloquence had convinced the jury, given Reynolds the freedom for which he, Arnold, had pleaded so earnestly! He was conscious of overwhelming relief when he heard the verdict. And knew that Jim would not be free... . He was that kind of an ass. But his jealousy of Reynolds ex-

pressed itself in despising the man as a miserable degenerate and a

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nuisance. He hated the thought that his wife should waste so much

time and speech and persistent sentiment on him. Amanda was ambitious for her husband. “They ought to make you a judge,” she said again and again, “or Governor.” He glowed. And then she would add, as an afterthought, “You’d pardon Jim.” Damn

Jim!

He had actually written to the Governor, asking clemency for Reynolds. And that, too, was fear compelling him, fear that

she might turn wished.

against him even yet if he did not do as she

His beautiful security, poured out to him by the clergyman’s voice in the wedding ceremony, and concocted of formality, had not lasted much beyond the day of marriage! They were both of intensely demanding natures. And their demands were so very different. A child would help. She would be bound to him then. But she gave no hint of approaching motherhood. “There is so much you could do here,” she insisted.

So much! For Reynolds, perhaps. And other vermin like him. He might have stayed at home, he told himself now, if she had pleaded harder. “Tt seems to me you’re running away from something . . . or someone.”

She had told him that! She said he stood on the threshold of greater things. He would have advanced quickly, she felt sure, to greater and greater prominence. “And you want me to go out there and bury myself in a wilderness! Be uncomfortable in a filthy cabin! Starve to death, do without everything, and have my throat cut by an Indian!” Well, perhaps he would have reached the bench. Or higher . the governorship. Or the Supreme Court. Why not? But she did not know, she never would understand, because

she was incapable of feeling what he felt. And God knows, how fortunate for her that it was so! For to be racked in this torment, to know oneself impotent, powerless through any exercise of in-

telligence or will or one’s own

personal integrity, to put any

check on the frightful plunge of society into degradation and on-

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rushing materialism ... that, indeed, was to live in unending conflict with one’s own moral nature, to be arrayed against the intellect itself, which must ever be devoted to discovery of moral and life values in the fruits of mankind’s ingenuity, and to the application of such material gains to moral ends. It was to suffer the Promethean damnation! Yes, little did she know the hell in his vitals that drove him

to follow O’Dogherty—that clumsy visionary, that queer, elemental man—to his Promised Land in the West. Back in the dungeon of his office, thumbing the leaves of his lawbooks, he was persuaded that they smelled of erosion and decay. Statutes designed to protect liberty and to insure the peace and happiness of the individual, they seemed to him so much dead matter!

‘““A government of laws,” the Fathers proudly proclaimed. To make men free and equal and ambitious. But as he attended court day after day and witnessed the endless march of delinquents and offenders, he was convinced that the law, as a basis for permanence and security, had missed its purpose. Actually, it confirmed that which was already bad and corrupted that which was weak. The true character of the law was made known, not very long before, when a judge in sentencing a convicted horse thief, gave utterance

to an aphorism now famous: “It is not that you may not steal horses that I am sentencing you to hang. It is rather that others may not steal horses!” “Yes,” Arnold told himself that same night, curled in his blanket on the hard ground, waiting for sleep, “I ran away.” And even sleep did not bring him rest.

He dreamed of Amanda. She was standing with Jim Reynolds on the doorstep of their home. Together they watched him go down

the street. Then he began to run. Faster and faster. He

looked back over his shoulder. Reynolds was following him. Shouting to him to stop, beckoning. But he did not slacken his speed. The distance between them widened. Reynolds stopped, hesitated and turned back. But Arnold kept on running, running .. .

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8 ‘What do you think of God’s country?” Patrick asked one morning, a few days later. Brandt did not answer immediately. He was dumb with fatigue, every muscle of his soft city body begged for rest, for release from the crushing, driving exertion of felling trees and of terrible hours in the saddle every day. But in his heart there was a new peace. New York, with its crowded streets and dingy smells, its furtive crimes and courts and laws, seemed far away. Amanda, too. And Jim Reynolds as if he had never been. Here, one did feel closer to God, to creation. And Patrick, with his back turned,

staring off at the cloud-topping mountains, seemed more human. Yes, godlike. Star stuff! He smiled. “What are you planning to do with it?” Patrick turned around, chuckling.

than

“T’ve got gold dust aplenty,” he said, “‘an’ I can build myself a big house down there at the foot of the mountain. It’ll be a palace like the king and queen of Patrick Land should own. And then I'll bring in a herd of cattle, an’ [’ll let °em breed and multiply. I'll make myself a gentleman. A step higher than my ol’ man over in County Kerry with his one cow and one pig and no horse!” Patrick laughed and turned back to the mountains. “You'll have peace and quiet,” Brandt said, ‘‘and live long.” Patrick sat down suddenly on the ground beside him. His face was serious, grim with thought. “That wouldn’t satisfy me,” he said. “It ain’t right all this should be mine alone. It wasn’t meant for one man, east or west, to have so much and others nothing.” Patrick paused. He got up to throw a log on the fire, for Mary’s need in the cooking. To the man on the ground he loomed huge as a giant, his hair waving in the wind. “Mary and I been talkin’ about it. We’re aimin’ to do right by God an’ man. Maybe we’re dreamin’ things. But she’s queen.

I aim to have her keep her title. We’ll go back East, to New York, and offer Shantytown a new home.

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“I figure there’s three hundred o’ them ramscallions ownin’ nothin’ but the garments on their backs. America ain’t done nothin’ for ’°em. They’re poor as lice an’ never will be anythin’ else. I’m intendin’ to lead em west an’ give ’em a share in Patrick Land. So they can raise their vittles an’ own their cattle an’ be gentlemen like me. An’,” he added, winking, “Mary’ll still be queen!” Arnold

stared, incredulous.

“Good Lord, man!” he said. ““You mean you'll give your land away to that bunch in Shantytown?” “Some of it. That’s just what I mean. I’ll keep enough to give me food an’ shelter.” “And Mary is willing?” “She is that,” Patrick answered with a chuckle. “Aye, more. She’s domned happy about it! “Will you help?” Patrick asked finally. In the succeeding days there was loud discussion of Patrick’s curious proposal to present Shantytown with an inheritance in the northwestern land of promise. Arnold did not know what to make of such unsophisticated and quixotic reasoning. As a lawyer and a mildly dissenting adherent of Whig party ideals, his own mental processes were so intricately involved with vested interests and rights of property—in spite of his gathering abhorrence of evils and injustices that sprang, it seemed, like a crop of bad weeds from that mixed sowing—that all his conservative habits of thought now rose against this unreasoning act of one who would elect himself a Gaelic Moses. It was fantastic! His own mental confusion

grew more painful in contemplating the anomaly. The ruthless individualism of the commercial interests and money-making institutions bore down too heavily, he could not but believe, on the class of laborers and mechanics who served

them, as well as on that vast floating group of the unidentified poor. He knew this and regretted it, as would any man of generous instincts. And he knew that the vileness surrounding the slavery question and states’ rights—the whole mess of putrid politics mortifying around the historic opposition of planters and bankers, petty farmers and merchants who were their creditors— would not be cleaned out without bloodshed.

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He knew that social justice was not being dealt large sections of the population who, with no tangible assets but their ability to toil, were at the mercy of business fluctuations, panics, unsound legislation, discriminatory tariffs and every form of wildcat inflation known to unscrupulous enterprise. Nevertheless, he was not,

he could not be of the opinion that to bestow largess on people who had possessed nothing but their ignorance to support them was the one way to rid the country of those evils he deplored. He had not enough faith in human nature for that. “Vote yourself a farm!” the invitation of Thomas Hart Benton to his Missouri constituents, was in Arnold’s sight the worst kind of demagoguery. He did not stand with the shouting agitators for free distribution of the public lands, nor could he give any endorsement to the proposals of Horace Greeley, who saw in the settlement of propertyless persons on homesteads a solution for growing unemployment and congested conditions in the East. No, that sort of thing was pernicious, subversive. It threatened the very foundations on which this union of states had been erected. Patrick, he realized, did not grasp any of the broader implications of his visionary project. No social idea was behind it. Only a simplehearted desire to give a living to a few of the multitude who had none. Large-handed gesture of an innocent mind! An

unaccountable race, the Irish. An irresponsible nation of beggars and gypsies with no moral sense at all. Yet his judgment told him that the opening up of the Northwest Territory was going forward, regardless, and a single Patrick O’Dogherty with his gift of free land would count no more than a pebble in the path of an avalanche. What had happened already in the case of Texas and the Southwest, was happening over again in this part of the country. Indeed, it would keep on, till every inch and corner of the land was filled up and staked out in claims. The great tide was rolling on, sweeping the plains, sweeping westward. To expansion and plunder. There is no stopping or breaking the force of a great racial inundation. History had witnessed no such imponderable mass movement of humanity since the barbarians swept down upon Rome, the Moors overran Spain and North Africa and the Mongol horde

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poured south into China from the wastes of the Siberian tundra. Entrepreneurs already were on the ground, reaping their harvest, building towns, opening banks and express offices to serve the multiplying outposts. Why couldn’t he get in on some of this early pudding? Why not Patrick and he, together? Amanda and her judgeship! Here was a real chance to do something, build for a better future. And the captured plums would not be tainted fruit, no, no—because they would be gathered with clean hands.

“Will you help?” Patrick repeated his question. “If you want me,” Brandt said briefly. They shook hands on it.

2 By the end of the third month, the clearing on the mountainside had been enlarged, and a second cabin built for new arrivals. There were four. Patrick spied the round-topped wagon

rolling down the pass into the valley, and rode out to meet it. It was one of a large caravan that had crossed the prairies, and lumbered through the mountains seeking a foothold in the land of promise. Reaching the last range, it had turned off from the main route to go on alone.

“Henry Brown,” the man introduced himself. An emigrant from Germany. One of the two millions who fled from the economic restrictions and political embroilments of the old world, preferring the physical rigors of the new. Henry Brown was really Heinrich Brunner, a blue-eyed, sandy-haired giant of twenty-six. Patrick called him Heinie. Heinie brought a wife with him. A large, bony, tired-looking woman called Sophie who was about to give birth to her second child. There was already a sturdy little boy of four. Mary O’Dogherty bestowed cordial ministrations on Sophie,

doing what she could to make the woman less uncomfortable. An hour after their arrival Mary came to the cabin door, broom in hand and fire in her glance. She advanced balefully upon the shocked Heinie. ““Ain’t you the divil of a man! Bringin’ the poor woman into

the wilderness. And her with a child not two days off!”

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A week later the child was born. A girl. Gathered solemnly around the fire, they gave it a name. Patrick officiated without a prayer book and said the words of a rudimentary baptism, using water from the brook. The infant was christened Mary. “It woulda been Patrick,” Big Heinie said, “if it wass a poy!” One day a group of horsemen was sighted riding up the valley. Patrick, splitting logs on the mountainside, paused for a breathing spell and, looking out where the trees parted in the clearing, saw the men approaching. He shouted to Brandt, pointing out the men. They saddled their horses and rode down to meet the strangers. They were a party of eight, all hardy-looking fellows with one exception, a pale, keen-eyed, soft-spoken chap who carried a portfolio. The strangers brought news from the outside world. Abraham Lincoln had been nominated for the presidency. And he favored the immediate construction of a western steam road across the continent to the Pacific. “Your land is right in the path of the road our company intends to build,” one of the men

said.

He explained that a company called the Union Pacific had been formed to build a road across the plains and had begun actual construction. To save time, a group of Californians had started a road from the coast and were planning to push through the mountains as rapidly as possible to join up with the road from the east. This Californian venture—the Central Pacific—was through the valley where Patrick’s land lay. Arnold Brandt forgot his new character of a pioneer, becoming again the lawyer, as he listened carefully to what the men had to say. “We're floating bonds,” the pale-faced gentleman explained. “Landowners will share in the tremendous profits that are sure to come.” One hundred thousand dollars in bonds, they offered Patrick

for his land. “It'll be worth a million before long. Go along with us, and you'll have more money than you can spend in a lifetime!” “It ain’t the money

so much

I’m figurin’ on,” Patrick said.

“It’s the land I want. An’ I got my hooks in, I ain’t gonna turn

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loose, be God, fer all the paper you got in kingdom-come!” Arnold gave them the information about Patrick’s plans. The men were amazed and enthusiastic. “Say, you got the right idea! You

better cotton on to us.

We'll want settlers. Millions of ’em! It’ll bring business for the roads. “You bring your friends out here! We'll give ’em land, and you'll have your hundred thousand!” Patrick saw that the men seemed in earnest. They would permit him to carry out his project. Shantytown would still be able to migrate. And with the money he could buy other land farther west, perhaps nearer the coast, bring new settlers—men from County Kerry by sea to save the long trail across the plains. The more, the better. Patrick had faith in the railroads. And he trusted

these men who were pressing him for an immediate answer. Eagerly he took the pen handed him by the man with the portfolio, and signed the option. Mary considered

that Heinie

owed

it to his family to take

them back East with the rest of them. “Tt’s the baby, poor little tyke!” she said, hugging the infant to her breast, her small pugnacious eyes spilling tears. But Heinie was for staying on and would not be budged. He was going to wait for the railroad to come through. Early in July, Patrick and Mary and young Pat and Arnold Brandt started on the homeward journey. In New York, at the headquarters of the company, the bargain would be closed. Patrick would deliver his deed and receive one hundred thousand dollars in bonds of the company. He would be a rich man. And then he would lead Shantytown back. They’d have their land. By August they were in New York. Brandt, full of the excitement of homecoming, wanted to shout, to sing. His old misgivings temporarily were in abeyance, displaced by the joy of the reunion with Amanda. He intended to surprise her. She opened the door. Seeing him bronzed and tall like a hero, his smile glowing with tenderness, she gave a little cry and tumbled into his arms.

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“I’m glad you’ve come,” she said softly. And smiling, her eyes deep shining, she repeated, “I’m glad you’re back.” And then she told him. The immense grandeur of the West, with all its promise and glory, was dimmed in his new happiness of fatherhood. “Tf it’s a boy,” she said, “we'll call him Arnold. Or a girl...

she'll be Mary.” She listened patiently, if without sign of any quickening response, to the story of his travels. But she was moved by his enthusiasm for his friends. When

he had done, she looked at him

gravely, leaning against him, her mouth lifted to his kiss. “Don’t leave me again,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

“Tt’s hard to be alone.” She freed herself, and walking to a cabinet at one end of the room in which she kept letters and personal trifles, returned with a letter in her hand. She handed it to him. The letter was from Sing Sing Prison. He opened it slowly and read:

Dear Mrs. Brandt . . . I’ve been pardoned. Mr. Brandt had something to do with it. He wrote a letter to the Governor. And the Warden helped, too. He wrote about something I did here. It wasn’t much. But he seemed to think well of me... I’m going west. You wont mind if I don’t stop to say good-by. It is better so. But I want you to know how I shall never forget your faith in me.I didn’t deserve it. But I hope to later. With sincere appreciation for all you and Mr. Brandt have done for me, and prayers for your good health, . Jim Reynolds Arnold turned the letter over in his hands, a frown gathering between his eyes. “Well?” he said. But checked himself on the point of adding, “You’re not going to waste any more sympathy on that fellow?”

“Nothing. That’s all,” Amanda

said. “I thought you’d be

glad. He’s turned out so well . . .” “Why, sure. I am glad, if that’s what you mean. I guess he’ll go straight.” He felt annoyed. His homecoming was spoiled.

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IO

In the joy of approaching parenthood, Arnold’s interest in the dream of Patrick and Mary waned. He settled back in the routine of his profession. He became again the eloquent pleader, and regained the esteem of his colleagues as a promising lawyer. Patrick came to his office one day, his pockets bulging with crisp certificates. “Take these,” he told Arnold. “Put ’em somewhere

keepin’. ’m more money Arnold shoulder and

for safe

a rich man, they say. A hundred thousand. That’s than there is in all of Ireland!” read the certificates. Patrick stood looking over his pointing with his thick, calloused finger at the fine

script.

“Tt says there, I gave ’em the land in exchange for these here paper doodads. What if they don’t build the road?” “They'll build, all right,” Brandt reassured him. “Congress approved it. The biggest banks in the country are behind it. There’s no question about their building.” “You don’t think it’s a gamble?” “SA gamble, yes. But a damned good one.” Patrick heaved a sigh of satisfied ambition. “T’m leadin’ Shantytown next spring. It’s too late this year. We'd be meetin’ bad weather.” Events tumbled in furious sequence during the next few months. The baby came. And they called it Arnold. Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The guns at Fort Sumter began the war. Lincoln issued his call for volunteers. Arnold Brandt was one of the first to respond to the President’s appeal. “It isn’t slavery so much,” he explained to Amanda, who, pale and agitated, heard the announcement of his enrollment. “It’s

the beginning of a new order. It will clean out everything that’s vicious.”

She bore it in silence, submitting to the inevitable. Too anx-

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ious and too unhappy to tell him, she did not share his optimistic belief. He was with the men who retreated at the first Battle of Bull Run. His optimism had vanished. He feared now for the future of America. But, like Lincoln, he returned to battle with

greater determination to fight on. And he fought on until he stood, a major, by the side of General Grant as he wrote his famous lines to Lee at Appomattox, ending the war. Amanda was at the curbstone as he marched by, leading his men in the parade, a part of the grand ceremonies held in New York to welcome the victorious soldiers. With her, holding tight to her hand, was little Arnold, their son. All of four years old, he was waving his flag and shrieking patriotic jubilation. Major Brandt saw them. And he realized all at once, a shock of weakness striking him in his legs and in his chest, how tired he was, how

much he wanted to be at home and forget the war. Toward

the end of the march, a voice called out to him. A

loud voice, resounding above the drums and fifes of the parading soldiers. He turned his head toward the lines of spectators crowding the sidewalks and spied Patrick O’Dogherty waving to him.

He looked back, barely in time to see Patrick’s arms striking the

air with long, winglike, flying motions, still waving, as the column turned the corner. It was but a half-glimpse, lasting no longer than a second. A flash, then his eyes touched other faces, dimly blotted in the muddle of craning heads. His feet knew it first and fell out of step, there was something queer about Patrick. Something had happened to him. And then, as an afterimage, his mind caught at the fact that Patrick’s hair was snow-white. Arnold tramped on, wondering and saddened. It was four years since he had seen his friend. His furloughs had been short and infrequent, hardly long enough to greet Amanda and kiss little Arnold. Once he had asked Amanda about Patrick and Mary. “They’ve gone west,” she told him. “They came to say good-by and see the baby.” No letters, no word came from them. The fast-moving war years kept him too busy to give them further thought. But something must have happened to Patrick, Arnold said | to himself, as he jerked along, his feet moving automatically with

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the rhythm of martial tunes his ears heard as a distant, dimly familiar strumming and clatter of instruments. He found himself at last in civilian clothes, seated by the grate in the parlor of his own home. Amanda was sitting close to him; and little Arnold interested himself with his father’s scabbard,

from which the sword had been removed. Arnold’s face was relaxed in a comfortable smile. The youngster was five; tall for his age and sturdy, with eyes as deep as his mother’s, and hair, browned,

like his father’s. He swung the long scabbard up to his shoulder and strode with important gallantry toward his father. “Tl be a soldier, too, when I’m big,” he announced grandly. “God forbid,” Amanda said.

“Why not?” Arnold said, smiling. “You, of all men, to ask why not!”

She continued, speaking with swift, piercing bitterness, while he stared at her amazed. “America owed life to its people, you said once. I remember it so.clearly. It was so true. And these four years, what have we had? The men in the army and the women at home? What have

any of us had? Nothing but death!” “Tt had to come, Amanda,” he argued, only mildly convinced of what he was saying. “The war was as inevitable as thunder and

lightning when the atmosphere is overcharged. Thunder brings terror, and lightning may cause death and ruination, but folks breathe easier afterward. The air is fresh, anyhow.” “Literary talk! You really think the death of those thousands of boys has made life more worth while for the living?” “T don’t know about that. But folks understand better the meaning and spirit of sacrifice. To give something of themselves for the common good. It will bring tolerance. Where there is tolerance, you won’t find bitterness or vengeance or greed.”

Amanda shook her head, frowning. “It’s a horrible price to pay for your noble morality, selfsacrifice bought with blood! Where do you see the tolerance the war has made? It doesn’t come out of hatred and killing. No! It sounds good, Arnold. But it’s not true. The psychology of war is might. Might regardless of right. It’s unmoral. And it disturbs the sense of balance, it destroys the whole balance of everything!”

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“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” Amanda repeated, “that it emphasizes power. What men went after on the battlefield with guns and swords, they’ll go after in peace times with other weapons. Money. There’ll be the same ruthlessness. It will be the same old thing . . . only worse. Rich men will become richer and poor men poorer.” “You seem to have it all figured out . . .” Brandt remarked. “No. But some people have, the ones who are already planning their campaigns.” The doorbell interrupted them. Arnold got up to answer it. A strong voice called a greeting; and outside on the doorstep, his long coat flapping from his tall figure in the wind, stood Patrick. “Have you no welcome for a friend?” He came in and stood hesitating in the hall. “Perhaps I shouldn’ta come,” he said, apologizing, “this bein’ your first night home.” He sat down heavily in the armchair placed for him. He

stretched his legs, ran his hands through his wiry hair, and was silent. Patrick had aged a great deal in four years. Physically, he seemed less vibrant. His forehead was creased, his cheeks furrowed.

And his speech was slower. He yawned.

“Well, it’s over. We’ve got peace.” ““Where’s Mary?”

Patrick slumped in his chair, his head bowed. His eyes went dull. He gulped, as his voice came out with an odd flatness. ““Mary’s dead.” “Dead!” exclaimed Arnold. And Amanda put one hand to her mouth, as though to draw out with her fingers the speech she

could not utter. Patrick nodded his head. “Two years ago. It was up there in the old cabin. She laid down one night and never came to. Died in her sleep.” Arnold got up and paced the room, too shaken to bear the eyes of the others. It made him angry that he could find nothing to say. Patrick leaned forward and continued speaking. “You see,” he said, his voice was soft and languid, “the war

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didn’t seem like it would end soon. The boy had gone, too. And we was alone. Mary an’ me. It didn’t seem like we could lead the folks like we thought, till it was all over. An’ then we got a hankerin’ for the cabin. An’ I was keen after seein’ them fellers build the railroad like they said they was doin’. So me an’ Mary headed fer out there. “You'd never know the place. They’ve dug it all up, an’ hundreds of men workin’. An’ rails bein’ laid down, with steam en-

gines comin’ right through. So me an’ Mary stayed there in the cabin for six months. An’ we would sit by the cabin door, watchin’

them

tracks bein’ laid, an’ the steam

trains from the

coast creepin’ up right close to the mountain.” Patrick leaned forward and smiled reminiscently. “It was a grand sight. An’ all the while, I kept thinkin’ of them bonds I stored with you. A hundred thousand dollars, an’ they would all be good as clover in summer. We was figurin’ how we'd buy more land when the war was over, an’ Pat came home. An’ how we would settle our people right close to the railroad an’ across the valley where I was aimin’ to buy the new land. We was dreamin’ grand dreams, I’m tellin’ you. There wasn’t no

sound of war up there by the cabin. No shootin’ or killin’ or marchin’. Only the sound of men singin’ at their work. An’ the smoke of peace, like the Indians say. The grand sight it was, an’ us growin’

fonder of it, till we could believe we’d got the best

price a’ the earth and heaven included.” Patrick paused. There was the old fire again in his eyes, and his voice had grown light with animation. “Then she died. An’ all our dreams was like the smoke from the engine, risin’ to the skies and gone. Big Heinie, you remember him, he was still out there. An’ he helped me bury her. It didn’t seem like I could stay there after she died. An’ I didn’t care. So I came back east. A month ago. Just when Grant was bringin’ peace.” “And the boy?” Patrick shrugged his shoulders. “T ain’t heard from him since he joined up.”

They talked late. Amanda had left them and gone to bed.

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“About those bonds,” Patrick said, “I been thinkin’ I got no use

fer ’em. Leastwise, till the boy comes back . . . if he does!” They went into the study. He opened the strong box and held up for Patrick’s scrutiny the bundle of certificates, intact, as on the day they were delivered. Patrick fingered them. “I’m thinkin’ I’ve no use fer ’em,” he repeated, “except the boy comes back.” He straightened up. war,

“You'll be wantin’ to start life again now it’s all over. The I mean. An’ you'll be needin’ money. I'll sign a few of ’em

over to you. Jest as a loan,” he added hurriedly, brushing aside

the other’s objections. ‘“Till you get set.” He sat down at the desk and signed two of the certificates. “Hold the balance,” he said next, “till you hear from the boy. If he’s dead, I’ll be leavin’ my will with you. I’ve got brothers an’ sisters over in County Kerry.”

He rested his arms on the desk. His lips tightened suddenly. And he breathed hard. “The heart’s not so good, Arnold. Maybe it’s only waitin’ to hear from the boy. If he’s gone .. . nature’ll put no hindrance on takin’ a rest, in the ground!”

Amanda had the Christian thought of offering Patrick a home, permanently, under their roof. She made the suggestion one night as they sat snugly by the fire in their parlor. She was worried about Patrick’s heart. He looked forlorn, with his grieving stare, his scraggy white locks and his beard all blown out like an. old woman’s petticoat. He had acquired a habit of sitting leaning forward with his hands over his knees, as though an intention to rise and proceed somewhere had been in his thoughts before his silent abstraction bereft him of motion, the enlarged finger joints crooked over his kneecaps squeezing Amanda’s heart with vague wretchedness. Patrick came. The little black satchel that held his meager belongings was deposited in a small room high up under the eaves. He brightened a little, touched through his lethargy by their wish to make him comfortable. But he could not be restored to happiness.

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Patrick had broken. His feet shuffled in an old man’s gait. His heart did not improve. He had frequent attacks, lost his breath, could not endure anything but the mildest of temperatures. It was plain to see that the sinking heart would not function much longer. And Patrick would be with the unfleshed dreamers in that uncontested Eden below the horizon. The announcement of construction work begun again on the Union Pacific where it had been halted by the interruption of the war, brought back his old dissatisfaction to smolder in Arnold Brandt’s brain. Now when he read editorials and infatuated accounts of the movable town—humorously christened by the workmen “Hell on Wheels’”—summoning to his mind’s eye the rapt vision of rails vanishing across the gray plains of Kansas, on and on into the buffalo country where the hands in their rest periods hunted out the great shaggy beasts, he felt the insignificance of his narrow life upon him like a crushing, stupid, inescapable yoke. He received letters from promoters of the road, suggesting that he become a stockholder. “We'll put you on the Board of Directors if you'll take a block of it,” they wrote of Union Pacific

stock. “A hundred thousand is all you need.” A hundred thousand. He’d never get it out of his law practice. Not much juice to be squeezed out of that dry orange! The entrepreneurs were the people who lapped it up, and they handed you the dirty rind for a retainer. God, if only he had it! Or if there were anywhere he could get it. There was millions in the thing. And the opportunity! Position. Millions. Oh, God, not a hireling any more, no taking orders. To have power, money, be somebody! He came home one night jumpy and irritable. In vain Amanda

attempted to divert him with questions and bright chatter at dinner. He maintained a hard bristling silence, heavy and glum. Patrick followed him into the study after dinner. Brandt did not look up or speak, or betray other interest in Patrick’s presence. Patrick hesitated, a long moment. Then he lowered himself into a chair, moving with stiff-jointed caution as though to avoid jarring his wilted invalid heart, sitting forward on the edge of the chair, his palms braced on his knees. “What is it, man? Money?” he asked, his breath whistling hard.

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Arnold shifted his glance, his face dimly smiling. “Money?” he said, surprised as though he never had any use for it. “No, no, I’m not in difficulties. A little upset tonight, that’s

all. Bothered about a case. A hard one, it’s got me stumped.” He laughed dryly. Walking over to a cabinet planted against the end wall of the study, he took out a decanter and poured himself a drink. Patrick sat a while. Efforts at conversation were abortive. Patrick felt ill at ease, baffled, repulsed by Arnold’s coldness and gloomy preoccupation. Presently, with a sigh, involuntary exhalation from the labor of putting himself in motion, he stood up and lumbered out of the room and up the stairs. Arnold set the brandy bottle back, listening to Patrick’s laborious tread on the stairs. He heard a door shut above, on the third floor. Still he did not move away from the chest but stood waiting, feeling a sudden, breathless, altogether strange provocation in the stillness and emptiness of the room. His movements remained unconnected with any purpose. He was not thinking of anything. But his brain all at once, somehow, was full of a cloudlike density of covetousness, longing, selfjustification. A sudden thought of Patrick’s bonds and the coincidence in the figures shot up to his brain, filling him with tremulous and painful excitement. Not intending anything more than to look at them, he stooped, groped in the cabinet, and drew out a long Manila envelope fastened with a string of faded red tape. The certificates slid out of the envelope. He looked at them, green and gold. Handled them. Put them back. Retied the string. He did not return them immediately to the cabinet, however, but kept the envelope in his hand, turning it over and over and staring at the yellow flap. A voice spoke to him out of the cloudy commotion in his brain. “He is an old man, with a weak heart. And his son, his only

son, was killed at Antietam . . .” “What am I thinking of?” his mind cried. But the voice persisted, though he could not give it identification. It was outside himself, like a weird embodiment, yet he sensed it inside him, deeper than consciousness, spurring him in fierce and secret instigation. “He is my friend. He respects and

loves me. And if he knew how much it would mean to me.

. .”

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He had another thought. Why not go to Patrick and explain the situation, the chance in it for them both to make a killing? Get Patrick to make over the bonds to him, temporarily, as a loan of collateral, to be secured with his personal credit and what tangible assets he could pledge? But his judgment told him it was too much to ask. Too big a favor. It had not an ounce of justification, from any sound business standpoint. And he would have to divide with Patrick—or Patrick’s heirs. No, no, if he went that far in humbling himself, enough to ask the favor, he could not do the rest.

What he wanted was not just more money than he had, but a lot more. And the power that went with it. He wanted supremacy. It was so easy. Patrick needn’t know anything. Patrick would

have none of the worry. Of course, he would return the bonds afterward. They wouldn’t have the same numbers, but that was nothing. Even as he stood there, realization burst over him. The light of his integrity dawned again, flickering forth in the hurricane. The habits of his accustomed reasoning and control returned, and now he could not believe that he actually was contemplating theft. What was the matter with him? His hands holding the envelope

shook so that he could scarcely control his movements. Stuffing the envelope back in the crowded place, he knocked down some loose papers that scattered on the floor. He fumbled and took a long time picking them up. And all the while he was engaged with the papers, in resistance to his feelings of horror and self-condemnation, cupidity stirred in the bottom of his mind. A cunning purpose, a sly, unacknowledged determination arose, outwitting his conscious thought. And he knew in the depths of himself that he would do this thing.

Carefully he locked the cabinet, restoring the key to his pocket. The possibility entered his mind that perhaps Patrick would change his will. He sat down at the desk, covering his face, his head supported in his hands. He lost track of time. His back was stiff, his arms had gone to sleep. He stood up, staggering and flailing his arms to rid himself of the numbness. He went softly up the stairs. There was a light in Patrick’s room. He lay on his bed, read-

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ing, and looked up as his host opened the door. He said cheerfully, “Feel better?” Arnold’s eyes burned out of his haggard face. Without answering, he sat down on the foot of the bed.

“You haven’t heard anything—about Pat?” he said abruptly. “Not as I know of. Why?” _ He hesitated. Patrick was looking at him with a gaze of troubled intentness, his prominent forehead wrinkling above curiously flattened brows. His eyes had the mild frosty blue of individuals who have come to old age after a life of robust and hard physical activity, the clean pinkness of his skin contrasting with his white hair and beard, giving his countenance the puckered plaintive look of an infant in distress. He felt weakness overtake him, seeing the puckered lines in

Patrick’s forehead. His voice came out with a dry, tinny sound that he could not make steady. “Suppose he’s . . . dead?” The old man’s frame trembled with his sharp intake of breath. And his mouth remained open. “What do you mean?” he said thickly. “Have you—you heard something?”

Arnold forced himself to look upon the dismay in Patrick’s face. And the suggestion tapped at his mind again, with wanton

and appalling cunning, noting the apoplectic flush, the bluish bruised look around the mourning

eyes, “He won’t live long.”

And a glad feeling of safety, almost of exultation, leaped in him. “P’m only supposing,” he said aloud. “I wondered. I’ve been | cleaning up some of my papers. It just occurred to me, as you’ve made me your executor—have you any other instructions? Aside from the stipulations recorded in your will?” Patrick sighed. “Only what I put in the will. I want the lad to have every-

thing. And after him, the folks over in Ireland. What’s the matter, ain’t it done right?” “Oh, yes. Perfectly all right. I just wanted to be sure.” “You

don’t think,” Patrick

turned

on him a look seeking

reassurance, “you don’t put no stock in that report, do you? It

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ain’t never been confirmed from headquarters—that he was missing at Antietam?” “Oh, no,” he lied, wishing to make the old man comfortable.

“You can’t tell much about unofficial reports. But frankly I don’t see any grounds yet to believe it.” “A good lad,” Patrick said dreamily, the pucker creeping up from his eyebrows, making his clean, bland, pink forehead crushed and pathetic. ‘““And a smart one!” Confidence had come back to him. “He’[l not be diddled off underground ahead o’ time, no, no. Don’t be supposin’ a thing like that!” Arnold wished him good night and went softly back down the stairs. A harsh and hurried agitation was churning inside him. But he did not stop to give heed to it. He sat down at the desk and wrote out a codicil to the will. When he had added it, with the date, just under the name of the last witness, he had no difficulty in tracing the jagged, meandering letters of Patrick’s signature. II

Potpie Palmer was a jolly old soul, With a three cornered hat and the pie he stole.”

Little Arnold stood in the center of the floor, his wide eyes staring seriously up at his father, his short arms keeping time with

the rhythm of the verse he was reciting. Amanda sat by the window, her sewing bag in her lap. Brandt turned a frowning face toward his son.

“Why teach the child such nonsense?” he said, addressing Amanda. Amanda laughed. “Because it is nonsense. He’ll have time enough to learn serious things.” “But this stuff about stealing, it puts ideas into their heads.

Suggestion, and all that sort of thing.” “Rubbish!” exclaimed Amanda. “The child knows it’s all in fun. Children imitate only what they see, not what they hear.

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The power of suggestion is in the eye. Environment, I heard you say so time and again in your speeches to juries.”

His eyes, disapproving, followed little Arnold’s energetic stamping on the red-carpeted floor. The child approached and stood in front of him, his sturdy legs planted firmly together.

“Potpie Palmer was a jolly old soul, With a three cornered hat .. .” The father jumped up in a frenzy of irritation caused by his cwn consciousness of guilt, and kicking aside his chair, flung out of the room. Amanda heard the study door slam behind him. She found him sitting at his desk, staring at the wall in front of him. She came close and perched on the arm of his chair. “Something’s on your mind, Arnold. You’ve been like this for six months. Ever since Patrick died.” He was silent. Staring.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s the matter?” He raised his head. Seeing her face alight with tenderness and concern, her eyes softly regarding him, intent with trouble, he

experienced a rush of feeling. His fear and the guilt that was wearing him down, destroying him, sank out of being momentarily, borne down by the love he felt for her as a woman and a human being whose life was fatefully entangled with his. His arm jerked out, circling her waist, and he drove his face against her soft yielding body. “Love me, Mandy?”

She clung to him. “For better or worse?” “Just to share life with you.” “Have you been happy? Really?” “More than I ever dreamed.” “Sure?” he persisted. Her two hands reached for his face and turned it up. Her eyes looked deeply and tenderly into his. “Sure,” she said, and kissed him.

He set her on her feet and stood up. “We may have to go west,” he said suddenly.

“Ts it the railroad?”

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“They’re talking about making me general counsel. We’d have to live in St. Louis.” Tenderness departed quickly from her voice and manner. “But I like it better here, Arnold. I don’t want to go to St. Louis.” He made an impatient gesture. “This thing is bigger than we! It means millions. I can be president of the road some day.”

““And then?” she asked, looking at him. He stared at her, uncomprehending. She sighed. “~T never wanted you to be rich,” she went on in a fretful voice. “I never thought of you as a rich man.-I didn’t think it meant so much to you. It was always as a lawyer I pictured you. Or a judge. Holding court to see that poor people got a square deal. That’s the way I liked to think of you. Like when you pleaded for Jim Reynolds .. .” “Ah, Jim Reynolds,” he interrupted, seizing the opportunity to change the subject. Her unreasonableness was like a lash on the bare back of his guilt. ““That reminds me. I’ve seen him.” “When? Where? Why didn’t you tell me?” “JT didn’t think it was so urgent. Besides, he asked me not to mention it to you,” he said evasively. ““He was crippled in the war. He’s leading a mission now down by the water front. He came to me for help. I guess he’s doing good work. If you call it that.” ‘You should have told me,” she said in an aggrieved voice. “Well... he’s crippled. Hobbles around on a wooden stump.”

He saw that she was angry with him for no reason. That’s how she was—drawn to him emotionally one minute, cold and unsympathetic the next. Simply, she couldn’t bear not to get her way in everything. But he was anxious to make peace.

“J suppose we could have him here tonight. I imagine he'll come.” His voice was tight with sarcasm. Reynolds came. Little Arnold ran toward him, stared fascinated, then he felt

the wooden leg. “I c’n recite,” he announced precociously. Jim bent down and stroked the child’s head.

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‘Potpie Palmer was a jolly old soul, With a three cornered hat and the pie he stole.” Arnold frowned. But Jim laughed. ‘How about a prayer, son,” he said. “Know any?” “Now I lay me down to sleep . . .” He stopped suddenly and made a face. “I like Potpie Palmer better,” he said, pouting.

Jim laughed heartily. “Your tastes’ll be different when you’re older,” he said. Reynolds discoursed tediously and sentimentally of his charity work. “It was Mr. Brandt’s money that gave us a start in our free lodging house. It helped a lot. A few more of those shelters and the courts’ll be less busy.” He turned to Amanda, adding, “You ought to look us over, some time.”

There was a slackness about Reynolds, in his face and physique, that to Brandt was offensive in the extreme. He had lost some of his upper teeth, which gave his mouth a pursed and flabby appearance, allowing the upper jaw to drop down on the fattish underlip, scooped out in a V shape like the lip of a jug. He had a shapeless, gristly nose, and a short thick pointed tongue which got in the way when he talked, exposed in full view, and appeared cleft to the roof of his mouth like a bird’s tongue. “A loose-talking fellow,” he growled to himself, “with his religious twaddle and his easy generalizations.” “You haven’t heard about Jim’s pardon,” he said, speaking to Amanda. And he launched into an insincere eulogy, the tone of it loaded with sarcasm, which relieved his feelings somewhat of the °

disgust he felt for the man, and the bitterness harbored in himself against his private mistakes and disasters. “A gang of prisoners had planned a general delivery from Sing Sing. They set fire to one of the larger shops. Several hundred men would have been burned to death, if it hadn’t been for Jim’s quick thought in giving the alarm.” “It wasn’t more

than any normal

man

woulda

done,” Jim

said, apologizing. “But the warden thought well enough of it to recommend a pardon.”

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Amanda excused herself, and went up to put little Arnold in bed. Arnold led Jim into the study. They sat facing each other, the desk between them. For a time they smoked in silence. “LPIl never be able to thank you,” Jim blurted out, referring

to the past. “It was your speech to the jury that set me right.” A faint deprecating smile appeared on the lawyer’s face. “I was suspicious of you, the way you didn’t call any witnesses I had fixed up. They woulda sworn I wasn’t there. Maybe they’da got me off. But I’da been the same old Jim.”

He paused and looked over, with his loose, ingratiating smile. “TI hear you’re doing big things!” BOD no. Brandt was thinking, the confounded thing about this fellow was, he was really happy. Saving souls now, and filling stomachs, right in the very neighborhood of his old field of operations, the water-front downtown. That he was still a poor fool and had forsaken his gang for the company of Jesus meant only that he was running true to his original infirm, dependent nature. Moral regeneration does not include vigor and stamina where they are lacking, if heredity originally is responsible for the omission. But Reynolds was redeemed, oh, yes! A wonderful new purity and peace had come into his heart. And how might he envy him that! The contrast to his own state was unutterably painful. Ah, he—bedeviled! A forger and a thief! “T’ve never felt so free,” Jim said. “Nor so glad with life. If you know what I mean.” Pree!

There could be no freedom for him. Forever he would be oppressed with life. It was all so wrong, futile, empty. His marriage. And the chatter of little Arnold, with his rhyme about Potpie Palmer. He would be rich and, possibly, president of the railroad.

Powerful. But there would always be regret, remorse. His position, everything he possessed was a lie. Amanda’s admiration was a lie. Life itself was a lie. Jim was still talking.

Earth’d up here lies an imp of hell, Planted by Satan’s dibble,

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Poor silly wretch, he’s damned himself, To save the Lord the trouble. Conscience was a terrible thing. If he could only kill it. But it was dragging him down. Would there be any peace anywhere? In death? “It’s a wonderful thing, being close to God and knowing He’s watching over you,” Jim said. Jim close to God. Jim the thief. The killer. The convict. Ah, yes, Jim the reborn! Suddenly he sat up straight. Jim’s voice was soft with emotion. Yet it seemed to fill the room like a detonation. He struggled to escape from the incessant pounding and hammering. Rising out of his chair, he pulled open a drawer of the desk. His fingers came in contact with the pistol he had used in the war. Jim rose, too. His mouth was wide open, his chin hanging loose. Like the tongue of a boot, he thought, a boot...

.

There was a roar. A flash of flame and a cloud of smoke. And astonishment in Jim’s eyes, as he stumbled and fell to the floor. The child Arnold ran in, and saw the smoking pistol in his father’s hand. I2

“What happened??? Amanda asked on her first visit to the Tombs. Arnold looked out at her through the bars of his cell door in murderers’ row.

:

Amanda approached close to the barred door and whispered. “Was it because of . . . me?” Arnold looked at her, silent, taken aback. He wondered what

made her ask such a question. What did she mean? But he saw from her absent expression, from the way her attention wandered and remained nowhere, that her mind touched nothing definitely but her own self-absorbed feelings of injury and grief. She asked the question with nothing in her mind but a great vague misery, no faintest comprehension of his mental state. Overnight he had grown pale and gaunt. His cheeks were

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sunken, his eyes hollow. His voice, too, had changed. It was thick. “It was something inside of me, Amanda,” he told her finally. “T can’t explain it. You wouldn’t understand. I don’t think I do, yet.”

Mystified officials speculated about the motive for the crime. Then, despairing of a solution, and anxious to be rid of a troublesome case that threatened to become morbid and romantic in the popular mind, they offered the prisoner a plea to murder in the second degree, carrying with it a sentence of twenty years in Sing Sing. Arnold Brandt accepted. He smiled wanly as Amanda bade him good-by. ‘You can dig a grave for me. I’ll suggest the flowers be omitted!” She stared at him in stricken silence, dry-eyed, her breath

coming thin and difficult. “That’s about all you’ve left me,” she said with quiet bitterness. Still she waited, hesitating, as if to hear words that would soothe her overwrought nerves, repentance, self-abasement, commiseration, and a final entreaty to be forgiven. But Arnold remained silent. She sighed deeply, and turned away. A week later he was admitted to Sing Sing Prison.

13 “I’m hoping you’re not superstitious,” the keeper grinned as

he escorted him to his cell. ‘The last fellow who lived in this cell died on the day he was to be discharged. Twenty years he did, too. For murder. Like you.” 202 was the number painted on the door. The keeper inserted the key in the massive lock. The iron door swung open. “They say you’re a lawyer,” the keeper said, eying Arnold Brandt with curiosity, “‘an’ a good one, too. Well, take a friendly warnin’. Forget what you learned in them lawbooks. It won’t stand you no good here. They makes their own laws in this place. An’ they ain’t bad, considerin’. “Twenty years is a long time. You'll see lots of changes. You'll be changed yourself. Your hair’ll be gray, maybe white.

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An’ you'll be rounder here.” The keeper pointed to his waistline. “An’ maybe your back won’t be so straight. Yes”—he peered into Arnold’s eyes—‘‘your eyes won’t be so . . . alive!” He paused and stared thoughtfully, then shook his head. “But don’t let it get you,” he said seriously, “like it did that other fellow—the one that died in this cell. It won’t if you don’t think what was or will be, but take each day as it comes and do the best by it.” Arnold stepped into the dim interior of the cell. The door clanged behind him. He stood leaning against the door waiting, listening to the steady tread of the keeper echoing through the high vaulted corridor. He turned and looked into the darkness that hid the inner walls of the cell. He drew a long breath, and coughed, the damp, heavy air choking his lungs, chilling his body. He walked the length of the cell and back, to stand finally by the latticed grating of the door, his face flattened against the cold iron, his nose dug into the square opening. There was a clatter of feet along the corridor. Arnold straightened up, waiting. The sound came nearer. A face appeared outside the lattice, grinning in. “Lo, new-timer. I’m the water boy. Hold up yer tin cup.”

Arnold reached for the cup that was hanging from a nail above his head, and held it close to the latticed grating. A long nozzle was shoved through the opening, and poured a stream of water into his cup. He drank feverishly and held the cup for more. The man laughed good-naturedly. “Not too much,” he said, “it’s a long wait till morning, new-

timer, an’ the plumbin’ ain’t so good.” The man stepped back and surveyed the cell. He whistled. “Two-o-two,” he said, grinning, “they say it’s haunted. There’s a fellow that died here. He stood it twenty years, and then . . .” He snapped his fingers, and passed on. Arnold remained standing by the door, listening to the man’s clatter. A great hope welled in his heart. There was a cunning look in his eye.

“Water boy,” he whispered to himself. ‘It would be fine to be a water boy.” He would aim for that. A water boy could talk, and he could

-

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walk the length of the gallery, and he could breathe the pure air. He would try for that. He slept that night, a deep, dreamless sleep, and woke to the sound of a gong. He sat up on his bunk, startled by the numbness of his body and the dampness of his clothes. The stamp of feet sounded along the galleries. He heard the scrape of keys and sharp commands. Stifled yawns echoed through space. He rose and stood by his cell door. Arnold had no fear of himself when he sat in his cell, in the

silence of the granite walls. There was peace in this silence, it was soothing. But he was afraid when he became a link of the long line, fearful of the passions that fused the individual links into a

solid mass, one unit of desperate, blind, hungry force. The sharp clang of the gong brought him out of his reverie. Again there was the scrape of keys, the swing of iron doors. He waited. But his door did not open. He heard the lines forming, the receding hiss of shuffling men, and the faint calls of the keepers. Then all was still. He felt himself alone in the tremendous hall of stone. He settled himself on his bunk, smiling, shrugging his shoulders. There was no need to hurry. Twenty years ahead, he would not let them get him. Like the fellow who died in this cell. Haunted! A ghost would be welcome in the everlasting silence, to tell him about the years that had eaten into the other man’s brain and physique. He wondered how it had happened that they had borne the fellow down. Snuffed his life at the very moment of release! High above, on the outer wall of the building, a ray of sun-

shine filtered through the grated window. It shot down to the floor of the gallery, close by his door. He looked around him. Three walls of solid stone. A ceiling of stone. A floor of stone. He smiled skeptically. No hope of escape from this tomb. He wondered if the fellow who died had tried it. Getting up from the bunk, he passed his hands along the grooves between the stones, examining their smoothness. Then a line caught his eye. He looked closer. The stone had been nicked, scratched. There

was the letter A. He searched further and discovered a name. Then another.

ABNER

WitprE.

Above

that were

the numerals,

1826.

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And below it, 1846. And above the last line, the one word—Rebel —with a line cut through it.

Arnold wondered about the inscription, and the man who had toiled at it; a murderer, no doubt, who had tried to fathom the

motive for his crime. A rebel, who had found life disappointing. But he had emerged alive, and judging from the line striking out the word “rebel,” apparently mellowed in outlook and feeling. He seemed to have intended to leave a record of his altered spirit. Arnold’s eyes and hands searched the other stones. Stooping, he made out the second inscription. 1846

EDMUND ROLPHE Cynic 1866

There was no line through the word “cynic.” The man had left it unchanged. He was the man who died on the day of his discharge. No mellowing of mind or heart in his case. He was the cynic in death as in life. A scorner, who had doubtless

found life empty,

and

had laughed at it. Arnold wondered whether it had been some intimate problem, perhaps love, that had summed up life for that man. Or whether it was the larger problem of ambition thwarted that had brought him to the murder for which he paid the penalty.

No wonder they said the cell was haunted. Arnold imagined the men who had toiled to leave their messages of self-appraisal would have liked to talk to him, to tell him of the varying moods . that had moved them during their years of confinement. Perhaps, as he shuffled through the years ahead of him, he would be able to discern their thoughts; perhaps he, too, would be able to nick his message. Then there would be three: the man who had found life

hateful, and changed his mind; the other who found it empty, who had been defrauded by death on the morning of the awaited return to life; and himself. What would be his own message to those who would follow him in this cell? His lips tightened, his face turned grim, staring at the two

inscriptions. “It won’t get me,” he told himself. “Pll see it through and come out whole.”

ARNOUD

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Abruptly, the next minute his blood ran cold, the skin of his body went crawly, and it seemed to him that he was not alone in the cell. Someone stood beside him, watching him. It had no palpable substance, a thing of smoke and transparency, yet he imagined he saw a face smiling and heard a laugh, a low sly cackling laugh that he knew, and a voice he could identify. He rose, trembling, from the bunk and turned, calling out:

“Jim!”

His own voice mocked him, and his eyes, fixed on the docr of the cell, became aware of two eyes peering at him through the iron lattice. The key grated in the lock, the door swung open, a keeper beckoned to him. “You’re to come with me.” Arnold stepped out and was escorted to the prison yard. The keeper led him as far as the prison dock, down by the shore of the Hudson, where a line of prisoners stood at attention. He took his place in the line. A group of men in civilian clothes stood at a distance, in their midst

a tall man

in a blue uniform.

Arnold

recognized him as the warden. “Strip,” came the sharp command. Arnold copied the actions of his companions, pulling the striped shirt over his head. There was a moment of silence. Then again, the sharp command. OUI! 3 Wondering, the prisoners gazed at each other, then at the keeper who repeated the order. The keeper grinned, pointing with his cane at their trousers.

A moment

more, and the whole line of

prisoners stood naked in the broiling sun. The group of civilians, headed by the warden, passed along the line of unclothed men. The warden grinned unpleasantly as the civilians examined the chests of the naked prisoners, felt of their arms, and pinched their thighs.

Arnold’s face flushed at the ribald comments that came from the group of examining civilians. They paused before each prisoner, conferring loudly about his physique, estimating his powers

of

endurance. They came on to him. ‘His arms ’s where his legs should a-been,” said one, laughing. “They’re that thick and flabby!”

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He was ordered to turn with his back to the group. “Too soft,” he heard one man say. “He won’t stand up.” “He can do his work sitting,” was the rejoinder, followed by a roar of laughter. “Well,

gentlemen,”

>

the warden

said, after they had com-

pleted their examination, “what'll you. do?” “Forty cents for the lot,” said a gruff voice. “It’s five cents over, but I'll chance it.”

“Forty-five,” another voice said. The warden shook his head. “Too low,” he said. “The state can’t afford to let them go at that price.” A thin voice interrupted him. “Pll pay sixty, if you’ll take the end fellow out.” He indicated Brandt. The warden hesitated a moment. “Sold,” he said finally. ‘““We’ll toughen that one on the rocks. In a few months he’ll be fetching seventy-five.”

14 The contractors would not have Arnold. Sing Sing would have to knead him and mold him and prepare him for the tasks it set its men. Men like him were a drag on the administration of the

prison. They had to be fed and cared for. Their labor could not be sold. They were too soft. So Sing Sing set about its familiar routine of hardening the new-timer. Arnold Brandt was sent to the quarries.

Strangely enough, he was glad to go. His back was strained at the labor of each day, his muscles ached, his eyes were blurred with the dust and sand. But he labored with the strongest, and toward evening marched back.to his cell tired but contented. He felt that he was meeting the test of Sing Sing. There would be no slackening in his determination to live through those twenty years. They would not get him. Sleep came quickly, in those days of his work in the quarries. He lay on his bunk, numb and painracked. But each day brought

’

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with it the sense of accomplishment. He was being initiated into the routine of the prison.

His overwhelming desire to become a part of his new environment left him little inclination to think about the past. Amanda and little Arnold became detached from his life. He felt alone in the world, alone on an uncharted island, stranded, without hope

of contact with civilization. He would have to build his own shelter—not a physical shelter, but one that would house his soul and keep it safe from the eerie dangers of the jungle. Jungle! The men who had sat in his office on their release from Sing Sing had spoken of it as the jungle. He had smiled at the epithet, attributing it to the natural aversion of human beings to confinement. But as he rested at intervals during the afternoon heat on the hills overlooking the prison, permitting his eyes to wander over the prison grounds, and saw the shuffling lines of striped men; heard the clang in the foundries and the endless buzz of wheels in the dozen shop buildings; felt the furtive glances of lone prisoners being escorted to mysterious corners, and listened to the warning shouts of keepers answered by the cries and groans of their victims, he began to appreciate the fitness of the designation. Sing Sing was a jungle in which prisoners lost all sense of direction, as they did of time; and in which authority impressed itself only by the brute exercise of power. Turning back from his survey of the hills, he spat on his hands, lifting the hammer high to shatter hard granite surfaces. Each blow, he felt, brought him closer to the shelter he was build-

ing for himself. He would protect himself against the jungle; its poisonous vapors would not blur his perspective. He would remain Arnold Brandt, twenty years would find him still whole, eager

for life. On the fifth day of his work in the quarries he was not called out. The prisoners remained in their cells after their return from breakfast. Sing Sing, like the rest of America, was celebrating Independence Day. And Arnold lay in his cell, weary from the week’s hammering on the hard-faced rocks. His hands were folded under his head; his eyes were closed. The galleries were silent. Only the occasional tramp of the watchful keeper broke the quiet of the restful morning.

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He indulged himself in a period of soothing existence. His mind was calm, his body listless. sense of security in the narrowness of the cell. nothing to him at that moment; it was as if he

nothingness, nonHe felt a strange

The world meant were floating on a

wide sea, swept on by the smooth swell of the tides, with clear

skies and horizons blending heaven and earth canopy. The prison gong startled him into sudden clang was louder and longer than usual. And faded to a tingling jingle, bedlam broke loose Shouting and yelling. Men hammered at the doors

in one

gigantic

consciousness. Its before the sound on the galleries. of the cells. They

sang, and hallooed, and stamped their feet.

Arnold stood by the latticed door, listening. He expected to see the hurrying figures of determined keepers bent on silencing the terrific clamor. But there were none in sight. The yelling and shouting and singing continued. Then there was a sudden hush, as a voice sounded above the pandemonium. It seemed to come from a neighboring cell. The tones were rich and sure. He stood rigid as the man’s song swelled into a deep deafening chorus. A thousand men were singing.

“My country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty .. .” He was swept into the wave of song. He found himself pounding the iron door to the tune and rhythm of words. And then it was over. He stood exhausted as the noise and stamping and yelling began anew with increased vigor. There was genuine fury in the outburst now. But it was a friendly fury that held no malice. And so Sing Sing began its celebration of Independence Day. The rule of silence was relaxed, prisoners were permitted to shout themselves hoarse as a special privilege, to join in America’s rejoicing on the birthday of freedom. The thousand men, to whom freedom and liberty were a mirage, sang eloquently and inspiringly, even proudly, of liberty and freedom. Was it loyalty that brought forth such enthusiasm? Loyalty to America and its institutions? Or was it merely an evidence of freedom from daily and constant repression, a momentary exultation in relaxed vigilance? Arnold Brandt wondered when, later on, as the men were seated in the chapel, the warden stood before them and presented a guest speaker—the Reverend Mr. Hermance of the

y

ARNOLD

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371

Methodist Episcopal Church—who drew from his audience round after round of applause by the fervor of his patriotic harangue. He wondered, too, when he, with a thousand fellow prisoners,

sat at the long tables in the mess hall and devoured with relish the special dinner prepared for them, which included roast pork and hot mince pie. And strong coffee. All that afternoon the tumult continued. From almost every cell came the sounds of song and shouting. Men greeted each other across the galleries. Neighbors, they had not talked with one another in months, forbidden by the rules. They had much to tell about. And plan. The noise did not seem to stem the flow of words. The babel of sound and song and yells continued into the afternoon. Then at five o’clock the familiar clang of the gong echoed through the building. Instantly, all was quiet. It was as if a giant sigh escaped the thousand men, wafted toward the rafters overhead. A sigh, then all was quiet, and the silence seemed

deeper than before, more

intense, and more

em-

bracing. From a distant gallery, high above, came the sound of a stifled laugh, a short, hesitating, lonesome

chuckle.

There

were

hurrying steps along the gallery, as keepers sought the author of the laugh. He would be punished, perhaps paddled. But the chuckle was gone; it had joined the sigh, and frowning keepers returned to their stations. Sleep came slowly that night. The unusual turmoil of the day, the meeting in the chapel, where for the first time Arnold sat with all the prisoners in Sing Sing, the affability of keepers, and

the general air of relaxation that had marked the holiday, made him curious. It seemed to him that Sing Sing was possessed of a dual personality. One that repressed and subdued and bore down with fatigue; another that raised prisoners to the heights of hope and inspired them with zest to live. It was impossible, he thought as he lay on his bunk, that the one was necessary in order to emphasize the other. Hope rising from despondency was keen and sharp. By permitting a glimpse of the normal for a day, Sing Sing perhaps was disciplining prisoners in the importance of conformity. Freedom was a precious privilege to be prized more dearly by those

who had experienced the pinch of denial. So musing, he was not aware of the flight of time. He lay for

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hours trying to fathom the motivations of Sing Sing. Perhaps, after all, it really provided some sort of balance in the scheme of things. These men,

a thousand

and more, had tried to conquer

life by

force. They had attempted to impose their will and to accomplish their desires by violence; they had been impatient with the restraints imposed by law for the common good, they had disre-

garded the claims of orderly processes in their wish to satisfy momentary greed and passion. Was it not justice that they, themselves, should be made to feel the weight of that very force they had employed with others? Was not Sing Sing repaying these men in the light of their own adventures .. . ? Hurrying footsteps roused him. They stopped before his cell door. A lantern was held high, and a voice whispered, ““Are you awake?” Arnold slipped from his bunk and confronted the light. A key grated in the lock. The door swung open, and startled, he found himself walking beside the night guard. ““You’re a quiet sort,” the guard was saying. “I feel as I c’n trust you out this time o’ night.” The guard led him to a cell at the far end of the gallery. The door was open, and the interior was lighted by a lantern. Another guard was standing beside the bunk, staring down at the motionless figure in stripes. The guard looked up as they entered and shook his head.

““He’s in a bad way,” he whispered. Arnold looked down at the features of the prisoner. The man

seemed to be asleep, but he was breathing hard, his chest rose and fell laboriously with each breath. Arnold’s feet slipped in moisture. He steadied himself, and his eye picked out a widening red splotch on the stone floor. The guard uncovered the figure, and Arnold fought down nausea and horror as he saw the wound in the man’s throat, the blood oozing out on the bunk and dripping at his feet. “Better work fast,” the guard said. They heaved the limp figure up from the bunk and laid him on a blanket. The prisoner seemed young, a mere boy. ““He’s the youngest in Sing Sing,” the guard whispered. “You wouldn’t think he’da taken on like that.”

They hurried the wounded man to the hospital. Arnold helped

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carry him. Blood dripped along the corridor, leaving a trail across the floor. The prison doctor swore sleepily as he busied himself with the unconscious prisoner.

“Another jab and he’d have been a goner,” the doctor said, when he had stopped the bleeding. “It’s an awful gash. What did he use?” The guard held up a tintype. It bore the face of a middleaged woman. The doctor looked at it and glanced at the boy. “Looks like his mother,” he said.

Arnold Brandt turned away, shaken.

“Now you wouldn’t think a fellow’d use his own mother that way, the doctor remarked with mock ruefulness. “She wouldn’t Ukevit at alll” They went back to the cell. The guard, holding the door open, shook his head sadly. ‘“The lad had fourteen more to go,” he said. ““He’s only a boy, not more’n sixteen, an’ they gave him fifteen.” He held the lantern over his head and peered into Arnold’s

face. “JT been watchin’ you. You’re the quiet sort. Serious like. Better not talk about this. They don’t like such things to get around.” He closed the door and turned the key. Arnold was left alone. But there was no sleep that night. He found it impossible even to

lie quiet on his bed, which seemed harder and more uncomfortable than ever. He sat up, his head buried in his hands. A sad ending to the day of celebration. The gayety of Sing Sing had weighed too

heavily on that boy with fourteen years to serve; the feel of freedom, a gesture only, had brought him mental agony which death alone could ease. What had made him impatient for the peace of death? Was it the one year he had lived in Sing Sing? Or the prospect of the fourteen still ahead? Was it the physical bearing down that broke

prisoners, or the waiting for life, for the things that are the normal needs of human beings?

He raised his head and stared at the wall. Though in the darkness he could not see the two inscriptions, they were indelibly etched in his mind. Those men had waited, too, and watched the

years slide on. Years that made one whole and broke the other.

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Twenty years! He felt a tightening around the heart. For the first time since he had entered Sing Sing, he felt fear. Not of the prison or its walls, but of the unknown years ahead.

>» “Thank God for Patrick,” Amanda wrote in her first letter.

“His generosity will help us over these years.” The words leaped up at him, scorching, fiery darts that drove into his brain. He felt too weak and helpless to tell her the truth —that she had no right to those bonds, that he had killed because

of them, that they had changed the whole course of his life. And that she was enjoying the fruits of his crime.

“T shall come if you want me,” the letter read. “Perhaps you will have something to tell me.”

He had nothing to tell her. She would want to know about Jim. And he did not know. Perhaps later, after the lapse of years . twenty years... “Tt is better not to come,” he wrote. “It would only oppress you. You had better put me out of your life. Yours and the boy’s. Let these twenty years be as if they had never been. Time carved out of both our lives. It’s our gamble. And then, when they’re over, and you still want to know about me and Jim and you, per-

haps I may be able to give you the answer. Twenty years is a long span. You may not want to know.”

He felt more at ease when he had written that. It seemed to him now that he had cut loose from the final bond that held him to the past. He was adrift on a new adventure. He carried no com-

pass and had no thought of direction, his course was uncharted. Twenty years. Seven thousand three hundred days. Each day

would tell its own story. He would not count them. He would measure life not by the span of time but by the other lives he encountered. Watching them, he would know himself better. Prob-

ing them, he would understand the mysteries of his own mind. Appraising them, he would be able to weigh and determine the goal that should be his.

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16

Throughout the summer of the granite hills of Sing Sing. He to most of whom Sing Sing was offenders, practiced in the ways standing of the rules, written

1866 Arnold Brandt worked on was one of a company of twenty, familiar ground. They were old of crime, with a shrewd under-

and unwritten,

of prison routine.

Arnold grew to like them. And they respected him. He was especially fond of Cow-legged Sam, a lank giant with corded iron muscles, on whose cadaverous features the burning sun made no impression. Sam remained pale, ghostlike, and his legs bent outward in a circle like a hoop. When he lockstepped with the company, the curves of his legs were plainly visible down the line of march. Cow-legged Sam was a Westerner who had drifted east in the late fifties, reversing in his adventures the direction of America’s migrations. It was his propensity for being contrary that brought him to Sing Sing. That and “hitting the pots,” he explained. Cowlegged Sam liked his liquor. Sam was a great gossip. He knew all there was to be known about Sing Sing, officers and prisoners. In the company’s rest period, when smiling Jerry Donovan, the only Sing Sing guard who allowed himself to grin at the prisoners under his charge, strayed off to a distance in order to permit the men to talk in

whispers—a breach of routine benevolently ignored—Cow-legged Sam regaled his comrades with secret information about impending changes of administration, of which he somehow had secured advance notice, and about newly arrived prisoners whose notoriety and intimate peculiarities were to him apparently an open book. He was never impressed by high-sounding titles. “One

man’s as good as another,” he said. “And

a damned

sight better.” It was an odd circumstance that created a bond of respect, if not real affection, between Arnold Brandt and Cow-legged Sam. It happened on the second day of Arnold’s admission to the company. The men were seated during the rest period, passing along the company’s tin cup to slake thirst and wash the dust and sand from their throats.

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“To think the likes of him is in Sing Sing,” he whispered, with a jerk of the head in the direction of the new prisoner, “and him the best spouter in New York!” The group stared at Arnold, who smiled. “And in for murder!” Sam whispered, his keen eyes sweeping his audience. There was a pause. Sam leaned over toward the others. Irish Mike wet his thick lips. Yellow, the mulatto recently confirmed in the faith by the prison chaplain, raised his eyes. Billy the Greek

folded his hairy hands and looked approval. “Anchored for twenty years,” Sam continued. Arnold retained his smile. “They say the man he shot was the fellow he got off for a killing some years before.” He grinned at Arnold who was no longer smiling. “They say it was a stand up,” Sam droned on, “but I’m thinkin’ maybe it was over a moll.” He was still grinning.

A dozen voices shouted warning. Arnold rose suddenly to his feet and hurled a jagged rock at Sam. The latter dodged, and the rock passed over his head. Sam towered up on his feet and started toward Arnold, who stood waiting with blazing eyes. Sam’s long

bony hands were clenched, his face red, his tall thin figure bent low like a battering ram. A dozen hands grabbed him, and held him down. He struggled violently. “He ain’t touched you,” Irish Mike laughed throatily, as his tremendous fist clutched Sam’s chest. ““He aimed to,” Sam bellowed.

“Too bad he didn’t,” Mike laughed. “The doctors woulda had a fine holiday with your big carcass.” The crowd roared. Sam ceased struggling. He grinned. The group broke suddenly as Donovan, the keeper, approached and turned on Sam. The keeper’s eyes were hard, his chin was sharp and pointed. He shook his cane at Sam, still grinning. “And it’s me that’s trustin’ you!” he shouted. “It’s a long time since you’ve felt the water drippin’ on your scalp.” Sam was suddenly serious. The men were silent, looking gloom-

ily at the comrade who was threatened with the shower—a punish-

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ment dreaded by even the hardiest prisoners. Donovan never forgave a breach of trust. Arnold stepped forward and stood beside Sam, who was taken aback by the painful prospect. “It was my fault, sir,” he explained to the keeper, “I threw a rock at him.” Cow-legged Sam looked at the figure beside him, surprise wide in his eyes; he moved as if to place his hands on Arnold’s shoulder. Then he grinned. “T guess it was me brought it on. Some things I said,” he told Donovan. Donovan was completely bewildered. His eyes softened, how-

ever, at the double confession. He sighed and walked away. The company crowded around Arnold. His back ached from the poundings. Then they resumed their seats. Arnold and Cowlegged Sam sat side by side. The tin cup was started on the rounds, and the men drank silently. The cup of friendship, of respect. For the second time since his admission to Sing Sing, he felt a strange presence in his cell that night. A friendly presence that seemed to be watching over him. He felt at peace with himself, surer. Cow-legged Sam’s imagination was rich, and it often led him far afield. But much of his talk was crudely informative. Though the company respected his omniscience, when he spoke of himself they became skeptical. “I been here four years,” he announced one day to his eager audience. “Six more to go.” He pounded his fists together, glaring at the circle of men. “I’m aimin’ to go straight.” Irish Mike guftawed. “With those crooked legs o’ yourn!”

Sam joined in the laugh. Then he raised his head and stared in silence at the building that stood on top of the hill. It had the appearance of an old-style mansion. Its front was almost hidden by large elms, and its lofty columns won for it the architectural esteem of visitors. But it was not the form and esthetic appearance of the building that caught Sam’s eye, his mind was fixed beyond the wall of the prison.

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“I'd pick myself a female from up yonder,” he said, ‘‘and we’d get spliced.” “One of them mollies!” Irish Mike said sarcastically. “No,

bloke,”

Sam

retorted,

“one

of them

plain innocent

tommies that’s tired of lifting.” “So you could show her new tricks,” Billy the Greek suggested. “No, greasy. as the other. Not “Divorced?” Sam scowled.

Just so she couldn’t say things. One’d be as good like my first wife.” Arnold asked with interest. “She took to religion and run off with a mission

fellow.” “Blasphemy!” a harsh voice called out. “Ye’re speakin’ de name of r’ligin in vain.” It was Yellow who denounced Sam. “Vain be hanged,” Sam scoffed. ““My woman didn’t take to that fellow in vain.” The yell from the group brought Jerry Donovan on the run. He breathed easier when he saw their grinning faces. Donovan, the keeper, turned his head, and his eyes scanned the slope of the hill that led to the prison. Then he scowled, pointing his cane at Cowlegged Sam.

‘“There’s no help for it, man,” he said seriously. “Your scalp’s thirstin’ for that stream of nice cold water. I'll be takin’ you now. I warned you.” The company gasped. Cow-legged Sam rose hurriedly Ans nervously and faced the scowling keeper. “J ain’t done nothing,” he protested, and looked to his companions for confirmation. “He ain’t done nothing,” a dozen voices spoke up. Jerry Donovan’s face relaxed. He smiled broadly. “It’s a joke you’ve been tellin’ without me hearin’ it. It’s a>

against the rules!” He coughed. “That is, unless you let me know of it.” Cow-legged Sam, his face showing relief, slumped down beside Arnold in the circle, in the center of which stood the tin cup within easy reach of every hand. The keeper approached and stood

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over him. His back was turned to the group, his eyes roved the expanse of hill that sloped downward. “The coast’s clear,” he said quietly. The group of men in stripes sat tense and expectant, their eyes glued on Cow-legged Sam who squatted comfortably at the keeper’s feet. He spoke in a hushed voice. “Have you ever heard of Sing Sing’s baby?” Arnold stared at him in amazement. The men grinned and hunched forward. “It happened up there.” Sam’s head jerked upward toward the mansion that was the women’s prison. ‘““The mother was a prisoner who had not left Sing Sing in well over three years, and she had two more to go. The squeals of that infant could be heard way down by the river. It was born strong and healthy. Those squeals was heard up in Albany, too. Albany was pipin’ mad. Then one

day a big delegation came down on the train and went sneakin’ through the prison. They was told to find the father of that baby. They, figured it musta had a father! They searched down by the river, and in the shops, and up there on the walls of the mansion. But they didn’t find any father. They asked the mother, and she just sat and smiled, and nursed the baby and smiled some more. But she wouldn’t say nothin’. “Well, these Senators and Assemblymen went back to Albany, and they writ out their findin’s. Their findin’s said they couldn’t find nothin’, and that it looked like the baby belonged to the whole of Sing Sing. It seemed as if the State of New York would have to adopt that baby. “Well, the politicians, and the Governor too, puckered their brows over that kid. And again the train brought a delegation of Senators and Assemblymen to talk to the mother. ‘““*The baby ain’t no prisoner,’ they told the gal. “We can’t keep it here. Besides, this here is a female prison, and we understand

the baby is a boy. It ain’t no place for him.’ “But the mother wouldn’t let the baby go. And so they went back to Albany and writ out their second report. Well, the whole

legislature and the Governor went into a huddle again and debated about that child. “Then one day the warden receives a big envelope marked

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‘Secret and confidential.’ It was a pardon for the mother and the baby. ‘Better send the woman out,’ the paper said. “We don’t want any scandal.’

“That night the Sing Sing keepers held a secret meetin’ up there in the village. The chairman got up and made a long speech. All about the honor and the duty of the keepers of Sing Sing Prison. He looked around the hall and looked into the eyes of every man there. And his voice was like crying, and he told them: ‘One of us is the father of that baby. It’s up to us to do the right thing. The honor of Sing Sing is challenged. Now, who’s the fellow?’ But nobody spoke up. Except one young chap. ***T ain’t the father, and I don’t know who is,’ he said in a

choking voice. “But I know the gal; she’s got looks and she’s young. And she knows when to hold her tongue. She has character! So I'll make a motion. Let all the unmarried keepers in this hall take lots, as to who shall marry the gal.’ And so, after a night of arguin’, they decided to take lots. And the chairman of the meeting, being

an unmarried man himself, picked himself the right ticket. Then they sent for the gal, and asked her if she would marry that handsome keeper. She looked him over, and she said she would. So they called a parson, and he tied the knot, and the little mother was

happy.” Keeper Donovan turned and stared down at Cow-legged Sam. “What become o’ that keeper?” he asked. Sam shrugged his shoulders. “He left for parts unknown a few months later, and the lady went to New York.” Irish Mike spoke up. “It woulda been funny if that keeper was really the father of that baby!” Cow-legged Sam grinned. “It would that,” he admitted solemnly. “But he wasn’t.” “Who was?” Keeper Donovan asked. “Who? Why, me.” The crowd roared. Noticing the question in Arnold’s eyes, he added in a confiding tone, “They sent me up to tinker with the plumbing, and I

found myself in her cell.”

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“Time,” Keeper Donovan yelled. The men rose quickly and picked up their tools. A dozen eyes looked up at the mansion on the hill. Spreading elm trees hid it from view. Irish Mike approached the keeper and whispered: “If there’s any fixin’ to be done up there, sir, I'd like the job!”

ye Beneath the bluster and imagination of Cow-legged Sam was tragedy and disappointment. He was conscious of his deformity, accentuated by years of riding on western plains. “Bronco busting,” he explained during one of their serious talks. He spoke airily and

flightily of life and living, but Arnold frequently surprised the brooding in his eyes and the impatient gesture with which he mentioned the years ahead. “If it hadn’t been for that woman

o’ mine, I’da never been

jugged. I took to slop in a big way.” He shook his head sadly. “When

I’m drunk, there’s no holdin’ me.”

It was during one of his drunken brawls that he had killed his man. “J was prayin’ for the noose,” he said gloomily. He laughed. “TI guess my prayin’ didn’t reach far.” Toward the end of summer, Keeper Jerry Donovan lined up his men and looked them over carefully. The company stood at attention, wondering. The keeper grinned. “T’ve been asked to pick one of my men for a pardon. The Governor’ll be here next month. I been thinking ’bout you all.” He passed along the line like a captain reviewing his company. He stopped in front of Arnold, then shook his head. “Too soon.” The entire line looked self-conscious and uncomfortable as the keeper passed, all except Cow-legged Sam, who seemed wholly indifferent.

But it was

in front of Sam

that Keeper Donovan

stopped the longest. He stared at him, scowled thoughtfully. “Want to go home?” “T ain’t got a home,” Sam mumbled. ““Where’re you aimin’ to go?” the keeper demanded.

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Sam raised his head and stared straight ahead of him. “Out there,” he pointed across the Hudson. “As far as the trains’ll carry me. And further.” The keeper nodded. “ll send your name in.” He smiled toward the other men. “You'll likely miss those tall stories he’s been fillin’ your ears with.” Immediately the line broke, and every member of the company shouted good luck wishes. There was no envy in their hearts. *You’re a sure winner,” Irish Mike told him heartily, ‘au’ a good one.” “I wish I could take you with me,” Sam whispered to Arnold, as they resumed their labors. “Dll feel scared to go alone.” Arnold, too, felt happy in Sam’s good fortune and was glad he was going westward. There was much of Patrick O’Dogherty in Cow-legged Sam. The same love of the West, the same impatience of the restraints of the East. Sam had been a great help in setting him right with the men of Sing Sing. He had learned to lean on him for advice and guidance; Sam’s keen wit had dissipated much of the sourness of the atmosphere. Several weeks passed. The prison was on its toes in expectation

of the Governor’s visit. There were to be personal appearances of all applicants for pardons. Men were rehearsing their pleas. Cowlegged Sam remained calm. Two-weeks more, and the Governor would arrive.

Sam marched with sluggish step one morning, his face paler than usual. His hammer swung listlessly, and he was unusually silent. At first he would not talk at all, and during the rest period

he sat back moodily. . Finally he touched Arnold’s arm and leaned back with his body flat on the ground. “Tm leavin’ tonight,” he whispered furtively. “What do you mean, Sam? It’s two weeks off.” “T’m leavin’ tonight,” Sam repeated. Arnold was silent. “Don’t you understand? I’m goin’.” Arnold heaved over and turned his head to look into the brooding eyes.

“You’re crazy, man, with that pardon only two weeks off!”

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Sam stared back at him. He muttered to himself. “Tt’s that woman,” he said. “The one that run off with that

mission fellow. She’s gone to the bad and got jugged. She’s comin’ up tomorrow.”

“Supposing she is?” Sam’s face was grim. “T can’t stand it to stay in the same grounds with that woman, not even for a day. It’s the hate in me!” “Does she know you’re here?” “Maybe she does, and maybe she don’t. But I can’t breathe the same air she does. I’m goin’.” There was nothing to be said. “I’m wishin’ you luck,” Sam continued. ‘“‘You’ve been a good pal. And some day maybe we'll meet—out there, where men don’t tread on each other’s toes and get jugged for it.” That night, toward midnight, the bell tolled sonorously. The men in the cells heard it, and understood. An intangible whisper swept through the corridors and seeped into each cell, as the thousand prisoners wondered: ‘“‘Who is it?” Keepers stamped heavily along the galleries and peered into the shadows of the cells, their rifles in full view. The bell tolled on, announcing an escape to the countryside.

Arnold Brandt lay on his bunk, his eyes wide open, his heart strained and tight. Two weeks to freedom. Yet an uncontrollable passion drove that man into a life of boredom and furtive hiding. The thousand men in stripes, staring wide-eyed in their cells, speculated about the daring fellow. But Arnold did not wonder. He knew. The next morning his cell door remained closed. The hall keeper passed it by. He sat on his bunk and waited. The prisoners marched to breakfast and returned, the work bell sounded, and still

his cell door was not opened. It seemed hours before he heard the familiar step of the keeper and the scraping of the lock. The door swung open, the keeper beckoned. Still wondering, and with a

sinking heart, he went through the corridor beside the silent keeper, who escorted him out into the prison yard. He felt a premonitory stab when he saw the prisoners of the company lined up in front of the mess hall building. He caught

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their eyes as he passed and tried to interpret the slow droop of each man’s right lid. He was placed at the end of the line. Nineteen prisoners in stripes waited expectantly. Six keepers watched over them, each with cane poised; at a short distance beyond them were two more keepers, holding rifles ominously. It was a silent group, with the noise of the shops, close by, sounding in their ears. The keepers straightened to attention as two figures emerged from the administration building and came toward them: the warden and Keeper Jerry Donovan. The warden faced the waiting prisoners. His cold eye swept down the line, appraising; he spoke, and his voice was colder than his eye. “One of your men escaped last night,” he said. The words resembled the sharp clang of their hammers on the granite blocks. “Some of you know how he went and where. You men on the hill are trusted outside the yard. Most of you know the shops are harder and stricter than the hills. We expect you to do the right

thing, and you owe the administration a duty. This fellow breached his trust and will suffer accordingly—when he is found. Give me the information I want, and you will all return with Mr. Donovan to the hills. Otherwise the company will be broken up, and each of you will be assigned to shopwork.” The warden waited. The line of prisoners fidgeted, but no sound came from them. Every eye was fixed on the warden. But not a muscle moved. Arnold, too, stared at the waiting official. He felt alternately chilled and hot, and his body seemed too heavy for his legs. He felt that he swayed visibly, and cringed at the agonized tug at his vitals that was sure to betray him. But he gripped himself and held on. His eyes were staring, his face impassive. The warden waited. He stepped back and nodded to Keeper Donovan.

“Line up,” the keeper called sharply. The men turned and stood front to back,.close together, each man’s right hand on the shoulder of the man ahead. “March!” The line began the shuffle. Irish Mike was the first in line. His

arms were folded over his chest, and his feet swung rhythmically. Keeper Donovan led the company. The other keepers marched

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alongside. And to the rear were the two armed officers, their rifles shouldered. The line wound into the cell block and along the corridor to the north end of the building. An apprehensive shudder shook Arnold Brandt’s frame as he realized the significance of their march. Their route led to the shower bath. A frenzy of impotent rage clutched his brain, as he took in the significance of the warden’s words. Irish Mike was the first to enter the enclosure. The water could be heard splashing, as Keeper Donovan pulled the lever. Then the rush of water ceased, subsiding into a faint dripping as the smaller stream trickled down on the head of Mike, fastened to

the wooden frame. The men fidgeted nervously as Mike’s gasps were heard above the trickling stream. Then it was over. Irish Mike emerged and stood waiting by the door of the enclosure. He was drenched and pale, his eyes bloodshot. Keeper Donovan eyed him, then turned grimly to the waiting line of prisoners. “The warden’s orders,” he said, with a scarcely perceptible

apologetic note in the words. “If any of you want to talk, there'll be no showers for the rest of you.” The men stood silent. One by one the prisoners were sent into the enclosure. Seventeen times, the first splash that drenched the bound man underneath the shower, then the faint trickle that fol-

lowed with unerring precision. As each prisoner emerged, Arnold was moved closer to the enclosure. The trickle came louder, and the gasps sharper. Arnold was the last in line. Yellow was immediately in front of him. The mulatto approached the enclosure slowly. The door stood open. And the keeper waited. Suddenly the man slid to his knees, and heedless of the waiting officer, bowed his head. Keepers and prisoners waited while Yellow prayed. He leaned over and kissed the wooden portal of the enclosure. “For Jesus’ sake,” he muttered, as he rose and strode into the bath. There was a splash of descending water. Then the fainter trickle. And the gasp. One loud intake of the mulatto’s breath. The trickle continued. Then it ceased. But Yellow did not emerge.

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Keeper Donovan went inside. He returned immediately and beckoned to another officer. Together they entered the bath and carried out the helpless form of Yellow. The unconscious body was stretched out on the stone floor. Donovan returned to his station. And stared at the last man. He choked at the first splash of water that deluged him, and left him gasping for breath. Then the slow trickle. A wooden frame held his head firmly. Each drop seemed like the blow of a hammer on his head. Fiery pains darted through his brain, his eyes bulged from their sockets. A numbness came over him. He felt no more pain. The water flowed down his face. There were no more hammer blows. His head felt enormous, swollen. And the vise-

like grip of the neckframe choked him. He closed his eyes. The door opened, and a voice called him. The frame was lifted

off his body. He staggered as he came out of the enclosure, but he did not fall. “Line up!” came the sharp command. Eighteen men shuffled slowly away. Yellow was left lying on the stone floor. He was still unconscious. Back in his cell, Arnold lay on his bunk, numb, exhausted, but strangely contented. He felt that he had been through his first test of endurance. He was being toughened, hardened. Each day

would be like the drops of water that trickled down on his head. They would hammer at him, overwhelm his senses. But he would endure them. He would conquer Sing Sing. 18

The warden nodded to the keeper. “Tt’s all right, Mr. Porter. You may leave him with me.” The keeper retired, closing the door of the warden’s office behind him. Arnold Brandt remained standing. For a few seconds the two men eyed each other. Warden and prisoner took stock, each of the other’s person and character. The

warden cool, appraising, the deep lines of his heavy face appeared to widen as he gazed at the man in stripes. Then his features relaxed. His eyes were contemplative. It was impossible, the prisoner thought, that this man should

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have ordered an entire company of men tortured because of one prisoner’s offense. Yet he was sure Jerry Donovan would never have assumed the responsibility. Donovan’s heart had not been in the task of showering the nineteen men. It was this man, apparently, who was responsible for all that had occurred. He was an autocrat whose rule was sustained by brute force. By fear and suppression. Men like him had made Sing Sing a byword among decent people. They had transformed and developed the prison into a sewer of unholy passions and human filth. Arnold’s eyes hardened, his lips tightening. He felt the tendons of his neck stiffen. But he remained silent, standing at a respectful distance.

The warden’s eyes dropped for an instant. Then they were raised again. And in that instant they lost their fixity, softening, and a smile broke the calm of the warden’s face. “It’s four months,” he said.

Arnold nodded to the burly man seated behind the big desk. “Take a seat. There’s no need of your standing.” The warden made a motion with his hand. Hesitating, he pulled a chair toward the desk and sat down in it heavily. The warden opened a drawer and fumbled a moment. Then smilingly offered his visitor a cigar. “Forget that you are wearing stripes,” he said. “Relax. You’re not my prisoner now.” Arnold smiled faintly. “But I can’t forget that you’re the warden.” “TI won’t be for long,” the other said quickly. Then he

laughed. “I’m going the way of the rest of them.” He chuckled. “The quickest way to get out of Sing Sing is to come in as warden!”

Arnold laughed. “You’re wondering why I sent for you?” the warden said after a pause. Arnold nodded. “Tt’s because I’m worried about you,’ the warden said. “You’ve got a long time to go. Even with a pardon you couldn’t make it before ten years. Sing Sing will get you, like it did that poor fellow who preceded you in your cell, and hundreds like him,

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unless . . .” he hesitated, ‘unless your heart’s cold and brittle as the granite you’ve been pounding these four months.” “TY think I'll make it,” Brandt said with assurance.

The warden shook his head. ‘They’re all sure at first. Then something grips them and they fall to pieces. I wouldn’t want it to happen to you. You’re not like the rest of them. But Sing Sing is no respecter of persons. It does not distinguish between mentalities. It aims to weld them all into one mass of wreckage.” He sighed. ““That’s why I am going. Before it gets me.” “But you don’t wear stripes,” Brandt said, smiling. “J might just as well. I feel myself slipping into a rut. My mind is as calloused as your hands, and I feel a growing delight in seeing men squirm.

“The other night I couldn’t sleep. Something weighed on my mind. I found myself worrying about new methods of punishment. Something that will be more painful. Something that will

not only break the skin and draw blood, but will bring terror into the hearts of prisoners and tear their very souls from their bodies. “T fell asleep after a while. And I dreamed I was a Roman Emperor and wore a robe of gold. I was seated in the arena, with thousands of Romans shouting themselves hoarse at the sight of the captives fighting desperately for their lives. One of them fell, and the victorious gladiator held his sword high, poised for the fatal thrust. Two pairs of eyes turned toward me. Those of the

man who was floored, and those of the victor. One pleaded for his life. The other waited for the sign to kill. The vast crowd was silent. ; “I hesitated. Then a shout went up from the throng. ‘Death!’ My thumb pointed downward. I sat back and sucked my breath, expecting that sword to descend. But instead it came flying toward me. I felt it enter my breast and felt the sharp pain in my heart. I felt myself dying.” The warden paused for breath. He smiled grimly. “It’s to escape those two pairs of eyes that I’m leaving Sing Sing.” Arnold looked down at the floor. He understood the man’s self-condemnation. He had felt that way about Patrick and Jim.

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It was to escape his thoughts of remorse that he had come to Sing Sing. And the warden likewise was seeking to be rid of the burden of guilt in the falsehood of his position. “But why is all this necessary?” he heard himself asking. “Why try to run Sing Sing by fear alone? Why not try to bring out the good in these men, instead of encouraging their evil natures? Surely, you could accomplish more by persuasion than by driving?” “It goes back a long way,” the warden said thoughtfully. It started with Captain Lynds—the fellow who built Sing Sing. It was his idea that prisoners had to be cowed, had to be made conscious of their subjection to discipline. That they could not ever be relieved of the consciousness of their imprisonment. The rules he laid down were all made with a view to subjection. That philosophy has become the basis of Sing Sing’s existence. The public thinks of it in that light. So do prisoners. They expect nothing else, though naturally they resent it. “Hubbell,

the warden

who

preceded

me,

thought

he had

found a better way. He came to Sing Sing fired with the thought that he could change things. I believe he was the first man who expressed the view that a prison is not primarily a place for punishment, but that confinement alone is the actual punishment

for

crime. He was hailed as the prophet of a new era in Sing Sing. Prisoners went wild over him. “The Convicts’ Friend,’ they called him. They wrote poems about him. But the record shows that during his administration every traditional method of punishment was employed to hold the prisoners in line. And the number of punishments was greater than ever before.” “That doesn’t seem right, somehow.” “It’s because the warden isn’t really the autocrat you think he is. The contract system has developed to such an extent that the contractors dictate the policies and really make the rules. In

buying the prisoners’ labor, they feel they own their bodies. They assume the right to dictate the time and method of punishment in order to push the men to do their tasks, and sometimes more than their tasks. The warden dare not refuse their demands, because the

contractors are all-powerful at Albany, and the warden’s head would not last long if he opposed them.

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are vicious, remorseless

SING

taskmasters,

far worse

than

were the slave owners of the South. We have several in Sing Sing now. Perry and Company, Pinckney, Horner. They’re all alike. All of the same pattern. “I lay all the ills of Sing Sing at their door. A more vicious, grasping lot of scoundrels you never saw! Crime means much to them. I can see them rubbing their hands in satisfaction at the news of a flurry of burglaries or murders, any of the other major crimes. With their tongues in their cheeks at efforts toward repression. I can see them watching like vultures for the verdicts of juries and the judgments of courts that will send more and more men to Sing Sing to do their work at prices far below what they would pay for free labor.” The warden’s vehemence was surprising. “They turned me down,” Arnold said, smiling. “Tt wasn’t your muscles they objected to; it was your brain. They were afraid of you.” The warden leaned over the desk, his heavy shoulders hunched forward, resting on his elbows. “J did not send for you to give you a lesson in penology,” he said with a laugh. “It’s because you’ve got me worried.” The prisoner stiffened. Perhaps the warden meant to ask him about Cow-legged Sam. The sequel to the shower, he thought resentfully. “Your company on the hill is broken up. They’re going to be distributed among the shops. Leave the service of the state and join the ranks of contractors. It will be nothing new to most of them. They’ve been through it before. They'll know how to handle

themselves. But I’m worried about you. It’s your first, a long one and, I’m thinking, your only one. And whoever of those scoundrels gets you will do his damnedest to break you.”

Arnold remained silent, listening. “T’m going to do something that’s never been done in the history of Sing Sing. I’m going to let you pick your own job. If I place you in a conspicuous assignment, my successor will prob-

ably change it and make it harder for you. For a week you'll be in the charge of Sergeant Kepper. You will accompany him on his rounds. Visit every shop and every office of the prison. I am leav-

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ing in just about eight days. Before the new warden arrives, you will tell me where you would like to work, and you'll be formally assigned. The responsibility will be yours.” He looked his gratitude. The man was square. “Do you understand, fully?” the warden asked as he rose to his feet. The other nodded. And stood up, facing him. “You’re very kind.” The warden waved a pudgy hand. “Better lose that cigar,” he said, accompanying him to the

door, “or you'll be feeling the pinch of iron around your neck.” At the door, Arnold paused. “One thing Id like to ask, if I may.” The warden nodded. “Ts it the rule to punish a whole company, if one man does wrong?”

The big man smiled. And placed his heavy hand on Arnold’s shoulder. “Tt all depends,” he said. “Sometimes it helps.” The warden opened the door for his visitor and passed him through to the waiting keeper outside. He was led back to his cell. Sergeant Albert Kepper was a youngish man, not over thirty. Slim and long-faced. He walked with rapid, nervous strides, his keen eyes darting everywhere as he passed through the prison. They were shrewd eyes. The sergeant had been promoted from the ranks of keepers and he took his promotion seriously. “T don’t know what’s in the old man’s mind,” he remarked

as they walked through the prison yard the next morning. “I don’t know if I’m watching you, or you me. But he’s the boss. And orders are orders.” Sergeant Kepper’s duties took him to every part of the prison. He corresponded to what might be known as general overseer, and his tour of duty led him to the prison on the hill as well as to every shop below. “If it’s sightseeing you’re doing,’ Sergeant Kepper told Arnold that afternoon,

as he unlocked his cell door after mess,

“you’re in luck today. There’s to be a funeral in the mansion. One

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SING

of the women died last night. A funeral up there is always an eyeful.” The women’s chapel was a small, square room. It was empty when they entered. “Her name is Mary Ann Williams,” the sergeant whispered. “She was a bad one. The matron—Dinah Luckey is her name— had a tough time with her.” A gong sounded. A sudden hush descended. In a few minutes there was the steady tread of marching feet, then the swish of women’s skirts. At the far end of the room a grim-faced woman appeared. She nodded to the sergeant, stared in surprise at his companion, and strode into the room followed by a long line of women in drab gingham dresses, all of one style and color. One hundred and ten women. They were a strange assortment. About a dozen were gray-haired, tired-looking, with faces deeply lined. They walked slowly, their gait as listless as their eyes. Their hair was combed straight back and tied in a knot. The oldest among them, a wizened creature who seemed much over three score and ten, was short and squat. Her arms hung loosely as she >

walked, her cheeks, sunken and grooved, bulged with each breath.

A score or more of the younger inmates appeared to be under thirty. Their faces were dull, pallid, sullen. Two

of them, taller

than the rest, walked nervously and stiffly, with eyes impassivity of their features, questioning, smoldering tangible hatred. The two figures seemed to shoot they came opposite, and their step was more vigorous the other women.

belying the with an inup taller as than that of

The last in line was a medium-sized woman whose head was covered with a black veil. She, too, walked

listlessly, unhurried.

Arnold recollected with a start the familiar story of Henrietta Robinson, convicted in 1856 of the murder of a man, a stranger to her. The woman had attracted world-wide attention, and added

to the popular curiosity about her crime by the veil which she persisted in wearing during her trial and ever afterward. Not for an instant was the veil removed, or the judge and jury permitted to see her face. It was rumored to be an attractive face, with a finely shaped head. Guards and keepers and matrons were curious.

But none of them dared touch the black covering.

ARNOUD:

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At a sharp command, the prisoners seated themselves on the wooden benches, remaining hushed and motionless. The grimfaced matron fixed her eyes on the door. Again there was the sound of approaching feet. Four men prisoners entered, bearing a rough cofin which they deposited in full sight of the congregation. The prison chaplain walked behind. It was a simple service. The prisoners bowed their heads in prayer, and chanted the hymn in soft chorus. The service was ended. Dinak Luckey stepped to the edge of the platform and faced the congregation. “You may come up on the platform,” she announced, “and pay your last respects to the dead.” The prisoners rose and marched to the platform. The older women glanced down at the dead features of Mary Ann Williams, and passed grimly along. Some of the younger ones lingered, with tears streaming down their cheeks. The youngest of them all sobbed.as she came down. The congregation was again seated on the benches. There was a moment of deep silence. Then the matron once more stepped to the edge of the platform and faced her audience. Her face was stern, her eyes hard. “It is my duty to say a few words on this sad occasion,” she began in a harsh, dreary voice, as the prisoners sat stiff and hushed. “Tt is a pity that Mary Ann Williams died so young. She was not over thirty. She had a hard life. But Mary Ann Williams’ life, as well as her death, ought to be a lesson to you all. As she sowed, so she reaped. They say she was a widow, and I’ve heard she was a self-made widow. They say she done away with her husband, but there wasn’t evidence to hang her. Then Mary Ann Williams took to religion. But she was false to her vows. “People thought she was a devout worshiper at Moody and

Sankey’s revivals. They welcomed her as an early convert. The Reverend Moody was impressed with her sincerity. And so was the Reverend Sankey. Perhaps God was, too. But the members

of the

congregation weren’t, when they found their pockets picked, their purses gone and their watches as if they had never been. This

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SING

time I tell you, the processes of the law, and Providence, worked sure and fast. And she was sent to Sing Sing. “But Mary Ann Williams had not learned her lesson. She did not take kindly to our efforts to lead her right. She was disrespectful and rebellious, as most of you know. There was no calming her. Words made no impression on her. Threats did not frighten her. And prayers did her no good. “So we had to resort to extreme measures. She aimed to destroy the peace and routine of the institution. I had to put her in a strait-jacket and gag her.” Dinah Luckey paused a moment.

“And now Mary Ann Williams is dead.” Arnold Brandt felt heat in his face and hands, in his blood. He wanted to cry out. Hell-fire! And that woman up there on the platform, it was she who should suffer torment, should smolder

in everlasting hell. The speaker, coming to the end of her sermon, glanced down at the body in the coffin. Then, stooping over, she appeared to be whispering a last message to the still figure. Tears were seen to trickle down the face of Dinah Luckey. They dropped—it seemed —upon the dead face of Mary Ann Williams. The women prisoners were marching out, their faces dark and strained. “Tt was a terrible thing that matron did,” Arnold Brandt remarked to Sergeant Kepper, as they descended the hill toward the cell block. “To speak ill of the dead!” Sergeant Kepper halted. “Don’t forget the clothes you’re wearing. Prisoners don’t criticize officers in Sing Sing!” Sergeant Kepper took his job seriously. The next morning, as he and Arnold were touring the shops, a guard hurriedly approached them. He whispered to the sergeant, who turned and said: “Better come along, I don’t want to lose you.” They went out of the prison grounds and up the hill. The matron met them at the entrance. The muscles of her face twitched. “There’s mutiny. The prisoners wouldn’t leave their shop to |

y ARNOLD

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395

mess. I’ve notified the warden, and he said for you to talk to them.” Sergeant Kepper strode into the shop. The place was wrecked. Twenty

women

stood silent, their hair disheveled,

their clothes

torn to shreds. The sergeant’s entrance was the signal for a wild outburst. “Send us Dinah Luckey, the murderess!”’ they yelled. ‘She killed Mary Ann, and she’ll kill us! We'll do with her!” Sergeant Kepper approached them. His mouth moved, but his words could not be heard above the clamor. “Send us Dinah Luckey!” Five women in gingham rushed at the sergeant. With hair disheveled, eyes blazing and arms swinging, they looked like Amazons. Five pairs of hands lifted the struggling sergeant above their heads. Arnold ran toward them, shouting a warning. He was almost up with them, when they had reached the open window. Before he could halt the maddened screaming group, they had hurled the _ sergeant through the window. Horror-stricken, he leaned out and saw the body limp on the flagstones below. It lay crumpled and still. Mary Ann Williams was avenged. The murder of Sergeant Kepper precipitated the warden’s departure. Arnold Brandt was still unassigned when the resignation became effective two days later, and the new warden took charge. Now he no longer left his cell, except for the march to the mess

hall. Otherwise,

his door remained

locked. It was

as if he

were being subjected to some sort of punishment. For the first time since his arrival in Sing Sing time hung heavily. The days

seemed endless; the nights were sleepless. He rehearsed again and again the events of the past few days. The desperation of Cow-

legged Sam as he discussed his “‘woman’s” impending arrival and announced his determination to risk his life to escape the barest possible mental association with her. He recalled, word for word,

the as a ory and

harangue of preachment the struggle hurled him

Dinah Luckey in which she damned the dead girl and a warning to the living. And he saw in memof the five prisoners, as they lifted the sergeant through the window to his death.

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202 =S1NG

SUNG

Each of those incidents was the culmination of a deep-seated passion. Not a passing emotionalism, but something that reached back farther than Sing Sing, which the prison had accentuated and made more acute. Something that Sing Sing made no effort, or was unable, to make right. The unbroken silence of night was no longer soothing. Day found him longing for night, night for day. Through the small, square openings on the wall opposite his cell, he watched the shadows climbing the hills beyond. Slowly they crept toward the building where Dinah Luckey reigned in all the majesty of her vengeful soul. He watched the dull gray dawn brighten into daylight that cast upon the cell block sparing and niggardly illumination. He found himself wondering about Cow-legged Sam, hoping the man had found forgetfulness in the wide plains of the West. There was pity in his heart for Mary Ann Williams whose twisted mentality had never been able to cope with the meaning of life. He was sorry for Sergeant Kepper who had fallen a victim to passion and hate not of his creation, but which a sense of duty compelled him to intensify. But he felt a rising anger, loathing, for Dinah Luckey whose words carried a scorpion’s sting and whose voice was like the lash of a venomous reptile. He remembered the tears that had flowed down her cheeks as she leaned over the coffin, dropping on the face that lay serene in death, and how she had seemed unashamed of them. Perhaps they carried a queer message to the girl she had done to death, a communication that not even she herself really comprehended. He wondered whether in her youth Dinah Luckey had not felt passion, even love, dimmed by the years and strangled in the clamp of sorrow, but which she longed to resurrect. The hard-faced, hard-voiced Dinah, who wept strange

tears. He could not pity her; he could not understand. A week after the new warden was installed, Arnold Brandt

was called to his office. The warden was standing by the window as he came in. He had a view of a broad back, with a round head

that sat low on a pair of thick shoulders. He remained standing in the center of the room. The warden seemed not to have heard the door open, nor did he appear conscious of the prisoner’s presence. Finally, he turned.

¢

ARNOLD

BRANDT—SKEPTIC

397

“You're not working,” the warden said in a voice as freezing

as his glance. Arnold did not answer. “Seems like the old warden had a soft spot for you!” ““He asked me to tell him where I wanted to work,” Arnold

explained. The warden’s face flushed. Not a red, healthy flush. It was a mottled apoplectic hue, like the color of venom. “There'll be no dictating by convicts in Sing Sing while I’m the warden!” His heavy fist smote the desk. “Don’t expect any favors, if that’s what’s in your mind.” That was the end of the interview. The prisoner was escorted back to his cell, and that afternoon he was assigned to the foundry. His first task was to shape and hammer the iron strips that were to become the framework for a new implement of punishment— the yoke. A change of wardens hardly affected the routine of the prison. Prisoners had learned not to expect any liberalizing influence. Foremen of shops paid little heed to the new personnel. Guards and keepers went about their duties with the same fixed routine. But every incoming warden felt it his duty to impress his personality upon the prisoners. And each had his peculiar method of procedure. The new warden determined to make clear to the prisoners of Sing Sing the basic philosophy of the new administration. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Prisoners were looking

forward to the holiday with their usual eagerness. Thanksgiving was a day of feasting. A special menu was provided. There would be chicken, perhaps, an unlimited supply of molasses, good coffee. And an afternoon of noise and talking along the galleries. All in

the tradition of Thanksgiving in Sing Sing. Sailor Dan, the huge, hairy fellow who worked on Arnold

Brandt’s right, whispered of it and smacked his lips in anticipation. Tommy the Piper, on his left, sang softly to himself, rehearsing the tune and words that would resound throughout the galleries during those hours of relaxation. New

warden or old, Thanks-

giving would be theirs. The foreman’s whistle announced the end of the day’s labors.

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20229SING

The prisoners lined up for the march

SING to supper.

Sailor Dan

dropped his tools. “Blubberin’ cat!” he exclaimed, and winked. “I'll be restin’

these weary bones all of tomorrer. I’d even pass the chicken for a good long snooze.” Arnold smiled. “You'll have enough sleep tonight,” he whispered. Sailor Dan grinned. “There’s nought compares to a snooze in daylight. It’s like stealin’ time from the state.” Tommy the Piper had edged close. His small, lean body hung over toward Sailor Dan. “When it comes to stealin’,” he whispered, “‘yer in yer right field. Ain’t you ever gonna learn?” The huge fellow fixed his eyes solemnly on the little man. “Right you are, son,” he said. “I started in early. My mother used to say I stole the milk from her breasts when she warn’t lookin’.” Sailor Dan chuckled. “She said I inherited that stealin’ habit from the old man.” He leaned closer and whispered, “She was sleepin’ when he done ~ ites Tommy stifled his sudden laughter and looked hastily toward the foreman. But the latter was busy locking the tool chest. Sailor Dan whispered on. “Now when I was in China—” “Yeah,” interrupted Tommy, “with that pig-tailed Mon+ golian sweetheart!” Sailor Dan ignored him.

“T heard of a tribe of yellow Mongolians where every child is taught to steal. The gals won’t look at a fellow who isn’t an expert thief.” “You mean the Afridis,’ Arnold interposed. “They’re not Chinese, they’re from a little country high up in the mountains north of India.” “T heard it in China,” Sailor Dan insisted aggressively, and continued: “Instead of baptizin’ the child, they pass it through a

||

|

ARNOLD

y BRANDT—SKEPTIC

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hole in a stone wall, backward and forward, and the mother sings in its ear, ‘Be a thief, be a thief.’ And he is a thief.”

Sailor Dan sighed. “Them gals would take to me all right. I’d be ownin’ a harem.” “Then you wouldn’t be a thief any more,” Tommy told him. “An’ why not?” “You wouldn’t have time!” Tommy ducked to avoid the huge arm that swung toward him. Another whistle brought them to the line-up. The keeper passed before them and counted his men. Then he faced them and held his cane high. “You’re to follow me into the yard. Supper’ll be late tonight.” He grinned. ‘“‘There’s to be a little celebration.” The line of prisoners lockstepped behind the keeper. Other companies were already lined up outside the shop buildings. In a few minutes the entire prison population stood at attention in the hollow square that was the prison yard. They had their backs to the buildings. One long line of striped figures, waiting patiently and expectantly for the promised “celebration.” Presently it came. From the far end of the yard, through the cell block, a figure walked toward them. It wore stripes like the others. But its head was invisible. It was entirely encased in an iron cage that sat upon the man’s shoulders, leaving his arms free. Behind him came

another, and another. In all, twelve men

with

iron cages on their heads marched into the yard and halted in the center of the square. There was a pause of a few minutes. Then another apparition appeared out of the cell block. It, too, wore stripes. Its head was free. But its arms were stretched out full length, held in place by a bar of flat iron, an iron band encircling the neck, and two

more bands around the wrists. This one was followed by a dozen others similarly attired. Then another pause. Another figure stepped forth from the door of the cell house. His head, too, was free, and his arms unyoked. But around his

waist was a flat iron girdle from which hung a long chain attached to a solid iron ball which he carried in both hands. Another iron band circled his left ankle, joined to the iron waistband by another

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(NG

SiLN.G

long chain. This man, also, marched to the center of the hollow square, followed by at least a dozen men in stripes. Fifteen men in the ball and chain gang. Their chains rattled as they marched toward the center of the square and formed a third line behind the iron cages, and the yokes and crucifixes. Again a pause. Then another figure came from the cell block. Its body invisible, it was completely encased in a wooden frame that extended below the knees. Only the head showed, protruding through an opening that fitted snugly around the neck. The box was square, and the man walked with difficulty. But he pushed on toward the other three lines. Four men followed him, similarly outfitted in wooden jackets. The four rows of men stood at attention, in the full gaze of the thousand prisoners lined up against the walls of the buildings. A thousand pairs of eyes were fixed on the shackled, caged and yoked men. A thousand silent men gazed with awe and fear at their comrades, and they understood the message that was being conveyed to them. The new administration apparently recognized the potency of these emblems of authority and obedience. They would not be discarded, they would be employed to the utmost. Again the door of the cell block opened. Two men emerged, carrying between them a wooden frame consisting of three walls, it was a miniature reproduction of the shower bath. They walked with their burden to the center of the yard and stood behind the four rows of prisoners. A whistle sounded. A dozen keepers marched toward the prisoners, bearing their emblems of authority. A sharp order was given, and the four rows became one. Led by the keepers, the column wound around the square directly in front of the thousand watching prisoners. It was the inaugural ceremony of the new warden. He did not appear in the yard, there was no need for him to show himself. His was a potent message.

The show was over. The symbolic parade reached the door of the cell block whence it had emerged, and disappeared within the squat enclosure. “Mess hall,’ the word passed along the waiting line.

The long column formed front to back, right hand stretched

ARNOLD

BRANDT—SKEPTIC

to right shoulder of the man

ahead. The thousand men

40t lock-

stepped around the square. The silence of Sing Sing was deeper than ever in the large mess hall. Men ate slowly. No hands were raised for second helpings. Toward the end of the meal, Sailor Dan nudged Arnold and turned toward him with a furtive stare. His right eyelid dropped slowly. Then he made a slight gesture, indicating Tommy the Piper

who sat next. Arnold nudged Tommy, stared at him furtively, and slowly dropped his right lid. The drooping eyelid passed down the line. It was part of Sing Sing’s silent language. The men had accepted Sing Sing’s challenge. “Keep cool,” Sailor Dan managed to whisper to him, ‘“‘whatever happens.” It happened the day after Thanksgiving. There had been the usual holiday mess, the prisoners marching to their meals in regular order. They devoured with apparent gusto the delicacies placed before them. There was fried chicken and soup with real vegetables, and white bread, molasses and coffee.

The men returned to the cells prepared to finish the holiday with the usual afternoon’s relaxation of the rule of silence. No sooner were the doors closed and keys turned, than the rich tenor of Tommy the Piper sounded through the galleries. It was Tommy’s custom—his festival of song, relished and applauded by Sing Sing’s thousand prisoners. A concert began always with the national anthem. Tommy’s cell was on the second tier in the gallery, immediately above Arnold’s. Hurried feet sounded wehead and a sharp command.

“New tule,” the keeper’s voice announced. “No singing on holidays.” A prisoner on another gallery began to whistle. Again there was the scuffle of hurrying feet. Again the sharp command. “No whistling.” From the top gallery a voice called: ““Three cheers for the new warden!” The feet flew over the gallery. And the warning: “No talking.” “How about prayin’?” another voice called derisively.

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“This ain’t no church,” a keeper answered, amid a chorus of laughs from the galleries. The laughter was stifled immediately. The galleries settled down to an afternoon of silence. It may be that the thousand prisoners were meditating. Arnold

Brandt, in 202, wondered whether the new master,

like his predecessor, was being influenced by the example of Sing Sing’s founder. Or whether it was not really the desire for personal mastery over men that prompted wardens to employ these desperate methods of subjection. Toward dusk there were again the heavy treads as several keepers hurried by. They were bunched somewhere along the gallery, whispering excitedly. A voice called: ““What’s the idea, Yellow?”

Arnold didn’t catch the reply. But there was the familiar scrape of a lock, a scuffle, and Yellow’s voice, pleading. “It’s Thanksgivin’, an’ I’m sayin’ my prayers to Jesus. Is that forbidden, too?”

A keeper laughed. “But why the undress uniform? It’s no respect you’re showin’ God.” Yellow, naked and shivering in the chill of late November, was being escorted along the corridor. “I couldn’t pray with all them varmin creepin’ through my clothes,” he remonstrated. “So I took ’em off. A person must be clean when he prays!” The keeper laughed loudly. “Guess you need a good soakin’, Yellow. We'll sprinkle you

up so’s you can stand fresh and clean before your Maker!” The mulatto groaned. They led him to the shower. The splash resounded through the silent galleries. The gasp. And the slow trickling . . . Two keepers carried the limp body back to the cell. There was a slump when they threw it on the wooden bunk. “Better call the doctor,” one of the keeper’s said. The other laughed. ‘“‘No need. It’s only Yellow’s religion fits.” No other sound disturbed the silence of that night. Thanksgiving Day was ended. The following day was unusually warm, with a strong sun

4

ARNOLD

BRANDT—SKEPTIC

403

and a cloudless sky. But there was an unwonted slowness in the shuffle of the sinuous line to the mess hall for breakfast. An unusual silence pervaded the tables. There were no furtive efforts at conversation. Arnold felt Sailor Dan’s nudge, and caught the slow drop of his right eyelid. He passed it on. “Stand by,” was the message. He had learned it the day before from Sailor Dan. “Follow the crowd,” was his own interpretation. He

did not

know

where

the crowd

would

lead, but the air

seemed charged with unrest. The men’s silence was ominous; like the unusually slow march and the impassive faces, The keepers were nervous. “Double quick!” they shouted, and prodded the leaders of each company, anxious to have the men locked in their cells. Arnold stood by his door, waiting. He had been given no hint of impending events. He doubted whether many of Sing Sing’s thousand prisoners knew what the day would bring forth. It was seldom that prisoners planned concertedly. “Stand by. Follow the crowd.” Crowds act on impulse. The work gong sounded. The principal keeper, a huge man,

strode into the cell block and stood in Arnold’s gallery. “One company at a time, and double quick!” he bellowed. There was the scrape of locks. A voice broke the silence of the galleries, echoing through the building with startling suddenness. “No work!” here was no answering call. But not a prisoner stepped from the open cells, in the unreasoning and unplanned impulse of a crowd. A catcall sounded from a distant tier. In a moment the entire cell block became bedlam. Deafening yells and hoots and oaths reverberated through the building. Tin cups rattled against the iron bars of cell doors, like the rattle of musketry, musketry with-

out advancing soldiers. An offensive which actually was defensive. All the keepers of Sing Sing—the night force pressed into day service—came running into the cell block, their canes poised for action. At each end of every gallery stood an armed guard, alert and ready. The clamor increased in volume. Prisoners seemed to vie with

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each other in the strength of their voices and the rapidity of their poundings. The principal keeper paced along the tiers, his face wet with sweat. There was a pistol in his hand, and he waved it toward the yelling occupants of the galleries. He shouted and gesticulated. But his voice was drowned in the increasing cacophony that issued from

the cells. Then

tired, helpless, he paused in the corridor

scowling in the direction of the shrieking men. He shrank as a missile dropped from an upper gallery, landing with an echoing crash on the stone floor. It was a plank from a prisoner’s bunk. It was followed by another. Then, amid the continuing jeers and shrieks, nondescript objects were hurled from the upper galleries.

The keepers retreated before the fury of the barrage. Bunks were torn up. Planks and boards and tin plates and wooden bowls, even bundles of clothes joined the general scrimmage. The wreckage on the floor grew until it seemed the entire prison was being demolished. There was no letup in the shouting. Arnold Brandt stood flattened against the bars of his door, watching the missiles fly through the air. He guessed the tumult was the prisoners’ answer to the warden’s spectacular parade of torture. And he knew that it was a futile gesture. A momentary hysteria that would pass and leave the crowd subdued, even more helpless than before. | The keepers had all disappeared. The air seemed warmer suddenly. Arnold ascribed it to the excitement. Then he heard the hiss of steam. In a little while it was stifling. His body dripped with perspiration. The cell became damper, water flowed from the stone

walls. Still the heat increased. For an hour or more the temperature of the cell block rose steadily. The air became unbearable. His knees buckled under him, and he lay back on his bunk. The barrage slackened, the din thinned down. Sing Sing was

fighting back. With steam. The barrage ceased altogether, the tumult died. A thousand prisoners slumped in their cells, gasping for breath. They had locked horns with the might of Sing Sing and had been beaten. The power of Sing Sing was supreme, unyielding. Sing Sing’s mutiny was smothered. Thereafter it was every man for himself. Wit and ingenuity would replace mass action.

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There was no call to the noon meal. Nor did the gong call them to mess at night. In the morning, the lines of striped prisoners marched eagerly to breakfast. And then to the shops.

ey) In the forty-odd years of its existence Sing Sing had already become one of the country’s major prisons. But it was not in size alone that it achieved its leading réle. There were larger prisons, in both area and population. Nor was it age. Scattered along the Atlantic seaboard were penal institutions whose histories ran back to early Colonial days. In New York State, too, Auburn boasted of more years. Yet somehow Sing Sing grew in the public eye, nationally and internationally, as the typical American prison. Sing Sing’s proximity to New York was perhaps largely responsible for the prison’s repute. Like the metropolitan district which it served, Sing Sing’s population was heterogeneous—racially, socially and denominationally.

The law condemns the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common,

But leaves the greater felon loose, Who steals the common from the goose. Sing Sing’s record of admissions gave the lie to that sentiment. It contained the names of men who had risen from the crowd and attained station and prominence, only to fall from their heights to the uttermost depths of social degradation. Daring criminals, men whose crimes involved tremendous sums, shuffled across the prison yard, shoulder to shoulder, front to back, with the most

lowly offenders—vagrants, petty thieves, and desperadoes. Sing Sing counted among its numbers men and women of all classes and of every stratum of society. The professions were well represented. Merchants, bankers, lawyers, physicians and, infrequently, politicians. The majority of these came to the prison, struggled through the years of confinement, and emerged finally to resume their interrupted lives. They were absorbed into the normal streams of life and did not return.

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But others there were who did return. It seemed that the normal courses of their lives gravitated toward Sing Sing rather than away from it. Changes of administration, frequent and swinging through every form of severity, did not affect the sureness of their backwash into the narrow cells that seemed to be theirs by tradition. Sing Sing was growing. The period of the Civil War had marked a definite reduction in its numbers. The early months of 1865 found the prison with a greatly reduced population, its lowest in several decades. But with the coming of peace, cells that had been vacant for years again were occupied. Prisoners trickled in steadily. Most of them had seen active service in the Union Army. It was the aftermath of the war. Arnold Brandt felt the increasing population of the prison. The mess hall was more

crowded, the line of shuffling prisoners

became longer. The foundry was enlarged. His company became bigger. The hum of industry seemed louder. Instead of three at his worktable, there were six. In addition to himself, Sailor Dan and

Tommy the Piper, there were now Long-arm Charlie, a short, slim fellow with exceptionally long hands; Kid Moish, a Jewish boy of not more

than sixteen;

and Bony

Berg, a tall, lanky German.

Sailor Dan had christened them. They accepted their appellations good-naturedly, and bore them bravely through their years in Sing Sing. “J hear they’ re doubling up,” Sailor Dan whispered one 2 day. “Doubling up” was new to Arnold. It became clear that evening as he entered his cell for the night lockup. Another bunk had been built into the wall; he was to have a neighbor. Sing Sing was outgrowing its facilities; and now for the first time in its history, its narrow cells would house two occupants. The pressure of incoming prisoners made it necessary. The newcomer was ushered in the following day. He came in jauntily, with a smile on his face and, after the keeper left them

together, a proffered handshake. “The name is Canter,” he said, “Jacob Canter.” He winked.

“Maybe you’ve heard it.” Arnold Brandt shook his head. “Tm the king of the forgers,” Canter continued, “the king

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of them all. See?” He held out his hand, shapely and well-kept. “These fingers can do wonders.” The man’s voice was modulated, and he spoke rapidly. He seemed to be a man of culture. He was a thin-lipped, youngish looking man, with thick black hair parted in the center, of medium height, with a round face and even teeth that showed white through his smiling lips. “Wonders. All they need is a pen. Ever hear of Pythagoras?” he asked, chuckling. “It’s written that when he needed a pen he called a white eagle from the clouds, who stooped to have a feather plucked from her wing and then soared away again.” He laughed. “Well, ’m like Pythagoras. My pens come from heaven, but they work like hell! They’re the gift of angels and do the work of the devil.” Jacob Canter seemed well pleased with himself. He sat on Brandt’s bunk. “Hard,” he complained. “You can’t sleep on this. I need a bed and bedding.” He gazed at the bunk overhead. “Mine, I take it. Right close to the top. That cold stone over my face. Like a tomb. It'll be terrible. Especially the first few nights. Mind if we trade, just for a night or two? Until I get my bearings.” And so, without waiting for a reply, Canter made himself comfortable on the lower bunk. Jacob Canter’s flow of words was incessant. “Here I’ve been talking,” he said apologetically, “and never even asked your name.” Arnold told him.

Canter sat up suddenly and whistled. “Not Arnold Brandt, the lawyer!” Then his lips formed the peculiar smile, and he stretched out his hand with sudden enthusiasm. “Shake,” he said, reaching up. “It’s luck, good luck, that brought me to this cell.” Arnold’s calloused palm closed around the other’s soft hand. Canter grimaced and withdrew it hurriedly.

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“Careful, fellow,” he said, “you’re damaging the one thing that’s worth more to me than life itself. My hand’s my fortune!” He sighed and held up his fingers toward the light. “Those fingers —like an artist’s, they could have painted, or played the fiddle, and brought me fame. Instead, they write and send me to Sing Sing.” He raised his left arm and brought it down heavily on his right. “Naughty fingers,” he said. “Naughty, but nifty.” Canter stood up and took both Arnold’s hands in his and examined them. He felt the calloused and roughened surface, pressing the hardened muscles, then stared scornfully at their owner. “And that’s what you let them do to you?” His face became serious. “But, of course,” he said with gravity, “I forgot. You’re a killer.” He shook his head sadly. “Tt’s wrong to shed human blood. It sort of complicates things. Very often it leads to serious crimes. It’s murder.’ There was a sneer in his voice as he continued. “It’s a terrible thing, is murder! It drives a fellow to sin.” He shuddered. “Now take me. I couldn’t get myself to kill anyone. The very thought of it would drive me mad.” Canter rattled on endlessly. He asked questions, and before they could be answered, asked others. He talked about himself, about the large forgeries he had carried off successfully. He spoke of huge sums. “All the world knew Jacob Canter,” he boasted, his teeth gleaming white. ““Knew him as the greatest forger of all time. But Jacob Canter was smarter than the law. There was one fellow, the one I sold those Erie bonds to, raised a howl about the twenty | thousand dollars he had paid for them. He discovered they were forged. And he pressed the District Attorney for an indictment. “I was placed on trial. They had me dead to rights. I couldn’t deny those bonds. So I told my lawyer to admit everything. But at the trial, he asked the fellow, ‘Did you know Jacob Canter’s

reputation?’ The fellow answered, ‘Of course I did. He was a crook. Everybody knew it.’ My lawyer pointed a finger in his face and howled at him. ‘And knowing that you bought those bonds and gave him twenty thousand dollars?’ The fellow admitted it,

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sadly. ‘I was a fool!” was how he explained it. Half the jury thought so, too. They wouldn’t vote for a conviction. And the judge and the District Attorney thought it would be a waste of their valuable time to try me again. They dismissed the indictment.” He laughed. “But they got you at last.” Jacob Canter grimaced. “I bargained with them, but they gave me ten. I felt it was time I disappeared from the scene for a while. It makes people

forget and sort of wipes the slate clean.” “Aren’t you afraid they’il break you?” Jacob Canter smiled. “Watch me,” he said.

Arnold Brandt felt a strange repugnance. The man’s insolent pride, his incessant flow of words, his utter lack of moral sense,

and his insufferable ego—everything about him was repulsive. There would be no peace in cell 202. Not while that man was his neighbor. He wondered how soon Jacob Canter would succumb to Sing Sing.

The final gong that called them to sleep was never more welcome. He lay on the upper bunk, thinking. At intervals he listened to the fellow’s breathing. Jacob Canter slept soundly. He seemed untroubled.

SSlipsthrough ...... and all hell’s in,” All hell was in that man’s heart. Yet he felt no fear. King of forgers that he was, he had not stooped to kill. “That’s murder,” he had sneered. Canter was no killer, no overpowering conscience had driven him. He was

callous, like Brandt’s hands which felt thick and heavy and stiff. “Rather a callous hand than a callous heart,” he reflected, as

his eyes drooped in sleep. The arrival of the king of forgers was memorable in Sing Sing. For the first time a prisoner played an important part in the administration. Keepers and guards, even wardens and contractors, fell easy victims to his intrigues. Prisoners were his gullible prey. Toward midnight of the second day after Jacob Canter’s arrival, Brandt was awakened by the sound of a shot. He sat up in his bunk and listened. There were several shots in quick succession,

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followed by loud shouting. Then came the sonorous tolling of “liberty bell,” announcing an escape. The heavy tramp of the night watch was heard hurrying down the corridor and along the galleries overhead. The guard peered into every cell and tried every door. When he had passed, subdued comments were heard in neighboring cells. “Wonder if the fellow got away,” Jacob Canter whispered. Arnold also wondered. The bell tolled its message to the countryside. A loud whistle shrieked the approach of a train. Then the clang of the engine bell, two bells, warning of danger. One spoke of a human fury loosed from bonds; the other of an iron fury, speeding toward the city. The air was suddenly filled with the clatter of an endless chain of freight cars rumbling along the tracks. Whistle, bells, clamor. The noise was deafening. Shots sounded in the distance. A sigh filtered through the galleries. ““Caught”’ was the word passed from cell to cell. “Killed” was the information that came from nowhere. Every prisoner seemed to know it. The prisoner had forfeited his life in a daring dash for liberty. The train passed, the bell ceased its tolling. All was quiet. Prisoners sank back on their bunks. Guards made the hourly inspection, leisurely. Sing Sing was safe for the night. But Arnold Brandt was awake. And so was Jacob Canter. Arnold heard his cell mate roll from his bunk, and was startled

to find him standing in the darkness by his side. He saw the gleam in the man’s eyes, which were like two balls of fire. Then hands reached toward him. “Guess they got him.” | Giless: SO...

“Does it happen often?” “The first since I’ve been here.” “Seems sort of foolish, taking such chances.” “Not when the urge gets you.” Canter was silent. He seemed lost in thought. Arnold saw the

gleam in the two balls of fire that were his eyes. Then they dimmed. “Seems to me there are safer ways,” Canter said. ec f 99? Safer?

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Helaughed. “Less dangerous.” “You're a genius if you can figure it out.” “Maybe I am,” Canter said slowly. “Maybe I am.” He clambered back upon his bunk. Idle talk. The man’s ego was superb. Canter was restless, tossing on his bunk. “Would you want to go—if it was safe?” he asked. It was a question Arnold had not dared ask himself. He did not answer immediately. Then he laughed quietly. “Better turn in,” he said. “Sing Sing’s got you already.” “Maybe so.” The eyes disappeared. Arnold heard the man settle himself in his bunk, and heard his low breathing, but Arnold lay awake, thinking. Would Amanda answer his letter? Was little Arnold wondering about his father? Hadn’t he paid too big a price? That fellow down below wouldn’t have paid. The heavy tramp of the night watch resounded through the silent galleries. He saw the figure of the guard pass by his cell, bearing the swinging lantern. He listened to the receding echo. Then all was quiet. A groan woke him. Dawn was already dissolving the shadows of the night, and in neighboring cells men were yawning. For a moment he did not realize the cause of his awakening. Then a low moan startled him into instant consciousness. He leaned over and stared at the figure beneath him, then leaped out of his bunk. The man was apparently unconscious. His face was yellow and splotched. The eyes were closed, the lips compressed as if with great pain. Arnold called to him, but there was no response. The groans continued. The fellow seemed deathly sick. ; Arnold shook the limp figure. The eyelids fluttered slightly, but did not open. In his desperation, he hammered with his tin cup on the bars of the cell door. A guard came hurrying up, the door was opened quickly. The guard took one glance at the yellow features and rigid muscles, and called for help. Two guards lifted the unconscious form from the bunk and wrapped it in a blanket. Arnold, watching the man’s face, gasped inwardly. For he had seen the right eyelid open stealthily, and drop. Suppressed groans came from the tight lips.

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The guards lifted the helpless figure to convey it to the hospital. The man’s moaning was heard all along the corridor. He seemed in great pain. But Arnold was convinced he was shamming. The stealthy eyelid. He turned from the door and sat on the lower bunk, wondering. But the ghastly complexion, there seemed to be no sham in that. It was real. Suddenly, his hand touched something smooth and soft. He discovered it to be a piece of yellow soap, and it showed the marks of teeth. Arnold’s first inclination was to laugh. And to shout the information to a passing keeper. The man was not sick, he had been chewing on the bar of yellow soap. “Watch me,” he had said. “I’m smarter than Sing Sing.”

Arnold became suddenly serious. Canter wasn’t shamming, he was planning his fight on Sing Sing. The soap, the yellow complexion, the groans, the hospital, all were essential in his campaign.

Arnold decided to watch him. But there was no change in his attitude toward the man. The aversion was deeper. 20

You have put years between us. I know it was not deliberate. It was

something

more

powerful

than you, or our love, that

brought you to it. Somehow, ’'m not sorry about Jim. He was weak, and he might have slipped back. It is better he died as he really wanted to live. Clean, with faith in God and the inspiration to be helpful to the helpless. I am glad I can think of him that way. Perhaps, after all, you saved him from himself a second time...

|

Perhaps, too, Jim may save you. The memory of his deep affection for you, and his great reverence, may help you and restore you to us strengthened in mind and soul and heart. . . . The years you speak of cannot be taken out of our lives. They are a

part of us, and can never be forgotten. A necessary part without which our lives cannot be whole. . . It was Amanda’s second letter, and her first mention of love.

“Jim may save you.” Arnold read the line over and over. He

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laughed inwardly. To be saved by the man he had killed. Incredible! The very thought of Jim, the memory of the eyes that had gazed at him so respectfully and thankfully, were like a whip in his brain, lashing. They held him bound to the past, like the yoke on the shoulders of prisoners. He had hoped to find relief in observing the passions and emotions of the men around him. But he had failed. The boy who had slashed his throat with the picture of his mother; Cow-legged Sam, who forfeited freedom and risked life in terror of the woman

who had spurned him; Mary Ann Williams, whom an obscure impulse had led to an untimely death; Sailor Dan, grinning at life; Jacob Canter, self-styled king, the egotist whose self-esteem stifled every emotion. In none of these could he find his own pattern. None mirrored the emotion that had turned him into a killer. Each of the thousand men of Sing Sing yielded to a peculiar and intimate pull that dragged him over the border line of normality. Each man’s life was his own. Like those two who had lived in his cell and had left their records—the Rebel who had found life whole, the Cynic whom it had overwhelmed. Arnold clutched Amanda’s letter and stared at the two inscriptions. It wasn’t Sing Sing, he told himself, that had brought one to serene heights and the other to annihilation. It was the inner urge. Probing his own depths, he found himself unaltered, a man

pursued by conscience. “Would you want to go—if it was safe?” Jacob Canter asked him. But no going was safe for him. Life

would forever be a flight from himself. Still staring at the legends of Abner Wilde and Edmund Rolphe, he vowed to leave his own message. There would be others to follow, and they would stare, musing, at those inscriptions.

The next day found him toiling on the stone block adjoining Edmund Rolphe’s. 2

There was a new warden in Sing Sing, the third since Arnold’s arrival. The prisoners obtained a glimpse of him on Sunday at the chapel services. He was a big man—Sing Sing’s wardens were all

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big men. And corpulent—they were always corpulent. Size and avoirdupois were essential qualifications for the wardenship. The warden stared at his charges. The prisoners stared at their warden. “How long?” was the thought that flashed from one to the other. How long would this man stay? How short would be his reign? The prisoners were indifferent to the new régime. Old-timers knew there would be no change in their status. New-timers were hopeful. Kid Moish was among the latter; in a careless moment he expressed himself audibly. “Maybe this new warden won’t have that dress parade, like the old one,” he told the group at the worktable. A snicker passed along the tables. The guard heard it. Kid Moish was hauled out, the guard wrote on a slip of paper and handed it to the youngster. “To the hall keeper,” he directed. Kid Moish went. In a few moments he was back and stalked protestingly up to the guard. “Jt says here I’m to be showered,” he said loudly, “and I ain’t done nothin’!” The guard stared at him, glowering; he appeared to swell upward slowly out of his chair as he tore the paper from the boy’s hand. STi fix ite He put a line through the word “shower” and inserted another. “Don’t come back this time,” he growled. Kid Moish went. Arnold saw him as the company marched to supper, standing in the center of the prison yard, his arms extended on an iron bar, his head held taut against an iron frame that circled his neck. Kid Moish was wearing the yoke and crucifix. He staggered under the weight of forty pounds; but there was a strange flaring light in his eyes, a look of rapture. The next morning the boy was back at work. He was unusually agile that day and he worked industriously. During the lull before the noon meal, he approached the guard and whispered eagerly to him. The guard smiled and beckoned to Arnold. “It’s the Kid’s birthday,” he explained, ‘“tand he wants

write a letter home. You write it for him after mess.”

to

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Kid Moish’s face was radiant with gratitude as Arnold expressed his willingness. “You'll write exactly like I tell you?” he asked eagerly. Moish began his dictation. Dear Mother,

Maybe you know, and maybe you don’t—you got so much trouble. I wish I could help you. At least bring in the money for the rent, like I used to. But it’s only four years more, mother, and Pll be back, and you won’t have no more worries. Moish will make it easier for you. But don’t spank Manassah. His noise don’t mean nothing. Boys have to make noise. That’s why they’re boys. And this spanking business ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes it makes boys worse. But, mother, maybe you remember that last Saturday was my sixteenth birthday. You got so many birthdays to remember. Eight. That’s a lot when you come to think of it. I didn’t even remember mine before I came here. But in Sing Sing— well, everybody remembers his own birthday in Sing Sing. So what do you think I did on my birthday. I know you'll be happy to hear it. I went to shul on Sunday. Of course, Shabbos ain’t Sunday, and Sunday ain’t Shabbos. But really it makes no difference, as long as you go to shul. You'd be happy to be there, too. Everybody was there. The shul was crowded. And the services was wonderful. Such fine music. And then we all said prayers. Long ones, like the kind you say. And then the reverend spoke, in English. It makes no difference, Hebrew or English. Remember you told me once—that time when we stopped to listen to the Salvation Army, that God understands all languages. So the man spoke in English. And he spoke nice. It made tears come to my eyes. I remembered how you always cry in shul. Especially on New Year’s. You know, it really makes no difference, New Year’s or any other day. It’s always good when you can cry in shul. Well, the reverend spoke. And he told us a beautiful story about a man called Jesus. He was the Son of God. And the reverend said we are all sons of God. But, he said, Jesus was the best Son God ever had. And I think to myself it’s funny you never

told me about Him. The reverend said how He cured all the sick people, and didn’t charge nothing. And there was a bad woman,

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you know, bad. Like the woman next door what had a baby, and

they took her away. Well, Jesus didn’t scold the bad woman. And He didn’t curse her. And the woman became good. It’s wonderful. And He went all over the country doing good to people. And they followed Him around and kissed His feet, and He prayed for everybody. And they wanted to make Him King. So the real King got afraid. And he told the soldiers to go after Jesus, and they captured Him. And they put Him on a cross and nailed Him. Then He died. But the reverend said He didn’t die. He went to heaven, and God took him back. Mother, I wish I'd lived then.

I wouldn’t have let those soldiers kill Jesus. ’'d fought for Him.

But that ain’t all, mother. The other day I did something I guess It was wrong. So the guard—that’s the fellow who watches us—he sent me to the Hall Keeper, and he put something on my shoulders. It was a little heavy, but I didn’t mind it at all. They stretched my arms, and I felt like I was on the cross, like Jesus. And it didn’t feel heavy at all. It made me feel glad to be like Jesus. Maybe some day I’ll be good, too. And then maybe I can cure your headaches. Well, mother, I told the man what to write, and he put down every word I said. And if you can’t read it, take it over to the priest—you know the one I helped when the loafers threw stones in his church. Tell him about Jesus, too. Maybe he knows Him.

So I know you'll be happy I went to shul. And I’ll write you again on my next birthday, when I’m seventeen. Arnold smiled as he wrote Kid Moish’s letter. He folded it and forwarded it to the chaplain for approval. A week later, Kid Moish approached eagerly holding two letters in his hand.

“Please read ’em,” he requested, and explained apologetically, “My readin’ ain’t much better’n my writin’.” One of the letters was from the chaplain of the prison, invit-

ing him to join the chorus at chapel services. The other was from home, from his sister.

“Mother died last Sunday.”

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The boy looked dumbly at the letter, tears flowed from his eyes. Stiff, choked sobs came out of him. “She died while I was in shul,” he whispered. He looked up.

““Write the reverend I'll sing in the chorus. Maybe she’ll hear, and it'll make her glad.” Arnold found it in his heart to envy Kid Moish. He would endure the rigors of Sing Sing, he was safe. 72,72

It was months since the soap-eating king of forgers had been taken to the hospital. He had not returned to his cell nor to the

foundry; and he was never seen in the line-up for mess. Nothing whatever was known of him until Tommy the Piper returned from the hospital, the day he caught his hand in the revolving shaft and was put on the sick list. He came back with his arm in a sling, and a broad smile. “Only the fingers broke,” he said. “The doctor said it might have been worse, and I’da lost the arm.”

He leaned over cautiously, and with a side glance at the guard, whispered: “Who do you think’s up there, trussed up in white like the doctor hisself? Who but that fellow Canter! You know, him with

those long, soft hands. The fellow that took sick.” Tommy whistled softly, and grinned. “Seems to run the place.” Arnold recalled the king’s words. “Smarter than Sing Sing.” Apparently he had started to make good his prophecy; the king was shaping his plans. No doubt Sing Sing would feel the might of his presence. For a week Tommy made daily visits to the hospital. “It’s coming around fine,” he reported one morning. “Doc says my grip’ll be as good as ever. T’ll be hammering away with you soon.” Sailor Dan snickered.

‘“Hammerin’ hell!” he sneered. “Why work when you don’t have to? Stretch it along. We ain’t missin’ you.”

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Tommy grinned. “The only way to do time is to work it out.” ‘An’ wear yourself out workin’.” “T don’t see you thinning down none.” “I c’n take more’n you can,” Dan whispered, as his eyes took in the skinny figure. “They shoulda put you to hats and caps.” “T’m no worse than Arnold, nor as soft,” Tommy replied. ““He’s different,” Dan said with a wink. ‘“‘Seems like they’re puttin’ him through the works. First the rocks, then the foundry. He’ll end up in front or in a coffin. Wait an’ see.” Tommy laughed. “Not me. I ain’t waiting. I’ll be out long before!” “Yes, an’ back again,” Dan grinned. “It’s your third, aint it?” “They got me wrong,” Tommy sighed. “Sure,” Dan agreed. “You got five, an’ it shoulda been twenty.”

They did not notice the approach of the foreman. Only Arnold saw the raised club descend on Tommy’s head. “Pipin’ again!” the foreman roared. “Not alone you ain’t workin’, but you’re disruptin’ the discipline of the shop!” Blood flowed from the scalp wound, and Tommy cowered, throwing up his injured hand to cover his face against the descending club. “If it’s the hospital you’re preferrin’, I’l give you a good taste of it!” The foreman’s face was black with fury. His club descended again and again. Tommy’s head and face were streaked with blood. Sailor Dan’s hand reached slowly toward the table, grasped a_ long iron wrench. He lifted the long rod and brought it down. There was a startled gasp, and the foreman’s body slumped and was still. Work in the shop stopped; not a wheel moved, or a hammer. The men stood tense, scarcely breathing. The guard had hurried to the scene and was bending over the body of the wounded foreman. Tommy stood staring down and gazing, bewildered, at Sailor Dan. The blood from his head oozed down and mingled with that

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of the foreman, forming a widening pool around which the guard stepped carefully. Arnold looked expectantly out the window into the prison yard. None of the guards seemed to be near. It was an hour before the evening bell. The shops were busy; each of the thirty-two

keepers was at his post. Sailor Dan’s voice broke the tension of the shop. “Tt’s murder, boys, an’ I’m goin’.” For an instant nobody stirred. Then with a shout a dozen prisoners dropped their tools.

“We're with you, Dan,” a voice yelled. Arnold heard Dan’s shout and the answering call, and found himself running beside Tommy, dragging him through the door and out into the yard. Kid Moish was at his heels. And with them was Long-arm Charlie. Arnold was running, his breath coming hard. “Suicide,” his reason told him. But he ran with the crowd. They passed the boot shop. “Come along,” somebody yelled. ‘““We’re leavin ! Several men in stripes plunged out of the door and joined the yelling crowd. They passed the hat shop. “Join the army,” another voice yelled. Again several figures sprang out and became a part of the shouting mob. They passed the carpenter shop. “Come along!” the shout went up all around. The door flew open, and a dozen men joined in the flight. Recruits came from every shop in Sing Sing. The fleeing prisoners numbered over a hundred men. “Suicide,” Arnold’s mind said. But he ran on, dragging Tommy and closely followed by the Kid. A hundred men in stripes making a wild dash for freedom. A desperate flight from iron cages, yokes, crucifixes, showers and dark cells. And taskmasters. 99>

The yells of the fleeing mob drowned the warning shouts of guards and keepers. The prisoners reached the gate at the south end of the prison. The single keeper raised his rifle, threatening. A dozen arms flung out and grabbed him; Sailor Dan took his rifle, the others tossed him inside the gate. The yelling mob rushed on.

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“Lucky there’s no wall,” the thought flashed through Arnold’s mind.

They reached the railroad tracks, only fifty feet to the east of the cell block. The prisoners ran along the embankment. “It looks like a go,” a strong voice yelled. Arnold knew it wasn’t. But he ran on, dragging Tommy stumbling and staggering after him. “Better leave me,” Tommy’s voice came faintly. “I'll only hold you back. There might be a chance for you.” But they helped him on. Arnold on one side, Long-arm Charlie on the other. And Kid Moish behind. Arnold

did not hear the shot, but he saw a man

fall. The

crowd halted an instant, looking behind. A dozen men with rifles were coming after them. The sound of a volley echoed along the countryside and over the hills and across the river; two more striped figures stumbled and fell. The crowd’s yell was the answer to the rifle volley. Sailor Dan wheeled around to face the armed guard, aimed his rifle and fired one shot. Then the mob moved on again. It ran frantically, despairingly. Another volley. The men hesitated. Then stopped. And turned to confront the armed guards who were advancing rapidly upon them. A dozen men lay along the tracks. Some were motionless, others lay twisted and groaning. Arnold gazed at the body of Sailor Dan sprawling on the ground. The hands were outstretched, the face was turned upward, and the figure did not stir. The armed guard was approaching. ““Hands over heads,’ was the command.

The prisoners waited until the guard was on them. “Form in line,” came the order.

Silently, the long line shuffled toward the prison gate. Tommy the Piper dragged his feet. Kid Moish limped, his right foot a mass of blood. . Arnold, marveling at his own escape from injury, wondered why he had joined that yelling mob. And worried about how it would end.

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23 Arnold lived in the dark cell fourteen days. He and the survivors of the desperate flight each occupied a separate hole. It was no more than that. Smaller, narrower than the regular cells; darker,

damper, fouler. When he stood erect his head touched the ceiling. He would stand for hours pressing his head into the clammy roof, with a feeling that he was holding it up to prevent it from settling down and crushing him. Then the horrible blackness would be streaked with tongues of flame, piercing that dark world. But the flames gave no light; they only made blackness blacker. And there was no warmth in them. They had no physical existence. Their source was in his own brain, and they spurted from his bulging eyes. But the fine dust that settled into his nostrils, parching his throat, was real. It stank of death.

And the gill of water, shoved toward him through a narrow panel in the massive door, was real. So was the single crust of bread. Their coming indicated the beginning of another day. They provided his only measure of time. The seventh gill of water, the seventh crust of bread, and he knew that a week had passed. Then came the eighth. Finally, the fourteenth. And the weakness that began to steal over him, that, too, was

real. He no longer stood erect, holding up the ceiling. He sat

hunched in the clammy dust. And the tightening of the skin over his bones was very real. His hand reached for his face, and he felt the bones of his cheeks. In his face and hands, his legs and feet, and chest; he had_ not

known there were so many bones in the human body. He had never been conscious of them, but now he knew them, countless numbers

of them. He fingered them. It helped to pass the time. And there was Jim. He was real, with his wooden leg, his thumping step; and the soft weak eyes, staring at him with a mingled look of mindless confidence and regenerative appeal through the penetrating darkness. Jim came to him always just before the gill of water and the crust of bread, at the moment

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when he felt most languid and indifferent; when life seemed most remote. And Amanda. With questioning eyes and her wan smile. It was the sudden clatter outside, the grating of the rusty lock and the swing of the door, that seemed unreal, as incomprehensible as the gust of fresh air that swept into the cell, and the voice commanding him to rise. He made no effort to comply. He remained hunched in his corner, deep in the dust, the sediment of years, compactly buried. Unreal, too, was the sharp pain in his chest as he swallowed fresh air. He made a great effort, and struggled to his feet. A guard was standing over him. Then his legs bent under him, he clutched at the guard, and fell.

The soft bed felt good. And the bright sun streaming through the tall windows, the white-robed figures hastening across the floor. Even the grinning face staring down into his. It was black with thick lips turned back from ivory teeth. “Lawd, ain’t Ah glad!” The words reached his ears dimly. “It’s tougher’n tough t’ feed a man what don’t know he’s eatin’.” A huge black paw rubbed his brow. “You be comin’ long now. Ain’t Ah glad. Thank de Lawd Jesus!”

From a bed close by another voice spoke eagerly. “Jesus! Ain’t He the Son of God? The same one the reverend talked about?” The black man turned to the questioner, his face collapsing in a scowl. Kid Moish lay on his back, his eyes looking toward the frowning negro. “What you know *bout Jesus? You infa-del!” “Not me, Blackie,” answered Kid Moish, “I’m a son of God, like Jesus! That’s what the reverend said.”

The black man’s eyes opened wide; and he grinned. “You ain’t no son ob God. You’s a son ob Abraham. You ain’t never jined up.” “Are you a son of God?” the boy insisted. “Bless Jesus, Ah is!” “But you’re black. God got black children, too?”

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The negro’s hand groped at his head. And he grinned again. “Guess God’s color-blind. He can’t tell diff’ence ’tween white

and black.” He leaned over the boy’s bed. “But don’ worry, son. It’s all ’cordin’ to what’s writ in yo’ heart. God look at nothin’ but hearts. Dey’s all one color, too. If it’s writ on yo’ heart that you de son ob God, it carry you t’rough de pearly gates, an’ you be playin’ de harp like de res’.” “But I don’t want to play the harp,” the boy protested. “I want t’ sing in the chorus!” “I guess maybe you c’n do dat, too, son. Dependin’ on yo’ singin’ voice!” The negro was a competent nurse. And amusing. “How long you got?” he asked Arnold, during one of his moments of leisure. “It’s a long stretch,” he said, “but dey ain’t no use runnin’ from it. Sooner or later a man got to pay back. If it ain’t Sing

Sing, he lan’ somewheres else. De time ain’t yo’ own to take. It belong to de state. You can’t steal none of it. “See what come o’ dat runnin’. Sailor Dan dade. Tommy’s brain all twis’ed. Dis boy foot amp’tated. And you ’most dade.” He shook his head sadly. ““Ain’t no luck in runnin’.” Arnold wanted to tell him that he hadn’t wanted to run. That he didn’t know why he joined the mob. But the colored man had left, to minister to another patient. In a week Arnold was allowed up. “Dey’ll be callin’ you to de shops.” But the summons did not come. Another week passed. The prison doctor looked him over, thumped his back and flattened his ear against his chest. “Looks like you’re better than ever. Too bad you won’t stay so. Keep out of mischief.” He smiled and signed the report. Still no call came. Then one day, after the morning bell, came a peremptory summons for all hospital patients. “Line up, everybody.” Arnold was the first in line. Behind him was Kid Moish, lean-

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ing proudly on a new pair of crutches. And next, the lean figure of Tommy, maimed and plastered with bandages. It was a curious line of prisoners. “March!” Halting and stumbling, the line wormed into the hall and down the stairs. It was guided into the cell block, and each prisoner was ushered into his own cell. As Arnold entered the familiar niche, it seemed colder than ever, after the month in the bright,

warm hospital. No explanation was given for the strange proceeding. Arnold was hardly surprised at his own return to the cell block. But for those who had not yet recovered it seemed the refinement of cruelty. Later in the afternoon came revelation. The men had come back from the shops, and were waiting for the signal that would permit them to lower their bunks. Voices were heard down the corridor. A group of visitors passed along the gallery. Their conversation could not be made out, but the suave voice of the warden,

addressing them, was heard all over the cell block. “Senator” and “Assemblyman.” A visiting committee from Albany. “You’re to be commended, warden,” said one of the men. “It

seems Sing Sing was never in better health. Your hospital is quite empty!”

5

Late that night the bedraggled line of maimed and crippled and enfeebled shuffled back from the galleries and up the stairs to the hospital. In the weeks that Arnold remained in the hospital, he acquired a broader view of the prison. Hardly a day passed without bringing its quota of injured. Crushed hands, lacerated backs, jaundiced faces, eyes glazed with pain, minds numbed by blows— all were given first aid in Arnold’s ward. Many prisoners remained as patients; others were given relief and returned to the shops. But the most curious of all sights was the company

of pris-

oners from the hat and cap shop. Escorted by two guards, they passed through the ward into the barber shop adjoining. The men marched sullenly, the guards prodding them on. The negro watched them and grinned.

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“Dey gonna have dey hair cut,” he whispered, leaning over Arnold’s bed. In half an hour the company returned, a comical-looking lot. No two heads looked alike. One man’s head was shaved on one side, the full coverage of hair remaining on the other. Over the crown of another head was a narrow strip of hair, with the balance of the skull shaved clean. Still another head was shaved bare except for a cluster of hair in the center of the scalp. Another had only a forelock. And so down the line appeared a variety of head gear ingenious in fashion. The line of prisoners marched self-consciously through the ward and disappeared down the stairs. “Sing Sing’s pompadours!” a voice from among the patients whispered, amid stifled laughter. It was more than that. It was Sing Sing’s mild note of warning. Another week. Arnold was beginning to worry. Time dragged. The idleness was more oppressive than the labor in the shops. He knew that everything in Sing Sing had a purpose behind it, there would be a measure of comperisation for this idleness. Payment would be strictly enforced, and the terms would be hard. He waited nervously for the summons to pay. It came in the person of Jacob Canter, Arnold’s erstwhile cellmate, the muncher of yellow soap. It was a wholly renovated Canter who appeared in the ward

one day. His face was fuller, his hair sleeker, and his figure grown stout. There was no yellow tinge in the face, but there a slimy grin on it. Arnold took the hand Jacob Canter held to him, feeling it smooth and pliant in his grasp. And cold. Canter wore the usual suit of stripes. But it looked clean. trousers were pressed, the coat fitted snugly. Canter looked portant.

had was out The im-

“Glad you’ve come out of it,” he grinned. Arnold smiled. “Too bad you joined that mob,” the man continued, glancing

at him. Arnold shrugged his shoulders. “T know how it is. It’s the mob spirit. It gets you when you’re

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not thinking.” His eyes strayed thoughtfully toward the window. “T don’t know as I ever lost myself that way. I always manage to keep my head.” He sat down. “With me it’s Canter first, and first Canter.”

Still Arnold was silent. He would not encourage the man. “J don’t serve time,” Canter chuckled. ‘““Time serves me. And

I’m not doing bad.”

He rose to go, and held out his hand. “Curious how it’s done?” he laughed. “You should be. You see, I’m the only prisoner-clerk in Sing Sing, and I have access to all the records. They like my hand. Even the dumbest of them can read it.” He stepped closer and whispered. “JT can do things. Keeping you in the hospital, for instance. I have a room all to myself. I'll fix it so you can visit me tomorrow. Maybe we can talk.” Jacob Canter was gone.

“He’s powerful,” the negro whispered in his ear. “Dey say he’s runnin’ things to suit hisself.” Arnold worried about the debt he was piling up with Jacob Canter. “Member or goat?” the keeper asked, as he escorted Arnold

to the lower floor of the hospital building. He stared at the prisoner curiously, and knocked on a wooden door. It opened into a

large, sunlit room. “Welcome to the Refuge,” a voice called pleasantly. Jacob Canter stood before him with outstretched hand. “Welcome to the Refuge.” Canter ushered him inside. Arnold was conscious of other persons in the room.

Three

heads turned toward him, he felt the scrutiny of three pairs of eyes. Canter was leading him in the direction of the eyes. “Gentlemen,” Canter was saying, “this is Arnold Brandt, the famous lawyer I told you about.” Three hands were held out to him, three nonchalant hands.

Each lay in his an instant, indifferently. Canter called their names. “William Brockway.”

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The man sat tall in his chair, filling it comfortably. He was bald and florid, with beady eyes and an unsmiling face. “Charles Wilson.” The antithesis of Brockway. Small, his skinny body seemed lost in the big armchair. His hair was gray, and his large, keen eyes stared unblinking at the newcomer. “Frederick U’Tassey, if you please.” His body was as large as Brockway’s, only more corpulent. His hair was snow-white, his eyes shifty. “Member or goat?” The mysterious words of the keeper were

in Arnold’s mind as he gazed at the four men in stripes. They were all clean-shaven. Their clothes fitted snugly, as if specially tailored. And there were no calluses on their hands. He fidgeted in the steadiness of their stares. “Ever heard of the Refuge?” Canter’s voice was asking. Arnold’s eyes strayed over the room. The walls were lined with shelves, stacked high with books and ledgers. Three large windows opened into the yard. A gas fixture hung low from the middle of the ceiling. “Tt’s the one spot in Sing Sing that’s exclusively the convicts’ own. No guard or keeper has been inside that door for many a year.” Canter laughed. “It’s sort of neutral territory, where Sing Sing’s rules don’t apply, and where prisoners may relax without fear of the cage or the yoke or the dungeon.” “And where you can sit without workin’,” William Brockway said in a tone of relief. “And there’s no joining the mess line,” Charles Wilson added. “And

no officer to stand over you every living minute of

your life,” the General grumbled. “Tt’s not every con that’s privileged to enter the Refuge,” Jacob Canter explained with a smile.

“Member or goat!” Arnold settled himself in the chair Canter had placed for him, facing the four men in stripes. He felt uneasy. “I appreciate the honor,” he murmured. Canter laughed. “Tt is an honor,” he said expansively. ‘“‘You’re in the presence of royalty.”

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The three men, Brockway, Wilson and U’Tassey straightened perceptibly. They looked self-conscious. “In the presence of kings,” Canter continued, unsmiling. Then he chuckled. “A royal flush.” His three guests smiled and nodded. Arnold smiled, too. But he felt a clutch of fear. The eyes stared at him, calculating, with

something strangely threatening. More cruel than all the punishments of Sing Sing, more relentless. Jacob Canter smiled affably. “There aren’t many kings in Sing Sing.” He waved his hand toward the prison yard. “Out there are the rabble. Small minds, uncouth, petty. They steal a dime and win themselves ten years for it. A year for a penny is their average.” He shook his head sadly. “A terrible price to

pay.” He gazed with approval at the pompous Brockway, at the demure Wilson, and the stilted U’Tassey. “Their level is in the hundred thousands, even millions,” he said next. “Kings. Masters!” Brockway frowned.

“But I’ve got no more to show for it than the meanest of the rabble out there. I didn’t have more’n a dime when I came to Sing Sing.” “Tt’s the turnover

that counts with me,” Canter

said, in a

soothing voice. “You're still the master counterfeiter. A useful citizen.”

“I had less than that,” Wilson said thoughtfully. “Probably too loose with your money!” Canter laughed. ‘But you’re young, in spite of your gray hair, and there’re thousands of safes to crack—safes bulging with coin and greenbacks! And your hands are still fast and sure.”

“Guess I’m done,” the General sighed. ““The war’s over, and I got noddings to show for it.” Canter laughed. “We'll scare up another war for you, General, so you can raise another regiment. You haven’t exhausted your family rela-

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tions across the Atlantic. Uncle Sam’ll pension them for not coming over and spoiling the fighting!”

“IT fought at Bull Run,” the General said proudly. “Yes,” Canter agreed, laughing, “and you never stopped running till you got to Sing Sing!” As they spoke, Arnold remembered their names. They had all figured prominently in the crime news of the day. William Brockway, notorious counterfeiter, filled the country with bills that for years escaped detection. They were more perfect in execution than the official currency, and compelled the government to recall all hundred dollar bills from circulation. It was rumored Brockway had made millions. Charles Wilson: notorious safecracker, specializing in banks. The City Trust alone netted him two hundred thousand. He had been the bane of the police in every metropolis. And General Frederick U’Tassey: a German Count who raised his own regiment to fight for the Union. The man who, for years, carried on his enrollment the names of men who had not yet crossed the Atlantic; phantom soldiers, whose pay checks were endorsed by the General himself, and cashed for his own benefit and enrichment. A master mind, but a patriot. “Rich in reputation,” Canter was saying, “but poor in purse!” “One can’t eat a title,” the General complained.

Canter resumed his seat at the large desk. “That gets us down to business,” he said, looking at Arnold,

who sat stiff and expectant. ‘There are two ways you can achieve royalty. One is to win your rank by accomplishment, like these

gentlemen. The other is to purchase it. It means something to belong,” he added meaningly. “You have free access to this chamber, and are immune from

supervision by guards or keepers. They respect the sanctity of this chamber. Tradition has made it a real refuge. You need not join the mob in the mess hall. You eat your own food here. There is no

call to work. Your time is your own.” He paused, breathed deeply.

“There is something still more important.” He opened a drawer of the desk and held up a card. “Here is your prison record. It is a complete statement of your

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conduct. And it tells in great detail of the crazy riot in which you took part. It says you were one of the leaders. And there’s a recom-

mendation that will interest you.” He handed over the card. In bold, red letters was the inscription: “This prisoner has lost all right to commutation of sentence by reason of his participation in the attempted escape. Must serve his full sentence of twenty years.” Canter waited until he had finished. Arnold looked up to meet the stares of the four men. He smiled. “Member or goat.” The words were clearer to him. “The kings can help you,” Canter explained. “Expert fingers will alter that record. King Brockway will provide a beautifully engraved certificate, and King Canter will sign it in the name of the Governor. It will be exactly like an original. Sing Sing won’t be able to tell the difference. And Arnold Brandt will go free, fortified by a complete pardon.” Arnold stood up quickly. His face was flushed, his hands trembled. He leaned over toward the suave Canter. “And if Arnold Brandt refuses to accept the good offices of the kings?” he asked in a quiet voice. Canter ignored the question. “And you can become a king in good standing and not be subjected to the whims of Sing Sing’s guards and keepers.” “And if Arnold Brandt refuses to become a king?” he repeated. . Canter stared at him blandly. He paid no heed to the ques-

tion, but held up his right hand. “Fifty thousand is all it'll cost you,” he said quietly, and» turned toward the three “kings.” ““Agreeable?” The three heads nodded approval. “Kingship comes high,” Canter said in a rueful tone, leaning back in his chair. “And impoverished kings need a lot of money.” “And if I refuse?” Arnold asked in an icy tone. Canter rose and faced him. His eyes looked coldly into those of his guest. “You'll be taken from the hospital and put back into your

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cell, and into the shops. And,” his hand banged the desk, “‘you’ll

do every minute of those twenty years!” Arnold turned to the three pairs of glaring eyes. “Tl have no part in your kingships,” he said in a firm voice,

and strode from the room. Outside, a keeper waited for him. Arnold breathed deeply. The air seemed purer and cleaner, his feet felt lighter. The keeper looked at him aid grinned. “Member or goat?” “Neither.” The keeper nodded. “A bad gang,” he remarked, ‘“‘and dangerous. I’d give ’em the dungeon instead of the Refuge. There’s a power higher than the warden that keeps them there. A power that’ll make it hot for you.” Arnold smiled. His heart felt strangely light. That afternoon he was returned to his cell.

In the days that followed he was vaguely conscious of eyes watching his every movement. He could point to no definite individual, but the eyes were ever present. In the shirt factory, his first assignment, they seemed to measure his tasks and mark the swiftness of his hands. He felt them in the mess hall. The meat apportioned to him was more meager than that of the others. He felt the eyes in his cell. The water boy often passed him by and forgot to answer his call. He bore it all submissively. He realized that it was not Sing Sing tempting him to rashness, it was an alien power, an influence that held the prison throttled. He began to see more clearly the basic formulas that governed the prison. And felt more sympathetic toward the officials, who had become brutalized by the brute force they were ordered to impose. Keepers as well as prisoners struggled against the invisible power. An authority strangely and intimately resembling the forces that encouraged crime fed on dishonesty in government and spread its roots into every form of communal life. Prowlers were prowled upon. Aggressors became victims. It was a power that withheld the errant individual from returning sanity, which followed him to the very walls of Sing Sing, and beyond.

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The men and women of Sing Sing were not really the prisoners

of society. Actually, they were held in bondage by the very power that had steered them from right living. It was that influence which

controlled the workshops of Sing Sing, regulated the price for which convicts’ labor was sold, distinguished between personalities and distributed with an unequal hand the favors forbidden by law. Not all the prisoners were as complacent and submissive as Arnold Brandt. Hungry Joe, who worked opposite him in the shirt factory, grumbled audibly. Joe was a medium-sized, lean-faced fellow, with a shrunken waist line. And dreamy eyes. “Always dreamin’ of eats,” was the way Hoosier Bill described him. ‘The more he eats the skinnier he gets.” Hoosier Bill was a jolly fellow. He worked fast. His tasks were completed earlier than any of the others. He smelled of the plains, and the tan of his long face withstood the damp and darkness of cells; five years had not faded it. Hoosier Bill’s laugh was like the roar of a waterfall, long and full toned it went splashing through the shop. And every face grinned with him. Two years Arnold worked on shirts. Jerry Donovan was his keeper. Donovan, formerly of the quarries, from whose company Cow-legged Sam had made his escape. Keeper Donovan did not seem to notice it when Hoosier Bill helped Brandt complete his task. The foreman, too, appeared indifferent to the breach of etiquette. Nor did he seem aware of Hungry Joe’s furtively munching jaws that struggled with bread crusts stolen from the mess table. In the two years of Keeper Donovan’s charge of the shirt shop not a single prisoner was sent in for punishment. But Arnold was conscious of watchful eyes. They hovered over him, dogging his every waking moment—eyes, he was sure, that reached toward him from the Refuge, trained and directed by the king of kings. Then came the news of a change of wardens. And over-

shadowing that, the astounding rumor of Hoosier Bill’s sudden fortune. It flashed through the shop like a streak of lightning. A

relative whom Bill had never known had died intestate, and Bill

stood to inherit a cool thirty thousand dollars. Bill became a per-

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sonage. Prisoners looked at him in awe. Keepers and guards spoke to him in softer tones. A month later Hoosier Bill was not in his accustomed seat beside Arnold. “Took sick last night,” Hungry Joe announced, “and was taken to the hospital.” Two months later came the startling news of Hoosier Bill’s pardon. “So he could enjoy his money,” was the way Hungry Joe put it.

Arnold smiled, remembering watchful eyes. Keeper Donovan was taken from the shirt shop. A new keeper took his place, a man who adhered strictly to rules. Hungry Joe no longer munched; and Arnold was hard put to complete his tasks. But a dogged fury drove him; he worked harder and faster, resolved that the watching eyes should not mock him, his tasks would be done. His arms ached and his eyes became bloodshot. A burned shirt gave the new keeper his first chance to impress his authority. Hungry Joe was the offender. “T didn’t mean it,” he pleaded with the keeper. “It just happened.” “Things like that mustn’t happen,” the keeper muttered, and hauled Joe from his table. “It’s time you men learned somethin’.” Hungry Joe learned what it meant to have his fingers scorched with the same iron that had burned a shirt. “That just happened, too,” the keeper growled, and sent him to the hospital for treatment. The next day Joe was back, his hand bandaged. “Doctor said I can’t work with it for a few days,” he told the keeper. “The doctor ain’t running this shop.” Hungry Joe was put to work. The men in the shop looked on silently; not a muscle in their faces moved. They looked furtively

at Joe, then at the keeper. Arnold’s heart turned cold, his lips compressed. But he labored on. His task would not wait, there were eyes watching. Hungry Joe’s hands got worse. They became swollen. He was unable to hold the pressing iron. It dropped from his grasp

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and burned a hole through his shoes. He yelled with pain, and was sent to the hospital. Two days later he was back. “The doctor said I was to stay here, but not to work with my hand.”

But he was put to his tasks. Hungry Joe looked pleadingly at the foreman, then at the keeper, then turned with a grin in

Arnold’s direction. In the silence of the shop he walked slowly up to the table, and undid the bandage on his hand. He picked up a pair of shears, toying with them a moment. Arnold lurched toward him, horrified, as he saw Joe insert his fingers between the sharp blades, tug at them, and with a sudden heave cut through flesh and bone. Joe turned and confronted the awe-stricken prisoners. “Hungry Joe ain’t workin’ no more!” he yelled, and smeared his bleeding stump over the face of the astonished keeper. Arnold f !t sick with pain. “Hold your places,” was the command that sounded through the shop. No one stirred. Hungry Joe grinned and held up his dripping paw. He was escorted out of the shop. Arnold worked long and hard on the inscription in his cell

that night. He was losing faith in himself, afraid that Sing Sing was too powerful, that he would break in its grip.

24 Sonny has been insisting more than ever on seeing you. He

can’t seem to understand—poor youngster—why I don’t take him to you. Even if it were possible, it would be unwise. The impression on his mind would be indelible and terribly op pressing. I am taking

him to Europe. It will give him new interests, and will, I hope, give me the peace of mind I need so badly.

Arnold read Amanda’s letter—it was her third—and ran his hand over his face, feeling of his gauntness. His cheeks were no

longer round and smooth. He looked down at his suit of stripes, and laughed inwardly.

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“The boy wouldn’t know me,” he decided. “Better wait. Perhaps when he grows up.” Better wait. Sing Sing had not done with Arnold Brandt. Nor he with Sing Sing. He felt of his muscles, harder than he had ever known them. His hands were tougher, the skin of his face seemed thicker, his body felt bruised. The constant strain in his back reminded him that Sing Sing had done something to his body. But his mind

seemed

clearer, his eyes sharper;

he knew

then, as he

would know for years to come, that he could not hope for freedom. Something more enduring than the walls of Sing Sing would hold him prisoner. The years moved on. He could not know whether he would float on that stretch of time or be submerged. His only interests were in his daily tasks, and the peace of night. His dread of the influence seeking to break his spirit grew, always he felt eyes watching, furtively. The gang in the Refuge had not given up. He was moved from shop to shop. His tasks grew heavier. So did his hands and his heart. He found himself finally in the shoe shop, slicing thick slabs of leather and hammering them into shoes. Sixty cents a day was the price paid for his labor. It was paid to Sing Sing, and Sing Sing paid him nothing. The foreman was a heavy-jowled fellow who liked his beer. The keeper, a man with a leather face and thick lips, hawk nose and a chin that jutted out vindictively, was a veteran in the service of the prison, and he ruled the shop with aggressive ruthlessness.

““Jiggumbobs,” he called the prisoners. It was the only wit he ever displayed, but he made much of it. “Working Jiggumbobs,” he grinned at the rows of hammering men in stripes. The rule of silence, as well as all other prison rules, was strictly enforced in the shoe shop. “You’re gonna make lots of shoes in your time,” he told Arnold on the first day of his new assignment. ““And make ’em right!”

It was the guard rather than the shop foreman who examined the work. The leather-faced keeper piled extra work on Arnold’s table, and commanded him to rip apart shoe after shoe “‘to make ’em right.”

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His heart was growing heavier. Now he understood the impulse that drove Hungry Joe to mayhem and Sailor Dan to murder. He felt a growing hatred of the thick-lipped keeper. In a frenzied moment he confided in the prison chaplain, a mild-mannered gentleman who abhorred conditions but despaired of improvement. “Pray for guidance,” was the chaplain’s admonition. “Pray.” Prisoners prayed on Sunday, and were caged, ironed and yoked on Monday. Kid Moish stood in the chorus, holding on to his crutches, and sang fervently. The chaplain was proud of Kid Moish, he had come into the fold. He had lost his foot in the process, but his soul was safe.

Arnold did not pray. Instead, he brooded and worked at the stone inscription on the wall of his cell. He was startled one night, as the iron nail chipped into the stone, to find himself planning revenge. He was not certain whom he would strike. It might be the gang in the Refuge—that group whose tentacles were reaching out toward him. Perhaps it would be the leather-faced guard or the foreman. He felt an uncontrollable ache to strike, he hungered for it. It left him no peace. Michael Gorman, gray-haired, soft-spoken, and_ straightbacked despite his eighty years, gazed wisely at Arnold sitting beside him on the work bench. Michael was an old-timer. He had

given thirty years to Sing Sing. Thirty years a cobbler in the shoe shop.

“T’m going home next week,” Michael had promised himself. But “next week” stretched into years. Michael still hoped for the pardon he said was delayed in coming. Michael would go . “home,” the pardon would be waiting for him. But no mortal hand would inscribe it. Thirty years in Sing Sing—and Michael Gorman loved life. He helped sustain that passion in others. He had no fear of guards or foremen. It was many years since he had felt the clamp of iron around his neck or borne the cage upon his head.

“I been through it all,” he said one day. Michael ignored rules. He spoke when he pleased and as he pleased. Nobody dared to answer him, but they listened; his words

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soothed and made hearts whole. He made them laugh. When men laugh, free and unrestrained, they do not hate. Michael knew that. ““You’re troubled,” he remarked to Arnold.

Arnold hammered at his shoes and did not answer. The guard was making his morning inspection. He had paused at the table and was examining Arnold’s workmanship. Old Michael grinned, tugging at the guard’s elbow. The latter frowned, but bent down to catch the old man’s words.

“You remind me of the judge who gave me the works,” Michael whispered. Michael’s foot touched Arnold’s, and the latter listened. A pleased look crept into the guard’s eyes. “And why?” he asked pleasantly. The old man stared at him, wet his lips and continued. “You see, the judge had a sharp nose and chin, like yourself. They pointed toward each other. And he asked me, ‘Prisoner, want to say anything before sentence is passed upon you?’ ‘Yes, your Honor,’ I says. ‘Say it,’ he says.

“ ‘Seems to me your chin and your nose will soon be at loggerheads,’ I says. You shoulda seen the blood come up in that judge’s face. The crowd in the court room tittered. I could see the judge take hold o’ hisself, an’ he looked me straight in the eye. ‘Why, prisoner?’ he says. ‘Cause hard words’ll pass between ’em,’ I answers. And the crowd yelled. And the judge said ‘Life.’ ”’ Arnold smiled. The guard scowled. His hand rose to his chin, then felt of his nose. But he did not remain at Arnold’s table. There was a slight grin on his face as he passed on. Michael turned to Arnold. “You can touch a man with a laugh better’n with a curse,” he whispered. “It ain’t his fault,” the old man continued, “not altogether.

It’s just that they dgn’t trust each other—the prisoners an’ the officers. Each thinks the other’s hate is stronger’n theirs. “Reminds me o’ the time I and my pal went prowlin’. It was Christmas Eve, an’ we was hot for cash. So we come to a house

that was all fixed up with a Christmas tree. It seemed quiet and peaceful. I felt like Santa Claus, only I was takin’ things instead of leavin’ ’em. Well, I seen a letter on the table. An’ I read it. It

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was from the son’o’ the house to his father. An’ it said, ‘I can’t

stand it any longer, I’m leavin’. I’ll make my own way.’ You know,

one o’ those nervous letters that boys write to their fathers. “I seen they had a spat. And I knew if the father could find a laugh somewhere, it would be all right. So I sat down and wrote one out. “Me and my pal has read this letter from yore son,’ is what I wrote. “Take our advice and forgive ’im, or he'll be cuttin’ into our job. It’s Christmas Eve you know.’ We didn’t take nothin’ there, an’ I felt like a real Santa Claus, ’cause I left somethin’ for

Christmas.” - The old man sighed.

“Y don’t know what happened to that father, but I think he laughed, an’ maybe the boy come back.” For several days the hawk-nosed keeper avoided Arnold, and neglected to pile his table with additional tasks. Then came a mysterious summons for him to the administration building. He was ushered into the Refuge. Jacob Canter, neat and sleek as ever, stood up to greet him. He was alone. “You look used up,” Canter said, after they had surveyed each other in silence. Arnold waited for him to continue. “The other fellows have gone,” he said, and laughed. ‘‘Probably on their way back by this time.” “And I’m going soon, too,” was his startling revelation. ‘““My time’s up.” Arnold sat erect in his chair, fearful of what was to follow.

Another threat, he supposed. And he prepared to meet it as he did the others. Canter ignored his agitation. “I did my best to make you see my way. It would have saved | you years. But I can’t say I don’t admire your courage. You’re not

like us. I don’t expect to be anything else than I am. It’s in my blood, I guess. Maybe if they’d given me a vaccine when I was a youngster, it might have cleared up. But they let me slide, and I’m sliding all the way.” He sighed. “You'll be out some day, and maybe you'll be interested in bread lines and soup kitchens. You'll probably see me waiting on one of them, a gray-haired, stooped fellow without a friend or

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home. I know it’s coming. But I’ll be dreaming of the things I did. That’ll be my only compensation.” The two men sat staring at each other. “You're different,’ Canter continued. “Something got you, you needed an explosion to get it out of you. That killing did it. You'll be all right, if Sing Sing doesn’t smother the good that’s in you.” Arnold was conscious of a sort of deep pity for the man. He would leave Sing Sing, but he would never be free. Canter realized that he was doomed to a life of futility. But he had neither the

courage nor the strength to overcome it. “Tm going to do one decent thing before I leave Sing Sing. I’m going to transfer the kingship to you. The prisoners here need a spokesman, someone who will talk up for them, who will intercede for them and at the same time calm them. It won’t be easy,

because neither prisoners nor officers will trust you. But you’re straight, and they'll soon find it out. You'll be able to do some good.” He laughed.

‘

“Tt won’t cost you a dollar. All I ask is that if I ever come back, you'll retire in my favor. It’s been a good thing while it lasted. ’'m leaving Sing Sing with more money than I brought in!” And so Arnold Brandt became the prisoner-clerk in charge of records, and the presiding genius of the Refuge. Eighty-year-old Michael Gorman was his assistant. Arnold Brandt never quite understood the power and influence behind his assignment to the clerkship. In the years of his confinement,

he had had little contact

with the officials of the

prison. What little there had been, had not been friendly. He spoke of it to Michael Gorman. “T think there’ll be a change,” the old man said thoughtfully. “The old crowd is easing up, and there’s that Prison Association that’s takin’ their place. It'll take time, but it’s comin’ sure. I'd like to live to see it.”” The old man sighed. ‘““The warden knows it, and so do the inspectors. And they need a face. You’re that face.” The door of the Refuge was always open. Guards and keepers entered freely. Visitors to the prison, at twenty-five cents a head, made it their first stop, and eyed the clerk curiously. He smiled at

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them, and the traditional gruesomeness of Sing Sing seemed dissipated.

It was his first duty to receive all newly admitted prisoners and take down their records. He marveled at their unending numbers, and at their ages—youngsters

for the most

part,

under

twenty. Half the population of Sing Sing were minors. It was his duty to ask them intimate questions. “Why did you commit the crime?” Invariably the answer was, “Drink. I was drunk when it happened.” “What made you take to drink?” And they stared at him, uncomprehending. He was not surprised at their ignorance; he had not known, himself. He, too, had stared at the warden when asked why he had shot

Jim Reynolds. But there was one man who did know, a middle-aged fellow convicted of the newly created crime of “suicide.” His sentence was one year in Sing Sing, the first man to be sent up for suicide. “J wanted to die,” was the answer he gave, “and they wouldn’t let me.” \ “Still want to die?” Arnold asked him. The man shrugged his shoulders. Sing Sing nad a big job on its hands, and a new one, Arnold thought. To make that man want to live. Or maybe it would help him die. “Guess I was crazy,” the man said, grinning. A year in Sing Sing would help him to find out. Arnold did not keep aloof from the prisoners. He marched to the mess hall with the rest, and joined them in the chapel. His clothes were like theirs. Not the least interesting of his new experiences were his frequent conferences with the warden, a heavy-set man, with calm .

scrutinizing eyes and a smile that came unforced. “If you have anything to suggest about—well, about improving things, don’t hesitate. I don’t promise anything, but I’ll listen,” the warden said in the second interview. “Tl suggest something now, if I may.” The warden nodded. “Abolish all punishments.” The warden stared, unbelieving, at the prisoner before him.

“If I didn’t think well of you, Pd think you’re scheming

something,” he said with a frown.

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“The shower, and the cage, and the yoke, and the dungeon are responsible for a great deal of what goes on inside. I know. I’ve been through them all.” The warden drummed on his desk nervously. “It’s been talked about,” he said. “But if the prisoners know

they won’t be punished, they’ll run us ragged. We'll be at their mercy. Our lives wouldn’t be safe.” Arnold smiled. “If you must punish, use what they hold most dear. Deprive them of time. Cut their allowance for commutation. They think more of time than they do of their bodies. Making them suffer

physically only makes them resentful and makes them hate. There’ll never be peace in Sing Sing unless you abolish those tortures.”

For a while, the warden was lost in thought. “Tell you what,” he said suddenly, “the Governor will be here in a few days to hear applications for pardons. I'll ask him if he’ll listen to you. You can put it to him straight. He’ll suspect I’m getting soft.” And so Arnold Brandt, the prisoner, was summoned to face the Governor of the State of New York. Governor and prisoner

looked at each other. The Governor was a tall, erect man, with regular features and wavy hair tinged with gray. His forehead sloped backward from the full temples that bulged, shelflike, over his eyes. His voice was suave and cultured. The Governor was seated at the warden’s desk. “T’ve ordered dinner for you, Governor,” the warden said.

The Governor smiled. “Better have it brought in here,” he suggested, “it will take less time. I like to linger too long at a regular table.” The warden left Arnold and the Governor alone. “T hear you have ideas,” the Governor said, with a smile.

Arnold felt like the pleader of old. Unconscious of the stripes he was wearing, forgetful utterly of his status as a prisoner, he began an eloquent plea for the men inside. The Governor listened attentively. Arnold’s soul was in his words; a world was his client, a

universe of prisoners. Not only Sing Sing, but every prison, in every country of the world.

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“These men are broken before they reach prison,” he told the Governor. “You can’t expect to mend them by shattering the pieces. You can’t clamp them in a vise and expect them to walk

alone. You can’t destroy their souls and expect them to respect you.”

The Governor smiled when Arnold concluded and stood waiting. The pleader was again the prisoner; he flushed. “I’m afraid I’ve been too presumptuous,” he apologized. The Governor waved his hand in a magnanimous gesture. “No, indeed. I’ve enjoyed it. And I shall think of it seriously.”

The warden came in hurriedly, pale and trembling. The Governor stared at him in surprise. “I’m perfectly safe, warden,” he said reassuringly. ““This man has given me much food for thought.” “You may have food for thought,” the warden said, with a grimace, and looked nervously at Arnold, “but that’s all the food you’re getting just now.” “How do you mean, warden?” the Governor asked. Arnold stiffened at the sound of “liberty bell.” “There’s been an escape—my cook. And he’s helped himself to your hat and coat!” The Governor glanced quickly at Arnold, and turned, laughing, to the warden. “T hope they fit him.” And added: “Better get yourself another cook. I’m beginning to realize what it means to go hungry in Sing Sing.”

2) The principal keeper appeared in Arnold’s office one morning with a gun strapped to his belt. “I’m takin’ no chances,” he explained grimly. ‘““With all them things abolished, our lives won’t be worth a damn.” Thus the Sing Sing officials received the news of the abolition of the shower bath, the iron cage, the yoke and crucifix and the

dungeon. But Sing Sing was strangely docile. There was no general revolt. Only the contractors complained. “How are we going to get our tasks done? We can’t even threaten those fellows. There’ll be hell to pay!”

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To Arnold the change was enlightening. He sensed a quickening in the shuffling lines of prisoners. Eyes were happier; smiling faces greeted him everywhere. Somehow, word had gone out that Arnold had made a plea to the Governor. It was an unspoken message that spread over the prison grapevine—the silent language that no rule of silence could suppress. The silence of the cell block now seemed less oppressive, and for the first time since his confinement, Arnold felt a sense of contentment.

But guards and keepers eyed him warily. Shop foremen passed

him with a shrug, and contractors regarded him menacingly. He was commencing the third line of his inscription. It was to be the message he would leave for his successor, a word of hope. Courage. To be hopeful was to be courageous. He began to scrape the letter C. The calm-eyed warden went the way of all Sing Sing’s wardens. His successor summoned Arnold. “It seems strange,” he told the prison clerk, who stood before him in a respectful attitude, “strange, indeed, that the Governor should have interfered with the prison administration to such an extent.” Arnold showed his surprise. “He insisted that you be kept in your present position as clerk. Wonder he wouldn’t pardon you, if he’s so well intentioned.” In the years that followed his duties increased immeasurably. The multiplying flow of incoming prisoners kept him at his desk constantly. Wardens succeeded each other with startling frequency; Sing Sing could not hold them. One warden’s term did not exceed three weeks. Other officers changed almost as rapidly. The entire personnel of the prison seemed unstable. Guards and keepers retired, were dismissed, or resigned. New ones took their places. The character of the prisoner population was also changed. Old-timers

were

discharged;

new-timers

came

in. Only

a few

familiar faces remained. Bony Berg was one of them, Kid Moish was another. And, of course, there was Michael Gorman, a patriarch in stripes.

Arnold’s familiarity with the prison routine and the records made him invaluable to incoming administrations. Wardens took

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him for granted. It never occurred to them that he could be supplanted. ““Ask Brandt” became the byword among officers and men. Arnold was the reservoir of information, he always sensed the pulse of the prison. Sing Sing’s prisoners numbered seventeen hundred. Housing was deplorable, the prison’s capacity was eleven hundred. “Doubling up” became the rule. Two sittings at mess; two services in the chapel on Sunday; and crowded shops, resulting in curtailment of tasks and much idleness. Michael Gorman described it humorously. “Short rations,” he said, ‘“‘short sermons, short tasks, short in-

terviews—that’s Sing Sing. The only thing that’s long is years!” There was a shortage, also, in personnel. Sing Sing was undermanned, as it would be for decades. Rules were honored in the

breach. Arnold was interested particularly in the unending stream of prisoners that appeared before him for registration. For years he had not seen a newspaper. They were forbidden. News of the outside world reached him only through hearsay. But the character of the incoming prisoners reflected, to him, the tides of civic affairs.

Thus, a long line of convicted bankers evidenced a sudden cleaning out of dishonest financiers; a group of deposed officeholders was

proof of a successful reform administration. The increased numbers of burglars and counterfeiters and petty offenders marked a determined effort in crime suppression. Sing Sing was, in fact, a reflection of the world outside. It was nothing else. It made no effort to improve the perspective of its charges, it accepted them as they were, its every energy was spent in making the prisoners earn their keep.

“Make Sing Sing pay,” became the slogan of every prison administration.

New

industries

were

encouraged;

new

contractors

became vitally interested in its operation, contractors who were

eager for cheap labor and increased production—rich pickings for politicians. Prisoners were encouraged to do more than their allotted tasks, and for this extra labor they were paid in cash. It was against the law, of course. But contractors agreed generally with Mr. Bumble,

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in Oliver Twist, that “the law is a ass.” Law in Sing Sing! Sing Sing was a law unto itself. It was this cash in the hands of prisoners that undermined the discipline of the prison. Underpaid guards and keepers looked on with envy and avarice. The less fortunate among the prisoners,

usually the slackers and laggards, busied themselves with plans for furtive acquisition. Thievery and robbery became common. Assaults were frequent. Even murder was not unknown. In those days Arnold despaired of Sing Sing and pitied the men who stood before him on their admission. Whatever the source of the error that had brought them to the prison, they would find here a worse kind of pollution. “Tt’s like temptin’ the devil to tempt ’em,” was Michael Gorman’s homely observation. 26

I asked Arnold to write you, but he said he couldn’t. “He’s like a stranger to me,’ was the way he put it. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

This was Amanda’s fourth letter. He looked down at the words, his heart heavier than ever. A stranger. They would always be strangers, he and Amanda and young Arnold. Strange as the impulse that had driven him to shoot Jim, that drove all these men to Sing Sing. It was all so tragic and meaningless. But there was no escaping it.

Courage was what he had intended to carve in the stone. There could be no courage without faith. He had hoped for faith, for himself, and the seventeen hundred men in Sing Sing. But it would be a false message. He felt no faith. Sing Sing denied it, Amanda denied it—and young Arnold. He doubted them all. He doubted

life and love. A skeptic. That would be the true message, by that he wanted to be known to those who would follow him in this cell.

He would etch that word—skeptic. His iron nail scraped on the stone. “Ask Brandt.” Arnold was summoned by the warden in the dead hours of a winter night. He hurried to his desk. A heavy

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snow was falling, and the cold was intense. Sing Sing was asleep. Only the warden was awake, and the captain of the night watch. The warden greeted him with a heavy stare, and the captain grumbled irritably.

“There’s a fellow says he belongs here,” the warden explained. “Tt may be a hoax. Says he escaped fifteen years ago and wants to give himself up.”

“A fellow that’s been out fifteen years is entitled to stay out,” the captain remarked in an aggrieved tone. “JT thought maybe you’d know him,” the warden said. Arnold followed the officers into the warden’s office. A huddled figure sat in a large armchair. He rose as they entered. His

face was still wet with snow. His hair was white, his face deeply lined.

Arnold stared at the weird figure, and shook his head. There had been many escapes during his early years in Sing Sing, it might be one of a dozen. The lines in the man’s face were familiar, but

he might have seen them in the line of march. The man might have been discharged in the ordinary course of events. “Mr. Brandt,” the man said. And laughed. Then, as Arnold eyed him mutely, the man

unbuttoned

his

coat and threw it on the chair. Arnold stepped closer, craning.

The bowed legs, the humorous mouth, the low throaty laugh, he could not be mistaken. : “Sam!” he almost shouted. The man laughed again. Cow-legged Sam had come back. “There isn’t much left of life,’ Sam explained. “And I come

back to be clean.” . “TIL get you a pardon,” the warden exclaimed, as he shook

Sam’s hand in cordial greeting. ‘““And in the meantime,” he said to Arnold, “perhaps he can help you.” He smiled. “His hand may not be so good, but his influence will help inside.” So Cow-legged Sam joined Arnold and Michael Gorman in the Refuge. Sam’s pardon was not forthcoming, the warden was not there to urge it, having given way to a successor.

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Arnold and Michael Gorman and Cow-legged Sam. Arnold smiled as he sat with his two companions in the quiet of the Refuge, recalling his first meeting with the “kings” in that very room. It had been so strained then, the room was stifling, the eyes confronting him cold and glaring. The door was open now. And there was about the place an atmosphere of self-respect and understanding. It was indeed a refuge. “There’s doings inside,” Michael Gorman was saying. “It’s the wall they’re building. Some of the boys’re planning to make

a break before it’s finished. They figure it’ll be harder when it’s up. Sing Sing was to have a wall. The prisoners watched it grow; it was soon to be completed. Arnold, too, had felt the wall’s significance.

A measure of safety, to prevent escapes; such was its

physical importance to the administration. But to Arnold there was a deeper significance; Sing Sing’s isolation would be more profound, the world would know less about the prison’s inner life. Sing Sing welcomed the wall, but the prisoners resented it.

“Blood will flow,” Michael Gorman said. ‘“They’re desperate.” Arnold recalled the day of the massacre when he had run with the mob, unwilling, unthinking. Yet he had gone. Sailor Dan sprawled on the ground, his eyes staring up. *“An’ there’s nothin’ can be done about it,’’ Michael Gorman

said. ““They’re set on goin’.” Michael had heard it whispered in the yard. The lines marching to and from mess and to the cells were tense. Officials became aware of the furtive glances passed along the mess tables, the droop of eyelids. Meanwhile, the wall was rising. And prisoners stared at it

with hate. It came suddenly, as do all prison uprisings, catching Sing Sing unprepared. The lines were returning from the mess hall after breakfast, when from the distance came the shriek of a locomotive.

A train was approaching from the north, it would pass by, skirting the yard. Suddenly the line broke. Prisoners rushed toward the

gate in the center of the ceil block. Guards yelled, threatened, and shot over the heads of the fleeing prisoners.

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The prisoners paid heed to neither shouts nor shots. They ran. They crowded the rails, shouted to the onrushing train, blocked its passage. The whistle shrieked long and loud; wheels scraped on the tracks; the train stopped. From the door of his office, Arnold watched several prisoners

climb into the engineer’s cab. He gave a start of horror as Michael Gorman walked toward the crowd of yelling prisoners, warning them back. “It’s madness,’ Michael shouted to them. ‘““They’ll shoot you down!”

Prisoners laughed and busied themselves with the coupling. The locomotive was free. It chugged and steamed away, several men clinging to the engine cab and squatting in the coal tender. Michael Gorman’s

white hair was black with soot, his hands rose

pleading. “Youll be killed, wrecked, and you'll make it hard for the rest !” he called to them.

The locomotive pulled away. Bullets rained over it, and whizzed through. Arnold saw men crumple in agony. He ran toward the tracks, seeing Michael Gorman sway and drop. He stooped over the motionless form from which blood oozed from a wound in the chest. Michael’s eyes were open, but they saw nothing. He lay there dead, a victim of Sing Sing’s folly. Gorman was right. That desperate escape, the most dramatic in all of Sing Sing’s history, did “‘make it harder” for those who remained. With the completion of the wall began a new era in prison administration. It seemed as though Sing Sing had stayed its hand until it was safe from scrutiny, hidden from prying eyes. What went on within those walls was no longer of public interest.

The prison was a walled community, autonomous, subject to no law but its own. “You’ve got a job, you and that Cow-legged Sam,” the warden admonished Arnold, when he pleaded for the prisoners. “What goes on inside hardly concerns you.” Arnold could not help but grieve over the change that had come over the prison. The law forbade all old forms of punishment. “There was once a Legislature that, for some reason or other,

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prohibited the game of ninepins in old New York,” the warden explained, smiling. “So the boys put their heads together and added a tenth pin and played tenpins. We are forbidden to use the iron cage, the yoke, and the ball and chain, but there is no statute

against other methods of punishment. We will invent new ones.” And so the paddle came into use. And bucking. And pulleys that strung prisoners up by their thumbs. Punishments that equaled, if they did not actually surpass the old ones in torture. Terror again stalked the prison. Lines of shuffling men again exuded venom and hate. But contractors rubbed their hands in satisfaction; their authority was supreme.

Arnold toiled on his inscription. Skeptic. Without faith or hope. The years rolled on. And despite the new wall, liberty bell tolled frequently its ominous message to the countryside. Men risked life and limb in the mad rush for freedom. One ingenious prisoner fashioned for himself a contraption that resembled a duck, made from gutta-percha, underneath which

he swam to liberty. Another pulled at the white hairs of a horse’s mane, made himself a complete set of whiskers exactly like those worn by an elderly prison contractor, and so disguised, passed through the gates unmolested. Still another hid in a swill barrel with a false top, and was rolled away in the prison wagon. Liberty

bell tolled incessantly. Prisoners were obsessed by one thought— to escape the threatening paddle. “Hope you'll forget your experiences keeper to a man who was being discharged.

here,”

remarked

a

“T will,” answered the prisoner, “when the scars on my back

disappear!”

Arnold’s task was never-ending. Prisoners oozed out of Sing Sing, but always there were others to replace them. The line of new admissions was never more constant. They came in scores, were sucked into the eager maw of Sing Sing, absorbed into its slimy entrails. Arnold

watched

them

come,

and wondered

why.

He asked them. They stared at him vacantly, or shrugged their shoulders and did not answer.

One prisoner did know. There was the smell of hard liquor on his breath, but his mind seemed clear. He came with the sheriff, from a town in upper New York. He was a man of about forty.

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It was late in the afternoon when the man entered the warden’s office and handed a commitment paper to the officer in charge. He was escorted to Arnold’s desk. “Another customer,” the officer called out.

The fellow approached and laid the commitment paper on the desk. Arnold examined it. “Where is the prisoner?” he asked. “I’m the prisoner,” the man answered with a smile. Arnold looked at him in surprise. “But didn’t the sheriff bring you in?” “Sure,”

the fellow

replied,

and

whispered,

“he’s

outside,

drunk.” Arnold hurried to the carriage standing at the door. The sheriff was unconscious, steeped in drink. “You could easily have got away,” Arnold remarked. The prisoner laughed. “Not after the sheriff treated me so fine. We stopped and had a drink. He trusted me. I wouldn’t go back on a fellow.” The man was big and broad-shouldered. His hair was brown, his face heavy. The lines in the face, the voice and gestures, stirred vague memories. The name on the commitment was unfamiliar. Peter Haggerty.

“Like your drink?” The man laughed, a deep-toned guffaw. Arnold knew he had heard that laugh before. And he had seen that face and the soft

eyes. There was a deep gash in the man’s forehead, extending backward under the hair that hung disheveled. “Any other name?” Arnold asked. The man shook his head. “It’s the only one I’ve got.” “Been in the war?” The man nodded. “Antietam.”

Antietam!

Patrick’s son fell at Antietam.

Reported, ‘‘Miss-

ing.” Patrick had never believed it. The face was Patrick’s, and the voice and the hair. There was a rush of hot blood through Arnold’s head.

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“Ever hear of Patrick O’Dogherty?” he heard himself asking the prisoner. The man stared back at him. His hand rose to his eyes, as if to wipe away the fog of dullness in them. “Seems like I did,” he said slowly. “Years ago.” “Ever hear of Mary?” “Seems like I did,” he repeated in a dull tone. “Ever hear of Shantytown?” The prisoner appeared dazed.

“Every hear of Arnold Brandt?” “Brandt,” the man repeated. “Brandt. Wasn’t he a lawyer?” “Remember the cabin on the mountainside, with snow away up near the clouds?”

Arnold hurled the questions at him. He did not wait for the answers. “Peter Haggerty, don’t you know your real name is Pat O’Dogherty?” For a few moments the man was silent. His hand rose to hide his eyes, touched his forehead and swept back the hair from his brow. Suddenly his eyes grew bright, his hand shook nervously. “Patrick O’Dogherty. The cabin on the mountainside. The queen of Shantytown. Seems like I know them.” Arnold leaned over and whispered. “It was a long time ago. Patrick. Father. Patrick and Pat. Father.” The man paled. “Not Haggerty, but O’Dogherty,” Arnold said again. The man looked at him, blinking furiously. “But you’re the lawyer? And in Sing Sing.” Arnold and Pat O’Dogherty talked until the bell sounded for the night lockup.

Sleep had settled into the cells. The slow tread of the night watch sounded heavy through the slow-winding hours. The silence of night had never been so welcome. He lay with his eyes closed, listening to the silence. But he was not alone. Patrick O’Dogherty was there. And Mary, and Amanda, and little Arnold. And above all hovered the figure of Jim Reynolds. He tried to make this clear to Amanda:

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I am free, free to live and love. Cells, bars, walls—I do not feel them. There is no man more free. I see it all so clearly now. My fetters were not physical. At first it was the false desire for power—power at any cost. I paid too dearly for it. A price that left me frustrated. I gave my soul for it. I felt humbled in the presence of Jim. The more I saw of him, the humbler I became, the baser and guiltier I felt. Jim had found what I had lost. But above all was the thought that I had blasted your faith in me. That shot was intended for me. Death was better than living a lie. Then came that instant of overwhelming hate—toward conscience, and Jim... . And Jim was dead, And now I have found Patrick’s son. He shall have those bonds. And we will get him free to enjoy his inheritance. I will be FREEBIE Arnold Brandt looked at his son. “Tt was then your mother sent you to me, and together we gave those bonds to Pat. “Jim Reynolds lived with me in that cell for years. I felt the will to live. To be free. “You know, son,” as they paused to say good night, “those men up there in Sing Sing, I’ve discovered the answer they could not give me. They could not tell me why they came. But I know. They were dulled, paralyzed, made callous by another imprisonment long before they came to Sing Sing. Bound and trapped inextricably, in a spiritual sense. No physical pressure can untie them. Sing Sing can’t do it. I'd like nothing better than to help them find themselves before they start on the path that leads to Sing. Sing. Something that Jim Reynolds aimed to do . . . and maybe he did.” Young Arnold grasped his father’s hand. They looked into each other’s eyes. “But how about that message in stone?” The father smiled. “I drew a line through the word skeptic. It took me a long time to do it.”

Four

ot

BREEN

Pre R KES eM

A Ral OWEch

TE

eh

are ©

Four

STEPHEN

YERKES—MARIONETTE I

Tre: Prace:

The morning of the 3rd day of July, rgrz. The Death Chamber of Sing Sing’s Death House.

7, I PRONOUNCE

this man

dead.”’

Twelve men started up hurriedly from the benches and moved toward the open door in silence. They did not look back as the black-garbed figure was lifted on the waiting cot and trundled from the chamber. It was as though death were frisking at their heels; the same death they had seen leading the somber procession and, later, standing by the side of the hooded man. A smug death, sure of its victim.

Tensely curious, the twelve men had watched the nervous fumbling of the uniformed guards as they adjusted the leather bands. The guards stood back, and waited. It was only a moment. ...

A

stillness,

overwhelming,

abysmal,

held

chamber in riveted suspense. An instant...

the small

and then...

close

the

raucous, whining drone. The twelve witnesses became alert, tense,

they swayed forward as if to speak, to give utterance to a belated protest or to lay hands on the figure straining at the bonds in the final, frustrate effort to escape death. The drone ceased, the body relaxed, settling back in the chair,

apparently eased and at peace. The chamber was empty. Captain Charles Hilbert and another of the Sing Sing guards were alone with the body. “Anybody claim it?”’ The guard asked the question. Captain Hilbert shook his massive head, looking down at the calm, lean, still features. The guard waited. “Gallery twenty-five, I guess,” he said presently, referring to the prison graveyard. The 455

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captain, absorbed in examination of the dead face, did not answer

immediately. It was singular, this silent emotion of Sing Sing’s rugged captain. It was said that there was no feeling in his big beefy hulk, built like a water tower. The guard watched with astonishment as the captain’s meaty paw reached for the collapsed and wobbling head, stroking it, caressing with unseemly tenderness its crop of stiff gray hair. “The doctors’ll be worrying him next,” the captain said gruffly. Then caught the eye of the guard in a baleful glare. “Stand watch and tell me when they’ve done,” he ordered, and turned to go. “How about the funeral?” the guard asked. The captain hesitated. “T’ll claim the body,” he said finally, ‘‘and give Steve a Christian burial.” The black flag atop the building which contained the death house signaled the news. Stephen Yerkes was dead. The law was vindicated, its judgment carried out with irrevocable finality. A group of idlers outside the prison gate watched the emblem flapping out the melancholy tidings. *SAll over,” said one.

“No fuss about his going!” another said. “A three-time killer,” somebody else remarked. “They say he was a bad one.” A short distance from them a solitary gray-haired man stood absorbed in the doleful signal. Presently he shrugged his shoulders, and smiling, walked rapidly away. 2

Stephen Yerkes was a “bad one.” So the prosecutor had thundered to the jury as he called for a verdict of murder in the first degree on the 3rd day of February, 1886, at the close of the trial for Yerkes’ first killing. “Society is best rid of vicious degenerates like him!’ he shouted, as he demanded the death penalty. The jury listened solemnly, their eyes on the prisoner whose

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lean face showed no emotion, his cool gaze following the prosecutor’s orgiastic gestures. “A cold-blooded killer!” The prosecutor’s fist pounded the railing. The jury stared at the prisoner. The prisoner stared back impassively. His lips tightened, then for a fleeting second the trace of a more warmly human expression flickered on his countenance, and his eyes softened in an imperceptible smile. It was rumored later that the defendant’s smile had won him his life. “A fellow who laughed at death!” the wise ones explained. At any rate the verdict of the jury was “Murder in the second degree.” The judgment of the court was twenty-five years. “Too bad it can’t be more,” the judge said, frowning upon the prisoner’s tight-lipped smile. But twenty-five years is a long span, long enough for passions to cool and memories to lose their rancor. The prisoner’s hair would be gray, his figure less vigorous, his body softer, his eyes calmer, his brain slower. Stephen Yerkes would be “safe” on his return to the world, 1911 would need have no fear of him. He would be over fifty. Stephen Yerkes wore his peculiar smile when he entered Sing Sing in 1886. And twenty-five years did not erase it. It was there when he emerged in 1911. “Go straight,” the warden told him. Six months later he was back. ‘A three-time killer!” the prosecutor thundered at the conclusion of Yerkes’ second trial for murder. ““T'wenty-five years ago the law was an ass . . . it spared the life of this man! Had he been sent to the gallows, we would today have been spared this ordeal; and the state would not now have to bear the expense of another

trial. Gentlemen, do not repeat that error. Send him to the chair. He does not deserve life!” The jury listened solemnly. Their eyes moved toward the prisoner whose lean, lined face showed no emotion, and whose calm eyes followed the prosecutor’s raving gestures. “A cold-blooded killer!” The prosecutor’s fist beat the words into the railing. The jury stared at the prisoner. The prisoner stared back

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coolly. His lips tightened, a fleeting glint of hardness moved in his eyes, and his lips curled in a thin smile. It was rumored later that the defendant’s smile had made certain his conviction.

“A cold-blooded murderer,” the jury agreed, as they decreed his death on the first ballot. “And may God have mercy on your soul!” the judge droned as he imposed the death sentence, glowering at the prisoner’s smile. >?

*“A bad one,” the sheriff said, when he surrendered his prisoner

to Captain Charles Hilbert of the Sing Sing guards. His tone con-

veyed repugnance and caution. Captain Hilbert gazed at the lean, deep-lined, inscrutable face whose eyes stared unwinking into his. Damn it, the man’s inhuman nerve! The captain banged his red, meaty fists on the arms of his chair. “TI hoped it wouldn’t be like this,” he said, “not after twenty-

five years.”

The prisoner remained silent. “Take him away,” the captain muttered. The sheriff poked his prisoner in the midriff as if he had been a straw dummy, and led him through the door toward the death house.

3 Had Stephen Yerkes not lived twenty-five years in cell 202, of the old cell block, there would have been for him no resurrec-

tion. Indeed, he probably preferred the oblivion to which the law consigned him through the medium of the electric chair. So, at

least, Yerkes might have told us, if he could have spoken at the’ moment of dissolution. Yerkes, born in 1858, was an American whose ancestors had

been native born for three generations. In the parlor of his red brick home on Bond Street, just a turn off Broadway, three men in

uniform looked down from the wall beside the damask-curtained window. The first was great-grandfather Yerkes, in whose eyes was the grim memory of Valley Forge and the pride of Yorktown. The

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second was Stephen’s grandfather, who had fought with Jackson for the glory of his flag. The third, the one with a mild suggestion of disillusionment in the eyes, was his own father. He had lost a leg, and his cheek bore a long scar, plainly visible on the canvas— a deep groove like a saber cut extending from the corner of his left eye to his chin. Stephen remembered timeless hours of communion with the portrait of his father, his child’s imagination picturing booming guns, charging cavalry, dark rolling clouds of smoke. His mother cried softly, as often as the portraits were mentioned, as she filled his eager ears with stories of his father’s adventures. She often told him about the time she had gone to look for his father among the unidentified wounded in the hospital. He had been reported missing. She had thought him dead. And Stephen remembered the faraway look in his mother’s eyes, the tears streaming down her cheeks. She was living Gettysburg over again. Stephen cried, too, as he listened. He was only ten. And he was glad when the doorbell rang tempestuously. The tall man reached down, planted his wooden stump firmly, and hauled the little boy to his shoulder. He was proud of his strength. In this way they entered the parlor where his mother was waiting. There were no tears in her eyes now... . An only child, Stephen was reared in a manner befitting the son of a wealthy silk merchant. His public school education was supplemented by a period of private tutoring, preparatory for college. . . . It was to be Harvard. “It’s where I would have gone,” his father explained, “if it wasn’t for the war. It’s the Yerkes tradition.” The choice of a profession for Stephen was the subject of endless discussion in the household. His mother wanted him to be a lawyer, his father leaned toward medicine. Stephen himself was interested in finance, which he thought promised more glamour for a young fellow beginning life on his own, and much better opportunities for quick advancement. At fifteen he was already following with eagerness current newspaper reports featuring “dollar battles,” with Wall Street

giants fighting for control of public utilities then in process of

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development. Names like Jay Gould, Jay Cooke, General Dix, Horace Clark, Augustus Schell, and the Vanderbilts loomed large in his imagination. Very early he got the habit of investing a modest sum of money in securities, on paper, and watching it grow into a fictitious fortune. He would exhibit his account with pride to his father,

and was chagrined at the latter’s lack of enthusiasm toward his manipulations.

“It’s gambling,” his father said. “No good can come of it . . . a man should work for his money.” Then had come the panic, in 1873, when his schedules showed losses instead of profits. Values tumbled from dizzy heights, and a score of banks closed their doors. Stephen couldn’t figure it out, he saw no good reason for the sudden collapse. But money seemed to have as suddenly disappeared. Where had it gone? His father was showing signs of nervousness. Stripped of credit, his silk business on Worth Street was threatened with bank-

ruptcy. He grew sullen and moody. The thump of his wooden leg was harsh and slow. Streaks of gray grizzled his hair. Stephen knew fear then, an unfathomable, consuming horror

no masquerade of gallantry could defeat. He saw it in the nervous twitching of his father’s lips, the pitiable broken trembling of his

hands which he tried to conceal. And it was in the sounds of lonely crying that broke through the locked door of his mother’s bedroom. “It means bankruptcy,” his father was saying behind the door

one night, in tones of bitter finality. “I can’t hold on much longer.” Stephen could hear no more. His father came out, stumped down the stairs and slammed the street door as he left the house. January 16, 1876. It was a bitter cold day, with the snow lying deep in the streets. The sounds of jangling sleighbells came silvered through the tightly shut windows of the Yerkes home. Inside the house, the tall parlor stove gave off a drowsy, pleasant warmth that crept along the halls and spread up the staircase, dispelling frost. Outside the whirling snow made butterflies on the windowpanes. Stephen was curled up on a sofa turning the pages of Harper’s

Weekly. The table was set for supper. The doorbell rang. He went eagerly out into the hall, expect-

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ing his father. The freezing air that came in when he opened the door rushed against his legs, sinking chilling teeth into his calves. A man grotesquely bundled and encumbered in a great ungainly fur coat with a fur hat pulled down over his face, stepped in, stamping and beating off snow. But it wasn’t the face of his father that emerged from under the fur hat. It was the man from the store. His face, reddened and

screwed up with cold, was yet further pinched by anxiety, and he was breathing hard from excitement. “IT want to speak to your ma,” he said in a thick strained voice. Stephen’s mother had come out into the hall and stood just behind him, her face questioning; as she heard these words she started forward, graciousness and dignity in her manner as she asked, “What is it?” The man had pushed back the hood, baring his head, and stood gape-jawed, fumbling with the coat as if he could not quite make up his mind whether to take it off or not. “There’s been an accident, ma’am,” he blurted out finally. Ar nce “Is he hurt?” The man hesitated, mumbling incoherently. She withdrew, only to return in a moment, wearing her cape and bonnet. The man was standing with his back to the door. “Don’t,” he said. “I—I’m afraid it’s no use, ma’am.”

She cried out sharply, and Stephen, putting his arms around her, helped her into the parlor. He spoke tenderly, seeking to reassure her about the disaster he himself knew must have been fatal. Then he left her, entreating her to be quiet till he got back with news. Snatching his coat from the rack in the hall he dashed through the door and jumped into the waiting sleigh beside the man who had brought the evil tidings, and the fast cutter soon reached his father’s place of business. Stephen pushed through the crowd surging around the entrance to the store and made his way inside, hardly conscious of the stifling fumes or of the heavy smoke blinding him and causing his eyes to smart. It was too dark to see anything. He groped

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along blackened counters, hot to the touch, stumbling over smolder-

ing bolts of silk and charred equipment, and reached the rear of the store, where a group of men stood silent around a clearing in the débris. Strong hands seized him, but he thrust them off and dropped on his knees beside the twisted body that lay between two flickering lanterns. He gazed, horrified, at the distorted features. “He mighta saved himself,” somebody said, “if his wooden leg hadn’t come loose.” Deep down in the region of his struggling

inchoate perception Stephen felt the words take root, lodged in his flesh and being.

“He might have saved himself . . .” His unwilling eyes were fixed on his father’s corpse. He looked at the stump of the right thigh . . . the wooden leg had been unstrapped. It lay in a corner, some yards distant, untouched by the flames.

4 Stephen was eighteen when his father died, tall for his age, clear-eyed, with strongly developed shoulders. He was wrenched by sudden tragedy out of his youthful world. The insurance on the store saved the estate from bankruptcy. It was just enough to pay the creditors. All that was left was the house they lived in, and the furniture. Stephen thought about a job.

But jobs were scarce. New York had not recovered from the panic, people still spoke commiseratingly of hard times. The election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency, after one of the most bitterly contested campaigns in history, had reaffirmed the. power of the Republicans but had not hastened the return of prosperity.

It was at his mother’s suggestion that he called on Howard Ayres, the lawyer. “He was your father’s friend,” she told him. ‘““And mine, too,”

she added reminiscently, “long before I married your father. He is

a great man, close to Mr. Tilden. I’ve heard he helped manage his campaign.”

Stephen waited in the antechamber almost an hour before he

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was ushered into the great man’s presence. Mr. Ayres was standing at the window looking out into the traffic of Broadway, a mediumsized, lean man, slightly bald. He seemed unaware of the young man’s entry.

Finally he turned. A pair of shrewd gray eyes, large, round, and of a luminous smoke-dullness like agate marbles, surveyed Stephen. They appeared somewhat too large for the narrow face, giving it a slightly froggy expression. His cheeks sloped sharply toward the finely pointed chin that hung, dagger-like, below a heavy mustache. “You are Allan Yerkes’ son?” The deep voice was cordial, but the agate eyes lacked warmth. “Your mother,” Ayres said after a moment, smiling faintly, “is she well?” “She asked to be remembered.” “Remembered,

eh?” The man closed his eyes for a moment,

then opening them suddenly, he spoke somewhat irascibly, “It is I who do the remembering!” Howard Ayres was a famous lawyer. His fees were high, his clients were leaders in their particular fields of operation. Besides being attorney for a large and powerful corporation with multiple resources, he kept up an active private practice as a corporation

and criminal lawyer. The talk of the street was that he had never lost a case, and he could slice a point of law so fine that the shrewd-

est judge was unable to detect the hair-woven strands of his argument. “How old are you?” Stephen felt like a culprit being examined for a misdemeanor. In rapid succession came a series of other questions: his father, his death, and finally about his mother. All the while Stephen remained standing. He was not offered a chair. “So, your father died on the verge of bankruptcy,” Ayres commented

with

brutal

frankness,

after he had concluded

his

interrogation, “and you want a job.” He had turned around again, staring down into the street.

His back was toward Stephen. Suddenly he marched to his desk and slid into his chair. His hand caressed the pointed chin, tugging spasmodically at his mustache.

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“Tl give you a job,” he said. His voice had grown warmer; there was a faint glow of red on his cheeks. “But first I want to see your mother. It’s twenty years . . . since we last met.” He extracted a heavy gold watch from his vest pocket, stared at it a moment, and added, “Eight o’clock, tonight. You will tell her.” The last with an air of dismissal. Stephen told his mother. But he was not at home when Howard Ayres called. When he returned, later, he found her sitting up for him. Her face was

streaked as though she had been crying. He waited for her to tell him about it.

‘““He’s the same as he was twenty years ago,” she told him. “Just as arrogant and unfeeling!” Her eyes moved toward the portrait on the wall, and she continued with a heavy sigh. “So different from your father! He never married. I sent him away tonight, as I did then. He is a great man, he told me, rich and

successful. He said I was a fool to marry your father. He said he could do big things for you, if .. .” “Tf you married him,” Stephen burst in. “He said he would take you into his office and make you a lawyer.” “Well, and what did you tell him? What if you refused?” “Ym afraid you’ll have to look elsewhere for that job,” his mother said with a small troubled smile in which, as in her tone,

there was a shade of whimsicality. Stephen stooped to kiss her. “Who in hell wants to be a lawyer, anyway? I’ll get myself a real job!” he cried with affectionate jocularity.

5 Stephen pondered a great deal about his father’s suicide. He must have died in agony. There was a kind of courage in it, the type of physical courage that had made him a hero on the battlefield. It enabled him to die valiantly, but to Stephen it was of no use as a guide for living. Yet he grieved. He understood, beyond the bitterness of his new position, beyond even his ignorance and inexperience, that his father had been consumed, beaten down by

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things he could not have helped, against which personal courage had been of no avail. He wanted to know more about it. But the exigencies of his situation gave him little time for reflection. He simply had to get a job. And he saw that his earlier hope of a clerkship in Wall Street, in a broker’s office where his natural instincts for finance promised a career, would have to be abandoned. Wall Street was still jumpy. Brokers held out no hope

of an early revival. He began to scrutinize the “want columns” of the daily papers. Through them he obtained a job as runner for a drygoods store. The pay was small and the work hard, carrying orders from the main building to the warehouse. Then the runners were fired. Again Stephen turned to the want column. Things were becoming desperate at home. His mother was ailing. February 10, 1877. He left home early, in a hopeful frame of mind. The morning paper was his inspiration. It contained an item that promised something definite. A coachman was wanted, an able-bodied young man of “good presence, native born. Call in person at No. 323 West 23rd Street.”

At ten o’clock Stephen was standing on the iron-railed stoop of a three-story brownstone house, one of a dozen applicants waiting to be admitted. Most of them looked older than he. All of them were more ragged. The door was opened by a tall angular woman who eyed them suspiciously before motioning them in. The men streamed into the hall and stood apart from one another, some gazing in fascinated wonder and others with an expression of surliness at the splendid furnishings, all of them eying their neighbors furtively, as if resenting competition.

Light footsteps sounded on the stairs. Stephen saw a pair of delicate

feet in shoes unbelievably,

ludicrously,

tiny and

trim-

fitting, stepping daintily down to produce a tempestuous swish of silken garments. Even before she appeared, he was picturing a young girl. She stopped at the foot of the stairway, a demure figure boldly confronting the stares of the waiting applicants. “My father was called away suddenly and could not wait to see you,” the young lady explained to the group of men. “He said

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to go down to his office, number sixty-two Wall Street. you there.” were disappointed growls. She turned away, walking the street door which she opened to permit their

departure. “What is the name, miss?”’ one of the men asked. “I thought you knew,” the girl answered, smiling. ‘Pitney, Thaddeus Pitney. It’s on the door. You can’t miss it.” Stephen was the last to go. She was still standing by the door as he passed.

“Sixty-two Wall Street,” she called out in a high light voice, seeing him wavering on the doorstep. He turned and for an incalculable, incredible second looked

directly into her eyes. She slammed the door, suddenly. The disappointed applicants stood in a huddled group on the sidewalk as he came down the steps. “Damned millionaires,” one of them grumbled. “Treat you like dirt!” “T be doggoned if I’m walkin’ that distance fer a coachman’s job,” said another, “‘an’ there ain’t a nickel in me pocket fer a ride.”

“A nickel could do better service,” a third man suggested, with a laugh. “It’s a cold day!” “Cute bitch,” one of the younger men said, loosing a stream of brown juice at the white snow at his feet, “I wouldn’t mind

coachin’ fer de likes o’ her.” Stephen turned sharply. Seeing his menacingly clenched fist, the speaker retreated, shielding himself with his arms. “No harm, mister,” he apologized, “I ain’t meanin’ no slan-. der!” He was more ragged, dirtier, more miserable than the others. His cheeks were sunken, and his black grizzled chin had not been scraped by a razor in a week. Stephen’s hands relaxed. Turning from the muttering group,

he walked rapidly in the direction of Broadway. It was a long walk to Wall Street. The horse cars jingled by, but Stephen made no effort to board them. There was no hurry. None of the other applicants had followed him. Sixty-two Wall Street was an unpretentious building, squeezed

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in between two imposing marble-fronted structures that reached high above their mean-looking neighbor, like virile youngsters guarding a shabby ancestor. The lower floor was vacant. On the windowpane of a narrow door was printed in black-bordered gilt letters the name “Thaddeus Pitney,” and immediately below it “One flight up.” A creaking wooden stairway led to the upper floor. Stephen knocked at the paneled door. There was no response. He knocked again, waited a moment, and then tried the knob. The door yielded.

He walked into a dim, bare-looking office that opened into a brighter inner room. A thick phlegmy voice called out, ““Who’s there?” Stephen stepped in and met the heavy-lidded gaze of a fat, gray-haired gentleman seated at a large desk. Spread out before him was a checkerboard on which a number of carved wooden chessmen stood in the order of the game. “T’ve come about that job,” Stephen explained after a moment of silence. The heavy eyes continued their scrutiny. The fat man leaned back in the chair, the tufted gray sedge of his eyebrows jerking in a lively and remarkable manner. “But I’m looking for a coachman,” Mr. Pitney said, smiling. “T am a coachman,” Stephen answered solemnly. “You are, hey? Well, not the kind that wears livery.”

“I’m everything you advertised for,” Stephen assured him. Mr. Pitney surveyed him doubtfully. “Td take you for a clerk,” he said, glancing at Stephen’s hands. *You’re not used to hard work.” Stephen flushed. “Give me a trial, Mr. Pitney,” he said quickly, trying to keep the entreaty out of his voice. “I’m sure I can handle horses . . . and do anything else .. .” “There will be the stable to clean and chores to do for Hennessy.” Mr. Pitney laughed, and cleared his throat. “Hennessy is the housekeeper . . . a woman who has been with us for years and hard to get on with.” “I'd like to try,” Stephen said. “If I don’t make good .. .” “Yes, I know. The last fellow lasted exactly two days...

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Hennessy chased him with a broom.” A chuckle originating somewhere in the region of Mr. Pitney’s great belly traveled upward in a series of jerks. “But I guess you'll do,” he said finally. “You seem all right. And you probably need the job. Report in the morning,” he ordered. “Your day begins at seven.” Stephen was already down at the street door when Mr. Pitney’s voice halted him. “I forgot-to ask your name,” he called out from the head of the stairs. Stephen told him, and stepped out into the street. Thaddeus Pitney waddled back into his office, seated himself at the desk with a heavy thud and began to reassemble his chessmen. Suddenly his pudgy hand smote the chessboard a victorious smack, upsetting the chessmen over the desk. “Yerkes,” he whispered to himself. “Yerkes. I wonder . . .” He reached for a silver snuffbox that he kept in a drawer of

the desk, delved in its interior, and brought his dusted fingers up to his broad tufted nostrils. He snorted loudly. “Jiminy,” he sneezed, “‘there’s something wrong when Allan Yerkes’ son hires out as my coachman!”’ Then he returned to the chessmen, setting them up again for battle. Pawns,

knights, bishops, queens,

and timid kings . . . it

was his way of tackling problems.

6 “Call

me

Hennessy,”

the lanky,

mare-faced

woman

told

Stephen as he sat in the kitchen the next morning, waiting for Mr. Pitney’s summons. “‘No title. Just Hennessy.” She glanced at him belligerently, ““An’ don’t be arskin’ me if I’m married, ’cause it’s none of yer bizness.”

She snatched a kettle off the stove, and poured out a cup of tea. “Men are always arskin’ me questions, especially when they’re new about ’ere. But,” her head bobbing aggressively, “I ain’t the

tellin’ kind. Sez I to them, ‘find out fer yourself . . . if you can.’ ” Her hands rose to her head, smoothing the strands of coarse hair which was streaked with gray, and went on smoothing down

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her sides, pressing out the folds of her white apron. She laughed vaingloriously. “An’ there ain’t none of ’em found out yet!” Hennessy introduced Stephen to the two horses. She explained at length, and with precision, the habits and preferences of the “mister” and “the little angel,” Miss Pitney. “It was me brought her into the world. I feel like her mother, she bein’ an orphan these ten years. Bless her soul, she’s the image of her ma. “Sez I to Mr. Pitney, after I closed the eyes of the poor sweet creature, an’ us standin’ together cryin’ fit fer our hearts to break, an’ she just like she was sleepin’, I sez, ‘The memory of her’ll haunt you the rest of your days. You'll never be happy with another woman. So don’t think of marryin’ again!’ “T remember like it was yesterday. Mr. Pitney looked at me kind o’ queer like. “The things you say, Hennessy,’ he sez to me,

the tears rollin’ down his face, ‘an’ her not cold yet an’ waitin’ to be buried.’ ” Hennessy dabbed her eyes with the edge of her apron. “I said it on purpose,” she continued vehemently. “I know men. Women ain’t no more to ’em than this!” Her fingers snapped in Stephen’s face. “Come an’ go, go an’ come. J seen it in my day.

He never talked of marryin’ again, I’da left ’im like that!”’ She snapped her fingers viciously. Stephen liked Hennessy. Garrulous and domineering, she had a genuine affection for the household to which she had given years of faithful service. Her reign was not confined to the kitchen. Mr. Pitney bowed to her judgment in the intimate details of routine. It was not merely the prerogative of an old servant, there was something deeper in the authority she assumed. The origin of the sovereignty wielded by Hennessy rested in the dead Mrs. Pitney. ““The missus would have arsked it,” was the winning argument in any controversy with Thaddeus Pitney. And she could subdue Marguerite to instant compliance, simply by

pointing out, “Your ma woulda liked it!” “T’m glad you didn’t strike that man yesterday,’ Marguerite said, coming into the kitchen on the first morning of Stephen’s

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employment, and giving him a friendly smile. “I watched you from the window.” Stephen felt his face turn hot. “So, you’re the fightin’ kind,” piciously. “Now,

Hen,”

Marguerite

Hennessy

laughed.

“Father

exclaimed, told me

sus-

he en-

gaged you,” she went on, “but he didn’t tell me your name.” “Stephen Yerkes,’ Hennessy repeated after him. She shook her head. “It don’t sound like no name for a coachman. I'd think it was one of them aristocrats that lives in them grand new houses on Fifth Avenue.” “But it’s my name,” Stephen replied in a serious tone, “and I am the new coachman.” “Well,” drawled Hennessy, “maybe you are.” She eyed him again. “I’m not sure how the missus woulda took to it.” “Mother would have left it to Father’s judgment,’ Marguerite said, tossing her head. “Your father’s judgment,” Hennessy grumbled. ‘SHumph!” She turned toward the stove and busied herself with breakfast. Stephen slipped easily into the duties of his job. The stable had never looked so tidy, the horses never so well cared for, the house had never been so warm. With the coming of spring the garden took on new freshness and neatness.

Even Hennessy overcame her early misgivings. Her coal bin was always filled. The kitchen floor was never dingy with prints of the coachman’s heavy boots. And these things pleased her. Her gruff voice softened when he mentioned his mother. “It’s a lonesome life,” she remarked, sympathetically. ‘“No woman should die a widow. If she’s still got marryin’ in her! Now, if the mister had died first, as I allus thought he would, the missus woulda married within the year. I’da seen to it. If it was me,” she

sighed, “I wouldn’ta waited the year. Men don’t deserve it.” Stephen never argued the point. His apparent acquiescence raised him in her favor. At no time did he experience a sense of servility. He had dismissed, laughingly, his mother’s shocked protest when he described his livery . . . a long gray coat with two perpendicular rows of

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brass buttons reaching to his waist, and the traditional tall hat to match. “It’s no humbler,” he told her, pointing to the three portraits on the wall, ‘than those uniforms. And as for excitement, well—”

“They served their country, Stephen,” his mother rebuked him. “Your father was a brave man!” A desperate man, rather, he wanted to tell her. Invariably, the

mention of his father ended the conversation. She lapsed into reverie. Yet it would hardly be fair to think of Stephen as content with his lot. He was, after all, a maturing youth nearing his majority. And though it was comforting to know that despite the general slack in employment, he had a steady job, there still stirred in his mind thoughts of advancement; they became more poignant as he was thrown in closer association with Marguerite. But he never thought of her seriously in connection with himself or indicated by the slightest sign anything more than the respectful attitude of a servant to his mistress. Marguerite was cordial. But after the first day she assumed in his presence a dignity, amounting to hauteur, far beyond her years. A little figure of arrogance and fire and captivating grace, she would sit erect on the cushioned seat in the open carriage, apparently unaware of the eloquent stares of pedestrians who blundered into the way, bemused with gazing at her and at the handsome coachman who handled his reins with assurance and skill. He did not know, of course, that she was interested in the

contour of his head, the elegance and dash of his tight-fitting coat, the thickness of his dark brown hair. He knew only that she called for the carriage frequently. “Sure, you'll be losin’ the use of yer legs,” Hennessy re-

proached her one afternoon. It was the fifth call that day. “Tsn’t he handsome?” she replied, laughing. “The girls are all dying of envy!” The laughter ended abruptly as Stephen entered to ask her

pleasure. With a solemn and dignified air she gave him his orders. He did not resent her attitude. It amused him. He did not discuss it with his mother. And he did not tell her about the night

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of the birthday party, a surprise, engineered by Hennessy. She had taken Stephen into her confidence. His stratagem was a huge success. Twelve couples responded. They had all brought gifts, each with a card appropriately inscribed. But there was one gift without a card . . . a bottle of the newest French perfume. It was greatly admired by the assembled

guests. “It smacks of a romance!” one of the young men declared in a loud voice. ““Who’s the beau?” another shouted. Marguerite, her face blushing crimson, laughed it off. Then while the party was at its height and the company waltzed to the strains of the musicians,

she came

out

into the kitchen

where

Stephen and Hennessy were busy with the refreshments that were to crown the festivities. Her young slim body snuggled against the ironclad Hennessy, and her round white arms pulled the old woman’s head down for the impulsive kiss of trembling lips. Finally, she turned away from Hennessy and came toward Stephen. There was no hauteur or dignity now, her hand stretched out and touched his in a warm clasp. Her lips curled in a childlike smile of innocence and joy. “Thank you,” she said, “for the party and . . . the perfume!” She did not wait to hear his stammering acknowledgment, but ran out quickly to rejoin her friends. A quarter of his week’s wages had gone into the bottle of perfume. She seemed to have forgotten it the next morning.

7 Stephen was fond of Thaddeus Pitney, who was as genial as Marguerite was aloof. His energy belied his years and corpulence. He was as garrulous as Hennessy, only more circumspect. Stephen

never heard him scold or swear. He had a ready smile, which broke often into an amused deep-throated chuckle. And he had a soft heart. Stephen himself had reason to acknowledge Mr. Pitney’s

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benevolence. At the end of the first year of service, his wages were increased. “You’re a high-priced coachman now!” Mr. Pitney laughed. Twenty-five dollars was, surely, a handsome wage. Curiously enough, it was Mr. Pitney’s generosity that eventually lost him his coachman. Stephen had begun to think more definitely about the future. Two events spurred his desire. One, the savings account he started the very day of his increase; the other was the accident of encountering Marguerite a week later at Union Square Theatre, where he had taken his mother to see Clara Morris in Jane Eyre, a great popular hit. Marguerite was escorted by one of the young men of her set, a foppish fellow who strutted stiffly in the latest thing in men’s fashions. Stephen caught sight of her during the intermission, in

his wandering through the crowded lobby, alone, listening to the animated gossip of the promenading couples. He deliberately crossed her path. She saw him, and nodded. Her escort saw him, too, and turned to whisper in Marguerite’s ear. She tipped her face up to the young man’s with a smile in which Stephen, watching, saw amusement at his expense. Reddening, jerking his shoulders, he walked away from them to rejoin his mother in the balcony. He paid little attention to the third act of the play. Miss Morris’ brilliant portrayal of the star part, drawing sighs and tears from the vast audience, passed before his eyes with no greater dramatic appeal than an empty fluttering of rags upon a washline

in a neighborhood back yard. His eyes roved over the darkened theater below, where he imagined Marguerite, in the dark, clasping her escort’s hand in fervent response to his whisperings. About this time Stephen put off his coachman’s livery. The long coat of thick woolen material was too hot for summer, and

it weighed on him for other reasons. Neither Mr. Pitney nor Marguerite seemed to notice it when he appeared without the uni-

form. Hennessy commented on it. ~ *Tt’s no more coachman you are,” she said, “without them boots and brass buttons. More like a gentleman caller! Better

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mind, young man. The mister’ll be stoppin’ yer wages, thinkin’ you’re no laborer.” Stephen was pondering. His bank balance showed two hun-

dred dollars. He was beginning to feel surer of himself; not that he exaggerated the importance of the little money, for he was mature enough to realize how insignificant it was as a basis for independence. But he began to like the feel of money. Though people spoke more hopefully, business was still stagnant. Stocks were at new lows, dormant. Yet Mr. Pitney was optimistic, apparently unworried. Stephen absorbed something of this remarkable buoyancy. He determined to look around for more promising employment. | He gave Mr. Pitney two weeks’ notice. Mr. Pitney broke the news to Hennessy. And Hennessy told Marguerite... . One evening a week later, Marguerite announced her intention of going to the country for a holiday. Stephen, waiting in the kitchen while they finished supper, heard her speaking to her father. He was expecting to drive Mr. Pitney to a meeting that night. Meetings had been numerous of late.

“You can’t have the horses,” her father said mildly. “I shall be needing them this week. I’m expecting a turn in the market.” “I don’t care! I’m tired of carriages and horses and... coachmen!” Marguerite exclaimed impulsively, in a loud pouting tone.

Stephen burned with a stinging anger. He heard her father’s angry remonstrance. Hennessy, returning to the kitchen, busied

herself noisily with the platters. Stephen’s head was buried in the evening paper, a black smudge blurring the page in his eyes. He jumped up quickly on receiving Mr. Pitney’s summons and stamped out through the back door; and met his employer at the curb. They rode in silence, Stephen’s trim figure squeezed, perspiring, against the fat man beside him. Mr. Pitney was fumbling with his snuffbox. “Pve been thinking about you, Steve,” he said after an unusually loud inhalation, “‘your wanting to leave . . .” “T owe it to myself, sir,” Stephen said. “But times are bad, very bad. And jobs are pretty scarce.” “T’ve got some money saved . . . it'll tide me over until . . .”

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“Then you have nothing definite in mind?” “Nothing, except I’d like to get a clerkship in a Wall Street office.” Mr. Pitney gave one of his throaty chuckles. “Aiming to be a financier? It’s a risky business.” “There’s little that isn’t risky,’ Stephen replied. “Even driving. . . .” He laughed, as he pulled at the reins to permit another driver to pass him. Mr. Pitney made no comment. He sat staring straight ahead into the darkness, punctured at intervals by the yellow gleam of a lamp. His fingers dipped mechanically into the snuffbox and reached for his expectant nostrils; his body rocked and quivered from the explosion of his sneeze. There was a moment of silence. “Walk the horse, Steve,” Mr. Pitney said. ““There’s time.” Stephen pulled on the reins. The horse settled into a slow, swinging pace.

“How would you like to be my clerk?” “['d be grateful for the chance, sir,” Stephen said eagerly. The darkness hid the glow of his eyes. “J don’t mind saying I’ve taken a notion to you, Steve,” Mr. Pitney continued, turning his great moon face to Stephen’s profile. “You’re dependable. That’s important in my business—in any broker’s business,” he added quickly. “Maybe you'd fit in. . I’ve never had a clerk,” he said after a pause, “but things may im-

prove soon . . . mergers and pools and corners . . . maybe that’s all Greek to you—” “No, sir, they’re not,” Stephen interrupted. “I’ve read about those things in the papers . . . I remember the Northwestern and the fight over the control of the Erie.” “That’s fine, Steve. As I was saying, there'll be doings soon. I’ve been hearing things . . . rumors, you know, Wall Street

rumors. There’s something stirring, I’m sure about that. PIl be needing someone who can be trusted.” The thick voice sank to a whisper. “I think you would be that kind of a clerk.” “Certainly, sir,” Stephen assured him. “I hope you'll give me aatrials “You’ve had your trial, eighteen months of it. I’ve been

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watching you. Besides . . .” Mr. Pitney smiled. “You’re strong. You may need muscle in your new job.” Stephen was told to report downtown in the morning. The new coachman, hired that very day, was expected the following afternoon. Stephen could hardly refrain from waking his mother when he got home, to give her the glad news. In the morning he told her. Deeper than his own happiness was the joy he felt in her grateful appreciation of Mr. Pitney’s kindness. “I feel like going to him to tell him how thankful I am!” she said, her eyes lighting. “I’m proud of you, my son. You'll make your way, I'll live to see you a big man!” Half an hour later Hennessy stood over him while he packed his belongings. “T knowed you wasn’t a coachman the minute I laid eyes on you! Stephen Yerkes! Who ever heard of a name like that scrubbin’ a stable or feedin’ horses? Now if yer name was Pat or

Mike—”

‘

Her chatter ceased suddenly as Marguerite slipped in through the doorway. She was in her rose-colored morning gown, of thin, almost transparent texture, her brown braids falling down over her slim shoulders. She was out of breath, as if she had been hurrying, and her eyes were heavy with sleep. “Bless me soul, girl,” Hennessy protested, “you ain’t had yer second wink! What woke you this early?” “Don’t pack my things, Hen,” Marguerite said, with a quick glance toward Stephen, “I’ve changed my mind about going away.’

“I had never a thought of packin’ yer things, Margy,” Hennessy declared bluntly. “As if I didn’t know about yer mind changin’ before you spoke it yesterday. Jest like yer ma you are,

child. She changed her mind every hour about her beaux . . . she had yer father near crazy! I never knowed what made her pick ’im in the end, nohow.

Now

go along, back to bed with you...

you'll be catchin’ yer death, an’ J ain’t achin’ fer a funeral.” But Marguerite did not stir. Her eyes were on the box in

Stephen’s hands. “Can’t I have the carriage to do some shopping this morning?”

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“Stephen’s not coachin’ this morning,” said Hennessy dryly. “His two weeks aren’t up yet,” Marguerite said crossly. Stephen was about to explain about the new man, but Hennessy interrupted him. “He ain’t leavin’ at all. It’s jest he’s bein’ transferred, promoted like. Yer father’s took ’im to be ’is clerk. From scrubbin’ to writin’ . . . quite a come-up. But [’ll be missin’ him. ’Tain’t often a coachman’s a good listener. An’ he never arsks questions!” Stephen laughed. Marguerite’s face was serious. “Perhaps if he did ask questions he might learn more,” she said rudely and walked out of the kitchen. “Ain’t wimmin the queer critters,” said Hennessy, bending over the ironing board. Stephen had finished packing. His face was angry, his eyes a sullen lead color. “All the same,” she went on, banging her irons, “‘you better take advice from your elders. Always know the answer before you arsks the question! Like the Good Lord when He arsked Adam why he-et the apple. As if He didn’t know! But He went right on >

arskin’, an’ let the man make a fool of himself.’”? Her head bobbed

vigorously, and she added, ‘“‘An’ he’s been a fool ever since!” Stephen did not thoroughly understand Hennessy’s Biblical allusion. He was glum when he said good-by. She held out her hand to him, her fierce eyes twinkling. “Next time I see you, you'll be Mr. Yerkes, an’ waitin’ to be

served like a highfalutin visitor. Don’t forget,” she said, “I’m always Hennessy to you.” “And I’m always Stephen,” he laughed, ‘“‘and I'll help with the dishes.” “Even if you are one of thim aristocrats, as I allus thought you was.

33

8 “See all, Know all, Say nothing.” This advice, framed, hung on the wall of Thaddeus Pitney’s private office. He pointed it out to Stephen the first morning of his clerkship. “It’s the motto of a good broker, something he never forgets,” Mr. Pitney said. “No man ever cleaned up in Wall Street by taking

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the public into his confidence. You’ve got to figure it out all by yourself, Tips don’t count for much. when he’s been sold out. The Bowery’s cut from under. Thought they owned selves paupers. Bought when they should

The tipster never knows full of men who’ve been

millions and found themhave sold, or contrariwise.

So remember, it’s ‘snoop around, learn all there is to know, and act

on your own hunch.’ ” Stephen’s duties were not onerous. His job was to follow the trend of the market and report to Mr. Pitney about any stock showing undue activity. He went to work at nine in the morning. His employer generally arrived at ten. By that time Stephen had scanned the morning papers and was ready to discuss the financial news with his employer. At ten-thirty Pitney left for the Exchange. Stephen lounged in the office, slouching at the ancient rolltop desk in the outer room, with nothing to do but continue his studies or read the news. Sometimes he would sit gazing at the empty, dust-covered bins that were like so many cavernous dead eyes surveying him with gritty disinterest. Mr. Pitney usually returned at noon, when Stephen went out for lunch. At one o’clock Pitney went out, and came back at two. The rest of the day he would spend at his desk. Thaddeus Pitney at close range seemed a leisurely gentleman, . unaffected by the Wall Street tempo, undisturbed by the tumult of the Exchange. Apparently he did little trading. He was exceedingly close-mouthed about his interests. And to the actual extent of his holdings there was no clue. Not a single caller came to the office during one whole week. Pitney seemed to be playing a lone game. He listened, without comment, to Stephen’s brief digest of the financial news and gave no indication of his plans for the day. His books of account were kept locked in the safe in his private room. He wrote his own checks.

Thaddeus Pitney of Wall Street was not the same man, genial employer and affectionate father, who lived on Twenty-third Street. Here he was not only secretive about things, he spent peculiar hours over his chessmen. Whatever the source of his wealth, Pitney never seemed to be short of cash. Stephen, going into the private room one morning to

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ask for something and walking quietly, had seen him take a strong box from the safe before he left for the Exchange, and it was stuffed with greenbacks. Mr. Pitney glared at him as he slammed the iron lid and reprimanded him severely for “bounding in” without knocking. Stephen was beginning to think there was something awry about Pitney. It might be the long wait for Wall Street’s recovery or depreciating securities eating into his resources. At any rate, there seemed nothing for Stephen to do, no errands to run, no stock to be picked up or delivered. He had imagined a broker’s office a

beehive of activity, responding instantly, vociferously, to the tone of the Exchange, a place where men shouted figures and bandied millions like children playing with pennies. Saturday came. It had been a long dull week, full of time dense like a fog drifting over a still sea. Pitney had left for the Exchange, having given Stephen specific instructions for the morning.

“If there’s any caller—Saturday brings them sometimes— have him wait, and you come for me at the Exchange.” It was nearly eleven, and no one had come. Not a break in the monotony. Stephen was reading for the fourth time the Journal of Commerce, in which there was an article about James R. Keene,

the English-born Californian, said to be worth over four millions. Keene’s “short” sales were attracting attention. Stephen was very much interested. He toyed with the fanciful idea of knowing this Mr. Keene. There would be a job worth while! A chance to be in the thick of it. Two hundred dollars wasn’t enough to do anything with, but a man like Keene might fix it up for him to come in on a narrow margin. He had heard of such cases, of shoestring operators building fortunes on small investments. Why not? His two hundred might double, maybe treble. Next week he would ask Mr. Pitney for permission to accompany him to the floor of.the Exchange, perhaps he would get a

chance to see Keene and talk to him. Stephen was in a pleasant glow as he pictured the swift bulging of his bank account. First he would manage to meet Marguerite, accidentally of course, and watch her eyes pop when he strutted before her in the latest fashion . . . she wouldn’t be laughing then... .

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Before he emerged from his reverie, the door swung open and a brisk carrot-complexioned young man in a tight-fitting tan suit walked into the office, closing the door carefully behind him. When he turned around his mouth was open, and he was swallowing chunks of air. He removed his hat. His red hair was damp and matted over his narrow brow. “Where’s the boss?” he asked, glancing about. “Don’t stand there gapin’. I got to see him right away!” Stephen told him Mr. Pitney was at the Exchange. “Tl get him,” he said, and reached for his hat. He invited the

carroty young man, who seemed in a state close to collapse, to be seated. “If you’ll wait. What name shall I say?” “Tell him Tommy is waitin’. It’s a matter of minutes,” the young man explained. ““Who are you?” he asked in a pugnacious

tone, looking at Stephen. “I ain’t seen you before.” “Mr. Pitney’s clerk.” The young man’s reddish forehead was drawn into a complicated pattern of ridges and furrows with the force of his cogitation. “Ain’t you the guy was his coachman?” Stephen nodded. “Promoted, eh?”

“I guess so.”

“Found you all right, did he?” And after a moment, he inquired with the same aggressiveness, ‘““Well, what do you know?” Stephen looked calmly at him. Suddenly remembering the motto on the wall about which Mr. Pitney had so scrupulously ad-

monished him, and wishing to give a smart answer that might be taken

for humor,

he said on impulse, ‘See all, Know

all, Say.

nothing!” It was a neat hit. The furrows in the young man’s brow re-

laxed, and he laughed quietly. Then coming closer to Stephen, “Maybe I oughtn’t to wait for the old guy,” he said in a confidential monotone. “There ain’t much time. We got to act quick. Think you could handle it?” “I think so. If it’s something for the boss,” Stephen replied, bluffing. “If it’s somethin’ for the boss!” Tommy snorted, his face a masterpiece of disgust and scorn. ““Why, it’d boost you sky high.

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He’d be slobberin’ all over you. Listen,” he added, apparently attacked by another spasm of -skepticism and mistrust, “are you really in the know?” Stephen smiled enigmatically. Tommy was satisfied. “The address is four-six-one Madison Street, two flights up, door with the brass knob. Only brass knob on the floor. Knock twice. Whistle once. They'll let you in an’ hand you a package. Tuck it in your inside pocket and bring it here as fast as yer dogs can carry you.” He paused, and added, “Better repeat the instructions, to make sure.” “Brass knob, knock twice, whistle once . . . two flights up,”

Stephen repeated, as he prepared to go. Tommy stopped him. Again peering mistrustfully into Stephen’s face, he said, “Sure yer O.K.? "Cause there’ll be hell to pay if you ain’t. Hell fer me and worse fer you.” “I’m Mr. Pitney’s clerk, Tommy,” Stephen said reassuringly, with a forced smile. “O.K.,” Tommy exclaimed with sudden decision. “Git. Ill plant myself here an’ wait fer the boss.”

Stephen made sure to lock the door to the private office before he left. A thousand doubts of Mr. Pitney, Tommy,

himself and

the whole business assailed him as he walked rapidly up William Street, toward the East Side. Keyed up though he was by the prospect of adventure, he felt with each advancing step that he was walking into trouble. But his curiosity was greater than his misgivings.

He slowed down once as the*thought smote him that there might be danger in this thing. It would be easy to turn back, tell Tommy he preferred to wait for Mr. Pitney. Better let the “boss” handle it. He wavered. Tommy would sneer and call him yellow. Perhaps it was really important, and Mr. Pitney was depending upon him. It would be letting him down. He couldn’t do that, not after all the man had done for him. Maybe it wasn’t what he imagined, nothing wrong. Perhaps only a stockbroker’s little deal. He was a

fool to worry. He walked on. The hallway was dark, and he had to strike a match to find

©

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the brass-knobbed door. Two knocks, a low whistle . . . and he

heard a key turned in the lock. The door opened, a slit, then a little wider. And a voice growled, “What d’you want?” “From Tommy,” Stephen said in a whisper. The door was drawn back to let him in. He stepped into a room that was pitch-dark, without a crack of light. The atmosphere

was close, smelling of rats and old lumber. An arm guided him away from the door. Then somebody struck a match, and a yellowish light hissed from a gas jet. Two men were in the room, and they wore masks over the upper part of their faces. He had an impression of size,

and toughness, the men were husky fellows. Their haberdashery was stamped with the seal of the Bowery. He felt their eyes searching him through the little peepholes of their masks. “We ain’t seen you before,” one of the men said. ““Who are you?”

“Mr. Pitney’s clerk.” “We ain’t heard nothin’ about a clerk,” the same voice con-

tinued suspiciously.

Stephen made a great effort to suppress his nervousness and keep anxiety out of his tone.

“Tommy sent me—Mr. Pitney was at the Exchange—to save time.”

“What d’you know about Pitney?” the second man asked suddenly. Stephen plunged, as he had done with Tommy.

“See all, Know all, Say nothing.” “O.K.” Both men took off their masks.

One of them was clean shaven, the other wore a drooping walrus mustache. There was no more gentleness than beauty in the countenance of the latter. The clean-shaven fellow, in contrast, had

a high classic head, with a thin flying nose from which the lower part of the face fell away in a curious vacancy, the long upper lip sloping down and turning in sharply over his long tusklike teeth. The lips did not quite come together but left an edge of teeth exposed, and it was this rabbity mouth with its adenoidal expression that made the whole face go blank at the bottom.

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“They shoulda told us about a clerk,” the walrus one com-

plained. ‘““How are we to know?” He

took

a long envelope

from

the inside of his coat and

handed it to Stephen.

“Hope it don’t burn you. Before you get it to the old man!” He laughed under his mustache. “Ts that all?” Stephen asked. “All!? the man said sarcastically. ‘“There’s enough there to keep you in dough for the rest of yer life. Better sprint fast. Tell Mr. Pitney we'll see him at Ma’s.” He went out into the hall, and returned in a moment.

“Coast’s clear. Git goin’.”” He shoved Stephen through the

door, slamming it after him. Stephen walked cautiously down the stairs, out into the street, and turned down Madison Street toward Wall. He did not know what the envelope contained. He felt a peculiar warmth where it pressed against his body—or he imagined it. It was in an inside pocket. He tried to walk nonchalantly, but his gait was awkward, his arms pressed stiffly against his sides. His hat was pulled down over his eyes. He could not remember ever having experienced physical fear. But now his skin felt prickly. He told himself there was nothing really to be frightened about. No one was paying any attention to him. All at once the thought struck him. Above the shouts and harangues of street peddlers lining the curb, he saw through Mr. Pitney’s elaborate gesture of optimism. He understood now. It wasn’t real. Funny, how things happen. He knew now what Tommy meant. Mr. Pitney had mentioned muscles. With these thoughts crowding his brain, he did not see the two figures moving up behind him when he came out of the Madison Street house. He did not look back. He had turned into a narrow street, below the Bowery, more quiet than the others and lined with warehouses already closed for the week-end. Not many pedestrians were passing along that way. Suddenly the two men stepped up to him, one on each side. His uneasiness increased. After a moment, observing that they

kept pace with him, he stopped. They stopped with him.

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“You fellows want anything with me?” he asked in an even tone. One of the men, a big-jawed heavyweight, jerked his head backward. ““Ain’t you the guy from four-six-one Madison?” “And if I am?” Stephen said, feeling his body becoming as tallow, gutted with fear. The men jumped on him. Each grabbed one of his arms, trying to rip his coat off. He threw one of them aside and swung out with his free arm, smashing with his fist. It was a hit, clean on the jaw. The man stumbled. In that second, his partner lunged forward, a blackjack in his upraised hand. Stephen swung around in time to avoid it, his fist jabbed into the man’s eye. With a yell of pain the fellow hurled himself on Stephen, who lost his balance and went down, rolling

on the ground, shielding his head with his arms. Blood gushed down his face. His vision blurred. His head felt swollen. He rolled over, and lifting his feet with an effort that threatened to burst his arteries, he dug them hard against the body of the man on the right. His victim howled, tried to balance himself, but couldn’t;

cursing, he fell in a heap, clutching

at his

abdomen. Stephen was up in a flash, the man’s blackjack in his hand, and made for the other. He swung hard. The man swung back. Stephen dodged and closed in on his opponent. He landed a heavy blow on the scalp. A look of shocked surprise flickered into the man’s eyes; his pupils fluttered, his body crumpled to the pavement. Heedless of the blood on his face, the pain and ringing in his ears, Stephen ran. On Wall Street people stared. But he did not see them, he did not stop. “Jeez!” Tommy exclaimed, when he burst through the office door, gory-faced and haggard and covered with dirt. “You look like you’ve been in a slaughter.” At that moment Thaddeus Pitney came out of his private room. His enormous whale like body quivered and paipitated in his excitement, and he took mincing steps, his eyebrows jerking terrifically. “Have you got the papers?” he asked in a wheezy cardiac

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voice, apparently not Agtieingh the ridges and clots of dried blood on Stephen’s face. “Come

inside,” he said in a tone

of relief, when

Stephen

nodded. A woman

in a black silk dress, and stouter even than Mr.

Pitney, turned from the window as he stepped into the private room. Her hanging jowls made her head seem square. “Look, Thaddus,”

she exclaimed,

“the boy’s hurt. There iss

blood on his face!” Pitney’s eyes were on the packet in Stephen’s hand. He reached for it and tore it open. “He iss a fighter,” the woman said enthusiastically, looking at Stephen and noting the evidence of brawn in his build. “And young.” She came over and laid a fat arm on his shoulder. “I like fighters,” she said, smiling and purring up into his face. “Do you know me?” she asked presently, in her peculiar husky voice with its German accent. Stéphen shook his head. The woman stamped her foot, and turning to Pitney with impatience that was partly real, the native heat of her temperament, and partly humorous exaggeration, “A fine gentleman you are,

Thaddus,” she exclaimed. “You don’t introduce your guests.” Pitney looked up quickly. He laid the papers on his desk, and came forward. “Stephen,” he said with an elaborate bow, “meet Mrs. Fredericka Mandelbaum. Those who know her well call her Ma.”

Mrs. Mandelbaum extended her hand. It felt flabby and soft in Stephen’s, there was no response to his pressure. The energy of her character seemed to be all drawn down into the capacious, thick-blubbered

reservoir of her body, quiescent in reserve

for

things more vital than a handshake; and some of it welled up and shone forth in the rich geniality of her smile. “They call me Ma,” she said expansively, “but I ain’t their mother. Not the real one. But I’m a real mother, too. Four, Gott bless them. But to them,” she waved her hand toward Mr. Pitney,

“I am Ma because I give them what a mother cannot sometimes

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give . . . money and horses and diamonds. When they call me Ma, I know they are happy!” Her face became serious. “Bring me some water,” she said to Pitney. “I will wash the poor boy’s blood. Maybe he iss hurt bad.” Stephen submitted to her ministering. When she had done! she stood back and looked into his face. “Handsome, too,” she exclaimed, the rich-flavored purr of her

inflection producing an impression of tremendous deep earthy vitality that seemed remarkable in a woman of her age. “Young

and handsome and strong!” She turned to Pitney, chuckling. “You shoulda told me about him, Thaddus. And now,” she said to Stephen, lowering herself into a chair, uttering as she did

so sighs and grunts, animal sounds of well-being, ‘“‘you will tell me what happened. Oh, yes, tell me everything!” She

listened

with

interested

attention,

her

small

round

twinkling blue eyes brightening with animation as he told about his encounter with the two hoodlums. When he finished, her face

wore the characteristic genial smile that glistened on her dark winy crabapple cheeks as if they had been rubbed with wax. For a few minutes she sat quiet, richly smiling, her hands folded on her short lap. In her loose-fitting, black silk coat she seemed like an agreeable bear-cat sitting on its haunches. Stephen’s eyes were attracted to the extravagant glitter of diamonds

bespangling

her person,

pendent

from

her ears

and

circling her fingers in brilliant clusters. Tommy had come in from the outer room and remained standing in the doorway, a look of fear in his eyes. Seeing him Mrs. Mandelbaum stirred, her eyes reflecting the sparkle of her splendid stones. “Tommy,” she said brusquely, “come here.” He approached with shambling, nervous steps. His lips twitched, and he swallowed hard. The smile sharpened on Ma Mandelbaum’s square face, her thin lips tightened, her jaw stiffened. “You took a long chance sending Stefan for that package,” she said. “He wass a stranger to you. It mighta turned out different.

oe)

STEPHEN “Well,

he knew

YERKES—MARIONETTE the code words,”

Tommy

487

said evasively,

shifting uneasily and dropping his eyes. Mrs. Mandelbaum nodded. Her husky voice sounded almost mannish.

“He wass smart,” she said. “I like smart people.” “T figured to save time,” Tommy insisted. “You could go yourself.” His tongue licked his dry lips. ““They’da spotted me sure,” he said defensively, “the coppers or the gang.” “Tt seems like your face iss well known. So? Too well known!” Tommy didn’t answer. “Maybe you need a vacation, Tommy,” Mrs. Mandelbaum

continued, her voice purring. A look of despairing woefulness came in Tommy’s face. He began to plead, “I ain’t done nothin’, Ma. An’ everything turned out all right!” ““A vacation will do you good,” the matriarch said, frowning, ignoring his witless remonstrances. “When we get so our faces iss too familiar, we must give em a chance to forget!” She rose, smiling, and stretched out her hand to Stephen. “Maybe you will come to see me? Thaddus will bring you. You like wine, eh . . . old wine?” She laughed, giving his hand a little pat. ““Young people like old wine,” she said, moving toward the door. “Thaddus likes old wine, too, even though he iss getting old.”’ She chuckled. “Maybe it iss the young ideas in his head. Ach, ya, in his head and in his heart. Ha, ha!”

She passed through the door. They listened to her heavy descending footsteps. Stephen crossed over to the window and looked out absently, watching her climb laboriously into her car-

riage, helped by the coachman who half lifted her and pushed from behind. The silence in the room was interrupted by Tommy’s raging fury. “The fat bitch!” he yelled. “She can’t make me the goat!” Pitney made a sound in his throat like despair, and slumped into the chair before the desk, eying his chessmen. “Don’t get riled up, Tommy,” he said in a resigned, placating voice. “Shell probably forget all about it by tomorrow.”

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“Oh, no, she won’t. Not her!” Tommy raged, his face work-

ing convulsively. “She don’t forget nuthin’. You know what it is. Time fer somebody to take a rap as a cover up fer the coppers, like Johnny Hope after the Manhattan Bank job. They gave him twenty years!”

‘““He’d have got away with five if he had pleaded guilty like she asked him to, instead of fighting,” Mr. Pitney explained. Tommy pounded the desk.

“Five or twenty years . .. it ain’t the years, but I been her slave fer ten years, since I was a kid. . . . Yeah,” he sneered, “‘she

told me about old wine, too. “Old wine and young girls!’ she said.” He stopped suddenly, glaring at Pitney. “You been with her longer than anybody. An’ you’re old . there ain’t much life left in you . . . why ain’t she put her finger on you? An’ you got more dough than the rest of us. You an’ her splittin’ big an’ throwin’ us guys the crumbs!” Mr. Pitney glanced quickly at Stephen. His face was the color of green marble, his eyes fishy. “Yeah,” Tommy went on, leaning on the desk and pointing his fist at Pitney’s withdrawing figure, “I'll talk to the boys about it... we got rights, too!” He checked his tirade abruptly, stood upright. And laughed . a loud, contemptuous laugh. “Say, how would it do to give the old bitch herself a vacation? Maybe the coppers wouldn’t like that? Or the papers, maybe. Watch the headlines! ‘Ma Mandelbaum arrested . . . the world’s biggest crook ... head of a gang of thieves... picks ’em young .. . bribes ’em with old wine and young girls . . . her latest job was bustin’ a Wall Street safe for a hundred thousand in Western Union stock.’ How the preachers would fall for that!” - He had retreated to the door and was about to pass through. He turned suddenly, and directed the whole discharge of his sneering animosity at Stephen, who had remained standing by the window. “So, you’re the new

one! You’re gonna

drink her old wine

. maybe she’ll lend you a gal or two, you’re so handsome . . . promise you millions like she did me . . . then, when you’ve done her dirty work, thievin’ and robbin’ and maybe killin’, she’ll throw

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you to the coppers! Well, when you’re lookin’ out from behind the bars an’ feelin’ the pinch o’ cold steel with twenty years facin’ you, remember the words of Tommy Kincaid, which is . . . play with the dirty bitch, but don’t drink her old wine... it’s poison!” With that parting shot he was gone. Stephen was startled by a loud snort. Mr. Pitney was inhaling snuff. Stephen could not believe it, that this man, the father of

Marguerite, was a crook, associated with that uncouth, foreignlooking, lecherous old woman. He felt sick. Tommy’s last words ran in his ears . . . “Play with the dirty bitch . . .” “Play with the dirty bitch . . .” Not he, whose father had suffered in a losing game. Gone down to death, crucified; the game had beaten him. And his mother, spurning wealth and position for the love of an honest man. Mr. Pitney was wiping his wide forehead with a large blue handkerchief. He did not raise his eyes, but continued sitting

hunched over in his chair. “Play with the dirty bitch . . .” Not he, Stephen Yerkes. Nor with Thaddeus Pitney. It was not the kind of Wall Street he had thought about. He dreamed of fortunes, but not Pitney’s kind, not Ma Mandelbaum’s kind, not the kind that provided Marguerite with luxuries. He’d be rich, too, but in the right way. Like Keene

and Gould. He edged away from the window and had reached the outer door when he heard his name called. He walked back into the private room. Mr. Pitney came toward him, moving heavily across the floor, wiping his forehead with the blue handkerchief. “Going?” he said. His voice sounded thick and unctuous. Stephen said, “Yes.” Mr. Pitney put his hand inside his coat and took out a wallet. ‘“Here’s your salary,” he said, opening the wallet. ““I'wentyfive dollars.” Stephen put out his hand. Then abruptly withdrew it. “Tt didn’t earn it,” he said, turned on his heel and ran down

the stairs. Stephen did not tell his mother anything. There was no need

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to worry her. She wouldn’t even have to know that he was no longer employed, his savings would tide them over until he found another job. And next time he would be careful, steer clear of anything that looked shady. Monday morning he would begin the rounds of brokers’ offices. Times were bound to change. More than ever he was determined to find a foothold in Wall Street. There, in

spite of anything, he would start his climb to fortune. He was almost twenty. Sunday morning he slept late, and permitted himself the luxury of reading the newspaper in bed, studying particularly the financial section. An item on the front page caught his eye. It told in great detail of the arrest of one Tommy Kincaid, long sought by the police as one of a gang of burglars who had preyed on jewelers in Maiden Lane. He smiled as he read, amused at the newspaper’s laudatory comments on the efficiency of the police in arresting so desperate a criminal.

Also there was a long column detailing the robbery of a Wall Street broker’s office. The robbers had worked fast, in the early morning hours of Saturday, and left no trace behind. A check-up showed over a hundred thousand dollars in Western Union stock missing, all unregistered and negotiable. The police would not stop till the thieves were located, a high police official declared. And on the last page of the newspaper was an advertisement

offering a liberal reward by the victimized broker for the return of the stock, and “no questions asked.” Signed to the advertisement was the name of the eminent lawyer . . . Howard Ayres. Stephen wondered how much they were offering for a reward. He was ill at ease. He felt himself in an awkward

position. He.

knew too much. People like Ma Mandelbaum did not sit by and share their secrets with strangers, outsiders. He could understand her attitude toward Tommy Kincaid who, apparently, had outlived his usefulness. Tommy was no longer necessary in her scheme of things. But she had taken for granted his own loyalty to Mr. Pitney.

He still couldn’t believe that Pitney had deliberately offered him a clerkship in order to entice him into an association with Ma

Mandelbaum. As he thought over everything that had happened the week before, he was persuaded that Mr. Pitney must really

STEPHEN

YERKES—MARIONETTE

ag1

have had other motives. Marguerite’s father had never hinted at Stephen’s participation in any wrongdoing, he had spoken of muscles. Perhaps he just felt the need of a protector. People like Mr. Pitney were not very safe, either with other gangs or with their own. Mr. Pitney might really have wanted to play fair with him, and Tommy’s untimely arrival had bungled things. Tommy

had blundered. Ma Mandelbaum would not forgive mistakes like that. It would cost poor Tommy a term in Sing Sing. By this sort of reasoning, he tried to figure it out, tried to decide what to do. He read over again the advertisement offering the reward for the return of the stolen bonds.

) In a sumptuous apartment over a haberdashery on Hester Street, a purple-cheeked woman sat glowering at the dejected figure of Thaddeus Pitney. “So, you think you’re done with me,” Ma Mandelbaum was saying. ““You made your pile, and now you think to quit!” “T’m worrying about Marguerite,” Pitney faltered. “Ain’t I got daughters, too? And married, Gott bless ’em!

You don’t see me worrying about them? They do what I say! I said to Esther, “You marry a detective .. . it iss good for my business.’ So she married a detective. And now we are related to the police department by marriage.” “But

you

don’t understand,

Ma,” Pitney protested,

“Mar-

guerite is an only child . . . and she’s been brought up differently.” “Differently! Where did you get the money to bring her up so differently, if not from Ma Mandelbaum? Ain’t I made you a rich man? All right, she’s an American girl and wears stylish clothes and talks fine language. So, we'll marry her to a judge. My daughter married the police, your daughter will marry the courts! I'll give her a nice wedding present . . . diamonds, emeralds. She will be a grand lady, and her husband will be a grand judge . . . the son-in-law of Mr. Thaddus Pitney, Wall Street broker. A fine match!” Pitney could not be of her mind.

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“Marguerite doesn’t know anything about this . . . I mean, about me, and you, or police and courts,” he said desperately. “I couldn’t tell her.”

Mrs. Mandelbaum gave him a disgusted look. “Fool! Who said tell her? It will be enough when her husband knows. He will dismiss indictments, not she.”

Thaddeus Pitney took between his big dingy thumb and index finger a good pinch of the brown powder to which he was so much addicted. It seemed to improve his resolution. “T’m giving you notice, Ma,” he said, putting more force into it. “I’m afraid. There’s talk of a reform administration. There will be a new mayor and a new police commissioner and a new district attorney. You won’t be able to handle them like you did the others. It will mean Sing Sing for all of us. Better stop now!” “What does it mean... a reform administration? They throw out the bums and put in high-toned gentlemen. So we will do the same! Our bums will go, too, like Tommy ... we will send ’em to Sing Sing for five or ten, maybe twenty years. They will be forgotten. The reformers will be happy. But we will take

in new blood, like your clerk, Stefan, handsome American gentlemen with brains! “We will organize, like a big corporation, with branches all over the country—in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, maybe San Francisco. We will be the generals.” Her fat hands waved eloquently. “You and me will be millionaires. We won’t steal; we will fix it so others can steal. What I do in New York with police and judges and city officials, I can do in other places. Reformers don’t mean that there will be no more graft or stealing . . . only. the price is higher! So, Pll pay more. Ma Mandelbaum will still be Ma Mandelbaum.” Fredericka Mandelbaum leaned back in her chair, her eyes snapping with excitement, her cushiony bosom heaving like a great bellows. She was smiling her rubicund, thick smile. Pitney had not known her so many years for nothing. He knew that for more than a decade this lusty peasant woman had gathered around her the pick of the criminal world, and her power over them was astounding. They laid at her feet the proceeds of their pilfering, great or small, they did her bidding without ques-

STEPHEN

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tion. And in return for this remarkably profitable allegiance she kept them in funds, and provided them with lawyers when the | trail became hot. Now and then a voice clamored for the scalp of this unique woman, “A stain on New York’s otherwise stainless escutcheon!”’ But Fredericka Mandelbaum knew how to outwit them, she con-

tinued undisturbed as the reigning queen of crookland, recognized by all classes, in reality by everybody. Nobody knew how she had come into possession of her sovereign influence, but even men of affairs, bankers, industrialists, financiers, respected her power and,

on occasion, sought her advice and codperation. Her contacts were city wide. Thaddeus Pitney had prospered through her. In the days following the panic she saved him from bankruptcy, when the market had gone against him. He never knew how she found him out, but she seemed to know all about his troubles. She even knew how much he owed the banks and how weak were his collaterals. She offered to lend him enough to tide him over. He accepted her offer as a dying man gulps oxygen to live. Then, later, she had come to him with bonds and stocks, with

detailed instructions to sell or pledge them. She even gave him the © names of bankers who would honor his notes secured by her bonds. He had never paid the notes and never redeemed the security— that was how Ma Mandelbaum made her transactions. And Thaddeus Pitney became rich.

Occasionally, when large amounts were involved, there would be a deal. Bonds and stocks would be returned to their lawful owners . . . for a consideration. Thaddeus Pitney would handle the matter. No questions asked, no information offered. It was the rule with Pitney, neces-

sarily respected by those who dealt with him. With lucid power of reasoning in such matters, Pitney realized that Mrs. Fredericka Mandelbaum was no stronger than the web she had spun. Sooner or later she must fail, the demands on her would become too heavy; or an aroused public conscience would undermine her strength by ejecting her confederates from office. Possibly, too, it was his satiety of wealth that now prompted him to disentangle himself. He had enough. He could play along

494

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S Inve

with the biggest in Wall Street, it would be foolish to risk more. Wasn’t he, after all, getting along in years? And he had ambitions for Marguerite, he much preferred his daughter to be a lady. He had long contemplated breaking with Mrs. Mandelbaum. The dooming of Tommy Kincaid to Sing Sing strengthened his resolve. Also his dormant conscience was suddenly disturbed about Stephen. He knew the break would not be easy. He would need personal protection. Yerkes was strong, trustworthy, clean-thinking. . . . But then fate in the person of Tommy Kincaid threatened to put a stopper on it, at least temporarily. Yerkes had come to Ma Mandelbaum’s attention. And she was impressed with his gentlemanly bearing . . . she always preferred her associates to be “gentlemen and ladies.” That he had bested singly, two loafers, presumably members of one of the city’s vicious gangs, was in her reckoning sufficient evidence of his eligibility to membership in hers. But Pitney was not at all sure of Yerkes. His departure without accepting his wages was hardly encouraging. Perhaps it would be better to wait until matters were clearer before he delivered his ultimatum. “So, Thaddus,” Ma Mandelbaum spoke briefly, positively to Pitney, who was by this time smiling at her, “we will hear no more about this nonsense! We will play together. Have no fear. If the police want victims, ach, ya, we have enough! Today it iss Tommy, tomorrow it will be somebody else.” She winked. ‘Maybe your clerk, Stefan. He iss young and can stand it, so!” Pitney stood up to go. He was now quite calm, snatched back from apostasy. “You always win, Ma,” he said, temporizing. “And now about

the Western Unions. They will be sending out feelers soon. How much?” “A hundred thousand iss the value?” “About that.”

“Well, let us say ten thousand . . . in cash. You think they will give so much?” “It’s a lot of money. They may hold out.” Mrs. Mandelbaum hit the table with her fist.

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“IT have an idea, Thaddus.”

“Not to sell them? I wouldn’t think it safe.” “No, big fool. But why tell ’em who’s got the bonds?” “You can’t fool ’em, they’d be wise the minute they heard from me.” “But why should they hear from you?” “Wellihowee o's? “Send Stefan. He iss smart and good-looking. A real gentleman! Maybe there will be a notice in the papers, like always. He can say he saw it and accidentally found out where are the bonds.” “They'd juggle him around till he told.” “He iss too smart, I tell you! Besides, you can always come in to finish the deal.” “Well, let’s wait till Monday.” He took snuff. A loud snort attended his departure. Mrs. Mandelbaum gazed after him, listening to his steps plodding down the stairs, her eyes hardening. “Tobacco brain,” she said with a grimace. “Worrying about his daughter. Pouf! Maybe she should worry about him!” She clapped her hands. At the far end of the room a door opened, 2 head appeared. Completely smooth and bereft of hair, a

pallid dome surmounted a face of grayish leather in which two squint-eyes burned like fag embers. “Bring me wine.”

The head inclined, and withdrew. In a moment it reappeared, a shambling figure came forth, bearing a tray with a bottle of dark wine and two glasses. Mrs. Mandelbaum grunted, disapproving. “Always you bring double, Sam. Maybe I want to drink alone.” The man’s rubbery lips contorted in a grin as he filled both glasses. The woman said, scowling, “It’s good they cut your tongue.

If you could talk, Gott knows what foolishness you would speak | Sim. Sam made a clucking noise, and pointed to his mouth. Then he raised his right arm so that the muscles of his biceps bulged, and with his left hand tapped his head, grinning. Mrs. Mandelbaum’s look softened.

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“Ach, ya. Muscles you have, and brains. They left you someding.”’ Sam nodded vigorously. “You heard?” Again the vehement nod. “Maybe you hear too much, Sam. Some day .. . He drained his glass. His red eyes seemed to have become impregnated with the wine, fiercely glistening, his face becoming stolid. His fingers mounted slowly and gripped his neck; his body swayed, squirming, and a hoarse gargling sound came from his throat as if he were choking. And this singular pantomime was followed by another sound, the caricature of a laugh. Mrs. Mandelbaum blazed out in anger. 39

“You forget yourself, Sam. Once I told you, it iss enough, A mother don’t kill her children. Punish? Yes. Johnny Hope, when he jobbed the Savings Bank without telling me, I sent to Sing Sing for twenty years. Tommy, when he acts like a fool, I punish, too. Thaddus Pitney will be punished. Not now. Later.” She pointed her plump finger at him in warning. “But no killing. D’you hear? I want no murderers in my house. Remember!” IO

Sunday had never been so boring, the night never so long. Stephen tossed in his bed. He was up with the early sun, dressed, and out of the house before his mother had awakened. At nine o’clock he was downtown at the corner of Pine Street

and Broadway, pacing up and down before the entrance of the building in which Howard Ayres had his office. As it happened, he missed Thaddeus Pitney who was even then interviewing his mother, questioning her as to where Stephen might be found. She did not know, but she took occasion to thank him for his kindness to her son. “He is ambitious,” she told him, with a proud look in her

eyes. “I am sure you will find him trustworthy.” Pitney echoed her sentiments, his eyes roving over the plush furniture of the parlor, and noting the general atmosphere of middle-class comfort. “I stopped by, thinking I’d ride downtown with him,” he said, as he settled himself on the brown plush sofa. He demurred,

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but faintly, when she invited him to partake of a late cup of coffee. Sipping the coffee, chatting agreeably, seated near her at a vantage

point from which he could observe the sun that poured through the curtained window striking across her face illumining her youthfulness, he decided she was a remarkably pretty woman. A charming woman!

Howard Ayres looked fresh and immaculate from his morning toilet, his mustache combed carefully, his chin clean shaven. The hand he held out to Stephen was cool with the pink clean coolness of skin lotions, the fingertips scented faintly with violet soap. “Still looking for a job?” Ayres asked with a smile. Stephen did not answer. Instead, he opened the paper in his hand, went over to Ayres’ desk and drew his attention to the advertisement for the stolen bonds. “It’s about that I came, sir,” he said.

His hand was steady, but he felt the hot blood coming up in his face as he watched the other’s countenance stiffen under the quick thrust of his interest, turning grim. The eyes became overcast with a sharp protective glitter of dissimulation and shrewdness, the chin lengthened. “What do you know about it?” Ayres said sternly. Stephen hesitated. “It says there, ‘No questions asked.’ ”’ He tapped the paper with his finger, and he proceeded to the point, passing over the other’s question. “I think I can get them. If the reward is right.” “You think,” the lawyer said, in a challenging tone. “Aren’t you sure?” A panoramic group of images flashed through Stephen’s mind. Thaddeus

Pitney, florid, sweating,

fumbling

with his snuftbox;

Ma Mandelbaum, square-jowled and lumpish, her mouth set firmly; Marguerite, a faint smile curling on her red lips. A young man came from the outer office and spoke to Mr. Ayres.

“Tf you don’t mind waiting,” the lawyer said then to Stephen, “perhaps we'll be able to settle it.”

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He excused himself. Through the closed door Stephen heard low buzzing voices, Ayres’ among them. For the first time since his sudden determination to claim the reward for the stolen securities, Stephen felt doubtful. The thing had looked easy, ‘‘No questions asked.’ He had intended to state his case, learn the amount offered, then go to Mr. Pitney to suggest a split on condition that the bonds be returned through him. There was nothing wrong in returning stolen property and claiming the reward offered voluntarily. It wasn’t as if he were holding up anyone,

or being a blackmailer, not as if he himself had been a

party to the theft. Actually, he was an instrument of service, heiping Mr. Pitney and Mrs. Mandelbaum to get rid of the bonds and favoring the owner by giving back his property.

Mr. him. But intended self as a

Pitney would be surprised. Afraid, perhaps, to deal with Stephen would reassure him, convince the old man he no harm. The money would enable him to set up for himtrader in Wall Street, put to practical test the tables he

had worked

on, when

small sums

became

thousands

and

then

millions. Stephen had lain awake half the night, picturing himself as the new Wall Street mystery. People would marvel at the rising millionaire. Marguerite would smile at him. And there would be

nothing superior about her smile, nothing indulgent or patronizing. He would be her equal, he would be “Mr.” Yerkes to her. But that had been last night. Now, as he sat alone in the lawyer’s private office, he began to have misgivings about the whole affair. What if Mr. Pitney should refuse to part with the securities? What if they should want to know more about the theft? Or even

accuse him? He had not counted on that. He had acted hastily. He did not know how long he sat there, waiting. The voices in the outer room had subsided. His eyes were glued on the door. Mr. Ayres would be returning soon, perhaps with his client. His nerves tingled expectantly. He began to regret his coming, he felt

himself a meddler. It was a foolhardy business, he wished he could leave without meeting the client. It was all a mistake. A joke. They wouldn’t believe him. But he would bluff his way through and Olt: aemeee After an interminable time the door opened suddenly and the

STEPHEN

YERKES—MARIONETTE

lawyer entered, followed by a red-cheeked man

499

with a scraggy

beard, who had not bothered to remove his high silk hat. The man was beside Stephen in two scissors-bends of his long legs, surveying him with a keen scrutiny underneath the shaggy

hedges of his eyebrows. The man laughed, a vibrant, good-humored sound, reassuring in its warmth and friendliness. And then he turned to Howard Ayres, who had seated himself at his desk. ““He’s young to be a thief,” he remarked. Stephen half rose from his chair, his glance kindling with anger. “Maybe I got you wrong, pardner,” the tall man said, noticing his discomfiture and resentment. “You are not the thief. Only a thief’s friend!” He chuckled. “To be a friend of a thief is almost like being a thief.” He gave Stephen a sharp, inquisitorial look, his manner sud-

denly cold. “You know where my bonds are?” Stephen said he did. “Well, why don’t you bring them?” Stephen lapsed into a sullen silence, his eyes seeking the lawyer, who sat looking on, an amused smile on his face.

“Tt’s the matter of the reward,” Ayres interposed in a quiet voice. “Ah, the reward. I’d forgotten. Damn it! You shall have the reward.” He reached into his breast pocket and produced a large wallet. ‘“There’s more in here, damn it,” tapping the wallet with his right hand, “than many an Easterner’s seen in a lifetime. Yes,

indeed! I could buy those bonds with this and have a little left over for a lively night on Fourteenth Street.” He turned with a grin to Ayres. “But you lawyers won’t get any of it. I don’t trust you fellows,”’ he said, chuckling.

“Have I merited your distrust?” Ayres inquired sarcastically. “Only that you had me offer a reward instead of calling in

the police.” “The police might have found the criminals, but not your bonds.” “Maybe.” The red-faced man turned again to Stephen. “How

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much do you want? Let’s get it over with. Damn it, I’m busy.” Stephen looked at Ayres. Then he heard the lawyer say quietly,

“*Twenty-five thousand is the price he asks.” Twenty-five thousand! He didn’t recall having mentioned any figure. Certainly not twenty-five thousand. And his client was talking. “A quarter of the value of the securities,” he was saying in a shocked tone, “New York thieves come high!” He shook his fist in Stephen’s face. “Damn it, it’s too much! You can’t get away with it!” He turned again to Ayres.

“Call the police and have done with it. Arrest the man.” “He was promised immunity,” Ayres reminded him, with a reassuring glance at Stephen. “You promised, not I,” the man shouted, his fist pounding the desk. “Damn it, Pll handle this myself!” “And lose the seventy-five per cent of your securities,” Ayres said coolly. “Isn’t it better to make the best of a bad bargain?” “Are you his lawyer or mine? I tell you, not even you, Howard Ayres, can fool with James R. Keene!” Stephen’s heart turned over. James R. Keene! The famous Wall Street gambler. The man he had wanted to meet. It was rumored he was in a secret combine with Jay Gould. They cornered everything—wheat, lard, opium, railroads. Keene slumped into a chair, his long figure sprawled toward the floor. “If you’d rather I’d step out of the picture . . .” Ayres suggested, in his tone the covered and deadly hostility of one forcing the game. But Keene was not listening to him, he was engaged with his own thoughts. Suddenly, he banged the arms of his chair with both fists and jumped up. His long, hairy hand reached out and smacked Stephen on the shoulder. “Took here, boy,” he said, “you don’t seem a bad one. You

have clear eyes and a clean face. Damn it, I’ll make a deal with you. By God, Vil make you a rich man, the king of all the thieves! A lark, I’d call it—making a millionaire out of a thief!”

His voice quieted, and he continued in a confidential tone.

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YERKES—MARIONETTE

“Damn it, son, I'll let you in on a secret

s5o1

. . . Mr. Ayres and

all these lawyers know it pretty well already. There isn’t a single millionaire with a clean conscience. It’s their fleshpots that give ’em sleepless nights. I know!” He was

silent a moment,

reflecting, the sharp concentrated

pupil points of his small hazel eyes contracting and expanding with the furious intensity of his mental processes. When he spoke again a stream of memories and images gushed up vocally out of his past. He began walking about the room in great strides. And yet, it was not strutting in any careless sense, it was justification; it con-

stituted an integrity, self-contained, which somehow survived the acts of dishonesty and plunder into which it led him, it marked the immeasurable moral difference between talkers and doers, the

impostors and the authors of this world’s history. “In three years I doubled my money. Yes, sir! Eight millions. Ayres’ll tell you. That’s the count now. Eight millions!”” He paused, his lank frame shook with laughter. “It was like busting claims in

the old days!” Suddenly becoming serious, standing at Stephen’s side, he burst out anew. “Damn it, I talk too much! There’s no stopping me when I get started. It was that way when I come face to face with Jay Gould for the first time. ‘You and me could do things,’ he said to me. ‘We'll make the sparks fly in Wall Street and roust the suckers of their filthy lucre!’ That’s the way Gould talked. And by hell, we did!” Keene waggled a long finger toward Stephen. “Now I don’t know whether you stole those bonds yourself, or had someone do it for you. A hundred thousand means nothing to me. Certainly not twenty-five thousand, which is what Ayres asked for you. I could give it without thinking twice. If it wasn’t that I’d be missing those bonds in a little deal I’m planning, I'd let you keep ’em with my best wishes. But I need ’em.

“There’s nothing sporting about low-down stealing. Taking a man’s property when he’s not looking is like shooting him in

the back. Out west we don’t do things that way.” Keene turned to Ayres who sat with his eyes closed, a smile flickering on his face.

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*You’re not listening, Mr. Ayres. Maybe it’s not new to you. Jim Keene is not as dumb as he looks. It all came to me like a flash.

It’s you wants twenty-five thousand, not this lad. Sit still,” he ordered

as the lawyer, red-faced, moved

to rise from his chair.

“If I’m wrong, I apologize. It’s a hunch, and you know my hunches have made millions for me and some to spare for you.” He breathed deeply. “But you Easterners aren’t satisfied just to play square. You want the whole hog. Those measly pots below on the Exchange look daggers at me every time the board sweeps my way!” He laughed boisterously, then turned to Stephen. “J said I was thinking of making you the king of thieves. That’s not exactly what I meant. So here’s my proposition. Take it or leave it. “Those bonds must come back, and I’m not paying a dime for ’em. But if your gang’s willing to work, I’ll lay aside twentyfive thousand dollars for ’em on condition that I can call on ’em whenever I need ’em.

“Those twenty-five thousand will remain with me. I’ll play with ’em as I do with my own money. If I win, you win. If I lose, you lose. It’s like a partnership with you getting a percentage for insurance. When I give the word, you and your gang dance no matter where it leads to. It’s something I learned back in prospecting days. The safest way to play with thieves is to have ’em watch over you. It makes ’em all-fired important and gives em something for nothing, which is all any thief wants, east or west. “Damn it, itll cost me more than twenty-five thousand. Maybe a hundred! But it’ll be worth it. ’'m thinking you'll be earning it.” Stephen did not know what to make of all this, Keene’s person-

ality and his talk nonplused him. But he managed to control himself. Howard Ayres sat gaping incredulously at the grim-faced Keene. “TIl treat you square,” Keene continued. “Your gang’ll get ten thousand a month in cash on account for one year, to make sure I can depend on you in a pinch. That’s a hundred and twenty thousand. It’s a lot of cash to give away to a gang of common thieves, but I’m figuring on a grand cleanup .. . your gang’ll

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come in handy. I’m fighting a war here in the East, and there’s no telling when I’ll need an army.” Intent as Stephen was on Keene’s fast-flowing words, he had not noticed Howard Ayres’ face turning chalk-white. Nor the unblinking stare of his eyes. Ayres rose suddenly to his feet, his chair clattering noisily from under him in the fury of his emotion. “You’re crazy, man,” he shouted hoarsely to Keene, “‘to tie

up with a gang of cutthroats. What the hell’s got into you? I won’t stand for it!” A red splotch showed on Keene’s forehead. His mouth twisted in a wry smile. “There’s lots of things you'll stand for, Counselor Ayres. These cutthroats, as you call ’em, are no worse than some of your

stiff-necked gentry who give me the glad hand in the morning an’

knife me an hour later on the Exchange. Don’t be shaking your head, Mr. Ayres, ’m thinking you’re wise. Perhaps wiser than I think. If it’s underhand fighting they’ve inviting, Jimmy Keene’ll show ’em a trick or two!” He was smiling again. “What do you intend doing with this gang?” Ayres asked sullenly. Keene laughed. “Now wouldn’t you like to know? Jim Keene’s not disclosing his plans.” Howard Ayres had slumped back in his chair, his fingers drummed nervously on his desk. His agate eyes were clouded over with contempt and spleen. Keene came up to Stephen.

“Can you make the deal?” he asked. Stephen had hold of himself now. This was something big, bigger than he had anticipated. He would have to talk to Thaddeus Pitney, perhaps also with the Mandelbaum woman. “How long do you give me?” he asked. Keene looked at his watch. “T work fast,” he laughed. “Tonight at eight... at the Astor . . . that should be time enough.” He bowed ceremonicusly to Howard Ayres, held out his hand to Stephen who winced in its grip, chuckled and walked out of the office.

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No sooner had the door closed behind him than Ayres was on his feet. He came over and stood close to Stephen, and said with his face near, ‘“Who’s your crowd? Mandelbaum?” Stephen hedged. “J don’t know that I care to tell, sir,” he said.

“If it’s that woman,” Ayres said, ignoring the rebuff, “you tell her I’m in on it. It’s the biggest thing that’s come to her yet.” “IT haven’t said it was her crowd,” Stephen reminded him. ‘““Are you trying to be slick?” Ayres sneered. “J don’t owe you anything.” “No, not yet,” Ayres pulled at his mustache, “but you will before long.” “J haven’t done anything against the law.” Ayres looked at him quizzically. “Maybe not,” he said, “but the road you’re traveling . .. “Isn’t much different from yours, Mr. Ayres.” Stephen turned and walked through the door, leaving Ayres agape where he stood in the middle of the room.

33

II

Stephen did not go directly to his old employer’s office. He

wanted time to think. Besides, he was afraid Ayres might have arranged to have him followed. He walked up Broadway, and boarded a street car. After riding a short distance, he got off and hailed a hack, ordering the driver to turn eastward toward the Bowery. There he changed to a closed carriage, and feeling he had thrown off any possible pursuit, directed the coachman toward Wall Street. Mr. Pitney received him with distinct evidence of relief. “T’ve been wanting to find you,” he exclaimed, as Stephen walked into the office. Stephen laughed. Without preliminaries he told about his visit to Howard Ayres and about meeting James R. Keene. At first Pitney’s fat face showed fright, then consternation, and as Stephen talked on his eyes became bright with anticipation. When the story was finished he jumped from his chair, his great mass of blubber

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expanded like a balloon beginning an ascension, and caught hold of Stephen’s hand. “Boy,” he murmured, sclerotically, “‘you’re a wonder! They don’t come any smarter. We’ve got to act quick. Let’s go over to Ma’s. Her face’ll grow pink with greed, and her palms’ll itch plenty.” Mr. Pitney put on his hat. They went downstairs at once and climbed into a waiting carriage. “Hester Street,” he called to the coachman, ‘“‘drive like hell!”

The horses dashed off. They did not slacken their pace until they turned into a narrow street lined on both sides with tumbledown

shanties, from whose doors and windows

came shouts and

cries in unfamiliar jargon. The air was like the stink of a privy. “The house on the corner,

to the left,” the coachman

was

directed, after they had proceeded several squares up the street. They stopped before a two-story frame building. Mr. Pitney, now calmer, lifted himself from the carriage, turned his eyes aloft

and looked pensively up at the shuttered windows. “Tt isn’t regular,” he said, hesitating, “but I guess she won’t mind your coming with news like that.” Somewhere in the interior a bell jangled, as they pushed open the door. In the dim light Stephen saw long counters extending

toward the center of the shop, with glass-topped cases containing an assortment of men’s haberdashery: ties, shirts, undergarments, socks, suspenders. The shelves along the wall were stacked with paper boxes of various shapes and sizes. Not even a cat was there, to make any life. And had there

been rats, one felt that they must have endured miserable starvation in that uninhabited, dingy place. Stephen walked after Mr. Pitney toward store, and he felt gooseflesh coming out over him brief experience of its uncanny desolation.

an existence of and unfruitful the rear of the from even such

There was no sound, not a rustle of footsteps, but like a genii

out of nowhere a figure shot up suddenly behind the counter. “Tt’s all right, Sam. We’re friends. Is the lady home?” The apparition bowed and clucked like a startled hen, glided from

behind the counter

and came

canvas pants and felt slippers.

toward

them, clad in wide

506

CELL (202-29 ING SING There were sounds of a heavy person walking overhead, and

a voice spoke heartily, “It’s you, Thaddus. Ach, ya, come up! That blockhead keeps you in the cold!” They went up the narrow, winding stairs. Ma Mandelbaum was standing in the hall at the top, her shapeless girth blocking up the passage, rustling in her accustomed black silk, a smile overspreading her gleaming crabapple cheeks. She held out both hands in a gesture of spontaneous welcome, and peered owlishly around Mr. Pitney at Stephen. “Ach, the boy iss here, too!”’ she exclaimed, motioning them

to enter. They came upstairs out of squalor into palatial splendor. They stepped into a large room, pleasantly warm, furnished in heavy, bulky mahogany. A glass-spangled chandelier hung low from the ceiling over a round table laid out with an elaborately chased and beveled silver coffee service. Highly polished silver decanters stood

along the walls, on the long sideboard and inside a tall chest with wide doors standing open as if to invite inspection. Ma Mandelbaum seated herself at the head of the table, the others took chairs near.

“You have news?” The question was addressed to both of them.

Stephen fidgeted, receiving the impression from her manner that she had expected his coming or at least had known of it beforehand. Pitney began to tell her the results of Stephen’s visit to Lawyer Ayres. She interrupted.

“Better Stefan himself should tell. He wass there.” As he spoke, describing in detail James Keene’s proposal, her — eyes gleamed, she kept them earnestly upon him, the crimson blood coming up in her face, her deep loose bosom moving with the strokes of her respiration. When he had finished she sat quiet for a moment.

Then she raised her short, round arms, and clapped her

hands sharply. The creature called Sam appeared in the doorway.

“Wine, Sam,” she commanded. “Then go out and call the boys together . . . they must know of this.” Sam placed a tray before her and disappeared. She filled glasses, handing them to Pitney and Stephen.

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“The best news in ten years, Stefan,” she cried next. “We will drink to Mr. Keene . . . and you!” She lifted her glass, and Pitney did likewise. Stephen was about

to take the first swallow when the image of Tommy sprang up in his recollection, infuriated and crying out, “It’s poison!”

“Old-country wine,” Ma Mandelbaum watchful and alert over the crystal rim.

was saying, her eyes

He took the glass in his hand again and swallowed the contents in one gulp. It was strong, with a rather heavy sweetness. I2

Soon the “boys” arrived. They straggled in singly and seated themselves around the table. Ma Mandelbaum greeted each one as cordially as she had welcomed her first callers. They looked Stephen over separately with covert glances as they entered and found places, but otherwise took no notice of him. Mrs. Mandelbaum did

not introduce him immediately. “How about a speech, Sam?” a voice down the room called out, when Sam presently reappeared with the wine tray and commenced filling glasses. There was a chorus of laughter. Sam stopped and glared at the speaker. “Now, boys,” Ma Mandelbaum spoke soothingly, in a velvet

voice, “don’t start nothing. Ain’t I told you, what Sam iss missing with his talk, he makes up in his ears and brains. And his muscles, don’t forget, like steel. Don’t commence. . .” “If they asked me to choose, like they did him, between my

tongue or my life, I’'d rather . . .” “They wouldn’t let you choose,” Ma Mandelbaum declared. “Without your tongue you are useless. Brains you ain’t got. And your arms iss like a woman’s, soft.” The laughter that greeted this sally had some effect in assuaging Sam’s feelings. He grinned, and continued pouring wine. “Who’s the stranger?” somebody inquired. “He’s young an’ handsome. He blushes like a gal, but he looks tough.” Stephen’s face was, indeed, crimson. But he was smiling. “The smile of a whore,” somebody else said.

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He started up, glaring. But Ma Mandelbaum laid a velvet hand on his sleeve. “Sit down,” she whispered. “It’s their way. They don’t mean nothing.” Sam was making the rounds with the wine bottle. There was a loud snort, and Mrs. Mandelbaum said, ‘““Thaddus iss thinking. So it’s time to begin.”

Everyone laughed. And then the faces around the table became sober, intent.

“These are my boys, Stefan,” Mrs. Mandelbaum said without turning. “They call me Ma.” She went carefully through the introductions. “You should know them all. This one is Sheeny Mike, born Kurtz. He ain’t much to look at, but he can open any safe in the country. He can tell the weak spot in a brick wall by looking at it.

He iss quick with his hands, and his feet ain’t slow either. He’s never lost a race with the coppers.” The man called Sheeny Mike grinned, and jerked his head to acknowledge the compliment. “Then there iss Johnny Dobbs. An Englishman who knows every bank in New York. He ain’t got such a good figure, he’s short and fat, but he’s got smart fingers, smarter than his brains.”

Her shoulders moved silently with laughter. “But smart iss smart! If it ain’t in the head it iss in the fingers. Everything counts.” Johnny Dobbs stared into his wineglass. “Then, next to him iss Eddie Goodie. Not a bad fellow, either. He’s losing the hair on his head, but his whiskers iss getting thicker. Sometimes it iss red, then he paints it black, and he rides a horse like one of them knights we read about in books. Eddie iss a good boy when he iss sober.” She sighed. “But he likes his liquor. Some day it will make an end of him.” The brown-eyed, red-bearded Goodie was wetting his lips

with his tongue, a dry smirk on his face. Ma Mandelbaum continued calling the roll. “And here iss my boy Terence. A nice boy, young but already a little gray. It iss not from worry. I heard it he iss married, but I never seen his wife. Maybe he don’t know her either. He has so many. One in every city, he says. Poodle, we call him, Poodle

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Murphy. It’s a funny name for a man. A woman can always lead him like a lady her dog. I’m wishing I could lead him that way. But then I am no lady, I’m only his Ma.” She laughed. Terence mumbled, but did not look up. “Ha, Tully! His nose gave him his name. Broken-nose Tully we call him. He can smell a brassbutton a mile away. And he has feet like a race horse. So swift. He says some day he will find the man who carved his nose and then . . . Gott pity him. ‘A nose for a nose!’ he says.” Broken-nose Tully, apparently, did not relish the humor, his face was grim.

Ma Mandelbaum paused a moment, lifting her glass and draining it slowly. Her eyes twinkled like the diamonds on her fingers. “My poor Jimmy. Wells iss his name. He iss always so sad. Funeral Wells we call him. They say he wass born on a cemetery, while his mother wass burying his father. Jimmy likes funerals. Good pickings, he says. Some day Jimmy will laugh. Then the sun will shine forever, and all the coppers will be buried. What a funeral! Eh, Jimmy?” James Wells, alias Funeral Wells, remained glum, unstirring,

except for an imperceptible wave of his thick, light-colored beard. “Don’t look so innocent, Willie. You’re next,’ Ma Mandel-

baum went on, good-naturedly. ““My bad boy, Willie Peck. Like Peck’s Bad Boy! You wouldn’t think, from the way he wears those side whiskers. They make him look gentlemanly. He iss young, only twenty-six, but what a scamp! And he goes to lectures. But it ain’t to hear words of wisdom. His fingers are too busy. Always he comes back from those lectures with watches and chains and wallets. Once they made a collection. Everybody gave, even Willie. It wass for the missionaries in China. But when they came to count the

money, it wass all gone. I think Bad Boy Peck thought he could mission himself better than the Chinamen!” She sighed. “So clever iss Willie! “And Shinburn. Look at him. Mark Shinburn. A German with no love for his Kaiser. He loves America. A handsome man, too. Bankers take him for a good customer and make friends with

him. He eats with them and finds out when they sleep and who are their women. Then he gets friendly with the ladies who tell him

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their lovers’ secrets. Mark knows what to do with secrets! Some day he will tell the good ladies his own secrets, and they, also, will know what to do with them. Then he will be a bum, and we will

send him to Sing Sing. Until then, Gentleman Mark is a very useful comrade.” Mark Shinburn moved in his seat, but said nothing. “Don’t look so mad, Red,” Ma Mandelbaum said, addressing the ninth man, “‘we are all your friends. That’s his way, Stefan.

He don’t mean nothing. Red Leary iss like a bull! My cut glass iss putty in his hands when he gets his fits. Strong-armed Red. He iss not a bad boy. Thinks he iss a great general. Once he organized a gang and marched them to Sing Sing, thinking to capture the prison and free all his friends. An army of a hundred bums picked from every dive on the Bowery. “But Red made one big mistake. He figured he wass Napoleon,

but he didn’t have Napoleon’s brains. An army when it iss hungry iss just a crowd of loafers. It wass days since Red’s soldiers had a square meal. So, when they passed one of them places where they

sell pies and hamburger steaks, with drink on the side, they stopped and made a mass attack on the lunchroom without waiting for Sing Sing. When they got through, only the walls remained, and the army wass so drunk it couldn’t march. That made Red mad, and he’s been mad ever since. “But don’t worry, Red. Some day you'll be able to attack Sing Sing from the inside. You'll be a general yet.” Red Leary glared balefully at his wineglass. With a sudden motion, he picked it up and drained it at a gulp. The other guests looked at him with respect. “And

now,

Stefan,” Ma Mandelbaum

said, nodding

to the

man sitting next to Thaddeus Pitney, “you meet Mr. George Leslie, a real gentleman. He iss tall and handsome. And wears a gold watch and chain and a high silk hat. He does . . . what he does. He goes to parties and balls and dances with beautiful ladies. He can play cards and understands preaching. He iss expensive. Lives at the Astor. But he iss a good investment. Ya, George iss a man you should know.”

George Leslie looked over at Stephen, unsmiling; a blond man with a high thin nose, and the look of a fop in his eyes.

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“Well,” Ma Mandelbaum said with a wide sweep of her hands,

“what can we say about Thaddus? He iss our oldest brother . . . oldest in years. More like a father to us all. If I wasn’t so old and he wass younger, maybe he and me would be married. But we make enough trouble for each other, ain’t it so, Thaddus, without look-

ing for more. So Thaddus will remain single, and my name iss still Mandelbaum.” They laughed. And then somebody broke in with a question. “How about Tommy?” The laughter ceased abruptly. Faces were again solemn, furtive-eyed. “What’s he done?” It was Red Leary’s voice, questioning. Ma Mandelbaum

answered in an even, distinct voice, ‘““The

coppers took him. He iss in the Tombs.” “How about springin’ him?” Red asked gruffly. Ma Mandelbaum shook her head. “Tt wass him or someone else . . . the coppers gave me notice. The chief’s word, they said. It wass him or . . .” “Or who, Ma?” Red persisted. LOUL “What

for?”

Ma Mandelbaum shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe you know. A knifing or something. They said it might mean the sad bells in the Tombs . . . a job for the hangman.”

Red scowled, and lapsed into silence. “So, Tommy being sick and his nerves sort of shot, I figured to let him go. It'll be twenty years, maybe.” A sympathetic murmur swept around the table. “What about the new bloke?” another voice asked. Stephen did not feel himself one of them, nor was there the remotest chance of his being associated with them or, like Mr. Pitney, becoming a link in their chain of operations. He was James R. Keene’s messenger to them. That was all. They would share in

his proposition. And he, with them. There it would end. So arguing to himself, he was hardly prepared for the words

uttered by Mrs. Mandelbaum, her velvet tones stroking the air in purring accents.

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“Boys,” she said, “I am not superstitious. But sometimes things happen we can never understand. The finger of Gott, we call it. Gott’s finger brought Stefan Yerkes to us. He iss Thaddus Pitney’s man: First his coachman, then his clerk. Until Saturday, Stefan did not know about us. Maybe he thought something, or not, about Thaddus. But Saturday the light came to him. It wass an accident, Tommy’s foolishness, that sent him to Madison Street for the package of bonds Red jobbed.” She told the story of Stephen’s fight. How he had arrived

bleeding, and she had washed the blood from his face. They listened in malevolent silence. “Those fellows, you know who they was. There ain’t room in New York for them and us.” She looked over at Red Leary. “Maybe, some time, Red will attend to it.”

Red nodded, scowling. She went on with the story of Stephen’s adventure. “Tt wass what I had in mind for him to do. I told Thaddus to send him. But before Thaddus

saw him, Stefan wass already

there. Such smartness in a boy! Muscles and brains does not always match, but with Stefan it iss different. He went to Ayres... and like always, the guy wass foxy. He sent for the owner, Mr. Keene, and makes out to ask twenty-five thousand dollars to return the bonds.” A derisive hiss went round the room. “Ten wass all I expected,” Mrs. Mandelbaum declared, smiling. “Of course, Mr. Ayres wass thinking of himself, though he iss Keene’s lawyer. But this time Gott’s finger wass working against . Ayres!”

She explained in detail Keene’s proposition. “Do you know who Keene iss?” They all knew. “Whatever he touches turns to gold,” she said impressively. “Eight millions the man iss worth. Eight millions . . . he’ll double it in no time. All he wants iss protection from those Wall Street, high-class gangsters. He thinks we can help him.” A skeptical voice spoke from the back of the room. “How much do we get?”

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“Ach, ya! Sheeny Mike would ask that question,” Ma Mandelbaum said amid general laughter. “Well, I will tell you. Ten thousand a month for a whole year iss what Keene pays. There will be five hundred a month to each of you, and Stefan gets double because he made the deal. Then there iss Mr. X and the balance in the treasury.” For a moment

there was silence. Then Michael Kurtz, alias

Sheeny Mike, stood up quickly, his eyes bright with loyalty and greed. “I vote we accept,” he shouted and slumped down in his chair. “Boys, ’m through stealin’! ll go in business.” “Doing what?” Broken-nose Tully asked, sneering. Mike sighed. “Always I wanted to be a broker,” he said. “A broker!’ George Leslie laughed. “You wouldn’t know one stock from another.” “Naw, blockhead. A pawnbroker, I mean. I think maybe you’d be a damn good customer!” Stephen joined in the laughter. “Who the hell is this Mr. X?”? Red Leary muttered. “He always gets a split and don’t seem to do nothin’ for it.” “Without Mr. X,’” Ma Mandelbaum said deliberately, weigh-

ing her words, “none of us could live in New York five minutes. Ain’t I told you? Always you ask the same foolish question.” “Td like to see this Mr. X sometimes, just to know his face,” Red persisted. “Ach, ya,” Mrs. Mandelbaum

smiled, “his face iss like any

other face. You seen it often.” “Then why don’t you tell us?” Red demanded. “We ain’t gibberin’ idiots.” Ma Mandelbaum eyed him severely. “Once

there was a Mr. Y, and Sam found out. He had his

tongue then. Now Sam only clucks.” “What happened to this Mr. Y?” “Before the coppers got to him, he blew his brains out,” she said quietly. ‘It wass a pity. They wass such fine brains.” As Stephen listened he felt a tightening of the muscles in the small of his back.

“IT am not one of them,” he told himself furiously.

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The voices around him became inarticulate, a jumble of sound,

a dense spiteful buzzing. Again he told himself, he did not want to be a crook. Ma Mandelbaum was speaking. “So, we will tell Stefan to go to Mr. Keene and accept his proposition. We will turn back the bonds. Keene iss a sport, he says. So are we. We will see what we will see. Go now, Thaddus and

Stefan, get the bonds and give them to Keene. And Gott bless you.”

At eight o’clock, Stephen was waiting in the lobby of the Astor Hotel. Five minutes later the tall figure of James Keene breezed in through the street door. “Of course, it’s yes,” he boomed at Stephen. Stephen nodded. Keene laughed. “Here,” he said. ‘““Here’s the first ten thousand. Make the boys happy. You can tell them that from now on they’re high-class . not low-down .. . thieves!”

13 James R. Keene was riding on a wave of miraculous good fortune. The most spectacular Wall Street figure, traders said of him. He seemed to have a genius for picking the right stock at the right moment. Moreover, with Pied Piper magic he led the little fellows along the phantom road of prosperity, enticing them to buy popular stock offerings. In those periods the Stock Exchange was a place of frenzied activity. Silk-hatted, dignified gentlemen became madmen in the: clamor for immediate deliveries. Stephen would stand in his favorite corner observing, as one possessing the privacy of an opera box, the scene of tumult and madness.

Thaddeus Pitney was generally at his side. Then, when the Exchange closed, they would retire to the privacy of Mr. Pitney’s office, now refurnished and carpeted, and check up on Keene’s profits. Others besides Stephen and Thaddeus Pitney looked on inter-

estedly at the antics of the traders. The debonair George Leslie had

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515

from there he

watched disdainfully the gesticulating brokers plying their trade. Even Sheeny Mike attired in a Prince Albert and sporting a high hat of the latest fashion, was there with his own particular nimble light-fingered activity. Many a broker had paused in his excitement to glance at the tall figure of Broken-nose Tully, whose hat topped all the other tall hats as he stood before the board watching the quotations rise to new levels. There also was Red Leary, slouching in through the wide entrance of the Exchange. No Prince Albert for Red. And he would not put his head into one of those high, stiff hats. He came in clothes better suited to his rank and station, a check suit

and black hard hat. He may have looked out of his element in the crowd of formally attired gentlemen, but he did not feel so. An attendant spied him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Trader or visitor?” he asked suspiciously. “Now that you’re askin’,” Red answered with a grin, “maybe I own the place!” There were monthly meetings at Ma Mandelbaum’s . . . gay affairs. She insisted on formal dress for the men, and even Red

Leary had to wear swallowtail coat and stiff-bosomed shirt. At first he grumbled, and then got to like it, especially after he had acquired, in a felicitous moment

and at considerable hazard, a set

of diamond studs to adorn his otherwise barren expanse of starchy whiteness.

At the next meeting

the others, not to be outdone,

appeared similarly bedecked. Ma Mandelbaum was resplendent, bearing up a fortune in stones that would have made Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe of jeweled gowns look like cast-off frumpery. Pendants hung glitter-

ing from the lobes of her ears; a huge sparkling breastplate reposed on her wide bosom, and her thick fingers were circled by gold bands on which deep-set brilliants stood out like ripe carbuncles. Wine flowed freely. The royal hostess of these occasions strictly enforced her own ruling that proscribed hard liquor. When business was in hand, heads must remain clear.

All were in the mood of hilarious and sanguine enjoyment. Stephen heard his own praises sung vociferously. The only note

of disharmony in that crescendo of jubilation was a communica-

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tion recently received from the mysterious Mr. X, who complained about the sudden cessation of income. There had been, of late, a

deplorable fall in the numbers and frequency of major crimes, both puzzling and disturbing. So it came about one day not long after the big strike effected with Keene that a gloomy and worried set of men gathered round the table at Ma Mandelbaum’s. They had come unbidden, George Leslie having brought news of a collapse on the Exchange. Prices were tumbling. Panic was in the air. It looked like a collapse for

Keene . . . the end of his rope and of the monthly stipend. Ma Mandelbaum sent at once for Stephen and Thaddeus Pitney. Red Leary was already planning things. “Too good to last,” he prophesied darkly. Ma Mandelbaum’s wine-apple cheeks were blanched to a weak plum shade. All day they waited in her house, silent, brooding, apprehensive of the worst. Only George Leslie was calm, though not communicative.

At two-thirty in the afternoon Stephen arrived with Mr. Pitney. He took his place, unaffected by the sight of glum faces turned upon him out of the surrounding lowering silence. Only when Pitney’s preliminary snort invaded the funereal gloom with something like a false note, a loud and unseemly explosion, Ma Mandelbaum turned on him in a fury. “It goes to your brain, Thaddus,” she cried, outraged. pans t I told you often? Tobacco brains ain’t smart!” She shook her head, sighing, and appealed to Stephen. “I think maybe your brain iss different. Tell me the truth. Iss it yes or no?”

Stephen smiled. “Some wine,” he said, reaching for his glass.

Sam filled his glass. And then, amid a profound silence, Stephen explained the mysteries of short selling. James R. Keene, with the wisdom of a fox and a magic wand, had led his victims into fancied security;

they poured their gold into the stock he had promoted. Then, with

a sudden turn, he had pushed prices down by flooding the market with the stock they had bought. At the close he owned more shares than ever, at the lowest prices in years. His profit soared to

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three millions. His and Jay Gould’s. Instead of being ruined, they had reaped a harvest. It was some while before the others understood. And then gloom gave way to joy. Hands reached toward Stephen, to slap him on the back. Just why they thought he had had anything to do with it they did not, themselves, stop to consider. But the bearers

and harbingers of good tidings have from time immemorial been feasted and crowned with the classic laurel, while their brother

bearers of evil fate have not infrequently been rewarded with death. It pleased them, for the time being, to exalt destiny and worship fortune in the person of Stephen, of whom they made a hero. And so, at the next formal meeting, Red Leary presented Stephen with a set of diamond studs. “From the gang,” he said. Stephen hesitated, choked with misgivings. But Red nudged him and spoke rather impatiently. “Tt’s all right.” “Sure,” Sheeny Mike put in, whining, “it ain’t what you take, but how you take it. Ain’t that fellow Keene a thief the same as Red? Only he takes millions, and nobody hollers. Don’t be so hifalutin, young feller. You ain’t no better’n us. Only you’re a gentleman, an’ we’re bums!” Stephen looked at Mr. Pitney and at Ma Mandelbaum, but their imperturbable faces gave him no moral guidance. His hand stretched out gropingly, lustfully, toward the handsome diamonds and swept them into his pocket. Ma Mandelbaum patted him on

the shoulder. “Now,” she said, “if you’d only call me Ma!” He laughed, diffident and wretched. “Tf itll make you happy, I will.” George Leslie laughed, too. A whinnying trumpet blast. The monthly payments came in regularly from Keene who continued his successful operations. At Ma Mandelbaum’s, however, there was dissatisfaction, jealousy of Stephen and suspicion

of Keene’s motives. George Leslie in particular sensed his waning importance, and Ma Mandelbaum threw out ominous hints of “feeding the coppers” again.

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14 Stephen was almost twenty-one. He had saved money. The world seemed good. But during the first of the monthly reckonings, when Keene smilingly handed him large rolls of bills for distribution among the “gentlemen thieves,” as Keene called his associates, they had felt to his touch very much like the package he had redeemed on Madison Street at the behest of Tommy Kincaid. He felt that the money was not really his. In the first place, it was peeled from the bankroll of some poor, unknown and unfortunate “sucker” who had lost to the shrewd and wily trader, Keene, in the gamble for easy money. In those days, he found himself aligning Keene with the satellites of Ma Mandelbaum. Fundamentally, the objective was the same. At other times, Ma Mandelbaum

and her ‘“‘children” loomed

more favorably in the balance. They at least risked liberty and, often, life. Keene risked nothing but money, the origin of which was shady in morals and ethics, and, perhaps, sportsmanship. But these subconscious misgivings in the early days of his association with Keene were short lived. The man’s tremendous energy and optimism wore them down. In subsequent months, it was not the manner of acquisition and accumulation, but how much, that counted.

.

Actually, Stephen began to rise in his own esteem. Keene was shrewd, he reflected, but Stephen Yerkes

was

shrewder.

He

ac-

quired a degree of arrogance that submerged utterly his earlier — juvenile humility. It showed itself in his attitude toward Thaddeus Pitney, who shrank in stature and perspicacity as his former clerk waxed stronger. Toward his mother, however, he was ever the same, affection-

ate and considerate. He responded to her pride in his success with genuine filial respect and devotion. Naturally he had not told her about Ma Mandelbaum or Red Leary or any of the others. To her he was the associate of Mr. Pitney, a highly estimable gentleman and successful Wall Street broker.

One day he brought his mother a beautiful diamond ring,

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scarcely as pretentious as any of Ma Mandelbaum’s, but the stones were really good, and bought with his own money. It was the first offering of his new wealth. He had refused, definitely and irrevocably, the fat woman’s friendly gesture of a magnificent bracelet for his mother. It was unthinkable . . . his own mother wearing stolen jewels! Ma Mandelbaum did not press him. ‘‘You ain’t like the rest,” she once told him. “You’re a gentleman . . . the others are bums. Money can’t make them any different. It can’t wash away the privy stink they wass born in. Their gambling and their women keep them poor. You and me and maybe Thaddus, we will be rich and do things!” And now he had a Prince Albert and a silk hat of his own. He donned them every day when he went downtown. And he began calling on Marguerite Pitney. In her presence he was the

elegant gentleman. Business, shrewdly conceived, took him often to the Pitney house. Hennessy

admired him, his clothes, diamond

studs and all.

“The stables ain’t never been the same,” she said positively. “I always knew you was a gentleman, Mr. Yerkes!” Marguerite showed no signs of infatuation in her somewhat grudging acceptance of his attentions. And her father did not encourage them. “Wait until we break with the gang and . . . that woman,” he insinuated weakly to Stephen, “if you have any serious thoughts about Marguerite. She’s all I have that’s clean. I want to keep her that way.” Stephen laughed, and did not disclose his thoughts. But Mar-

guerite’s father accepted with alacrity his invitation to accompany his mother to the theater. “Mind you,” Stephen cautioned him, laughing, “no serious intentions! Not until Marguerite says the word to me!” It was not until many months after his meeting with Keene that Marguerite did finally say the word that made her his betrothed. Stephen was persistent, and lavish with his gifts. She, on her part, was favorably impressed with his financial success. They would be married in December. Thaddeus Pitney heard the news calmly, though without en-

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thusiasm. Stephen’s mother was delighted. Hennessy’s eyes glistened as she resurrected an old Irish ditty, her dishes danced to her tune. One afternoon Stephen returned home from the Exchange earlier than usual. He had felt tired. Marguerite’s social duties were making his nights long and his sleep short. He came up the front steps, preoccupied, his thoughts hovering foggily around Marguerite, running on to the future and returning disconnectedly to the business matters that had engaged his attention that morning. As he pushed open the front door, he became aware of the fact that his mother had a visitor. Someone was with her in the parlor. A man’s voice came out to him, uplifted in argument. He left his coat and hat on the stand. Going into the parlor, he was astonished to find Howard Ayres there, standing before the window, beneath the portraits of his ancestors. They had been having what was, apparently, a painful and upsetting conversation. His mother was sitting on the sofa, her face hidden in her hands. When she looked up, he saw such an expression of woe and helpless distraction that he felt his heart crushed in with pain for her; and he blamed himself for giving no thought to her, scarcely ever seeing her except to know that she was there, in these recent weeks of absorption in his own life and happiness. With a stiff gesture to Ayres, he rushed over and caught hold of her hands. “What is it? Has something happened? Tell me, for heaven’s sake, what is the matter?’?

Conscience-stricken,

he caressed her

hands and implored her. Ayres had turned away and was looking out the window, his back to the room, his hands clasped behind him. A devastating thought flashed into Stephen’s mind. What if.

Ayres had told her? But his mother’s words were reassuring. She looked up at him bewildered, her eyes brimming with tears, one of her hands lifted limp in his as he bent over her, the other wilted and curled in her lap. “For months Howard has been warning me about you,” she said pathetically. “I didn’t want to worry you, I was afraid to say anything yet, and thought probably you knew what you were doing. He said Mr. Keene’s

bubble

would

burst, and he would

carry you and Mr. Pitney down with him. Today he said it’s sure to come. You'll be ruined . . .”

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“So he wants you to marry him, so you can be saved from poverty? Is that it?” Stephen’s voice was hard with anger. His mother looked stricken. She did not answer. He saw tears falling in her lap, making a dark spatter on the wisteria silk of her dress. Thoughts of Keene’s invariable luck, his own spectacular success and good fortune that derived from the other’s control of power, swam dizzily in his head, filling him with intoxicated belief in himself and the permanence of his own security. He was so infuriated by Ayres’ presumption, coming to his mother like this behind his back, the indecency and dishonesty of it, and of using him as the pretext. He went over to Ayres and put his hands on his shoulders, jerking him around. In a high breathless voice, the words rushed out of his mouth. “Tl ask you never to set foot in this house again,” he said, fighting to keep control of himself. “When we need your help, we'll ask for it. Now go. Please get out!” Ayres kept his dignity. He bowed. And with another bow to Stephen’s mother he gathered up his hat and coat and cane and left the room. Stephen followed him to the door. “You'll come to me, young man,” Howard Ayres said, turning, his hand on the door knob. “But it will be too late.” Stephen slammed the door after him.

=) In two weeks the wedding trip was ended. Marguerite resented Stephen’s eagerness to return to New York. She wanted to extend the holiday; but Stephen, nervously keeping track of affairs in Wall Street, insisted on returning. Whether it was his nervous reaction to the unaccustomed, in-

tense immersion in an emotional life or some lurking shreds of Ayres’ warning, inspired by malice and rancor as it was, he did not know. His uneasiness did not abate. He began to entertain all sorts of wild fancies and notions, seeing catastrophe ahead and all around him. He kept worrying himself with the question of whether or not

Keene was in truth being swept on to his doom. He lost his nerve completely. He said they must go back.

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Marguerite attributed it all to his obstinacy and indifference to her wishes. If he loved her so much, how could he deliberately and cold-bloodedly disregard her desires, especially in this thing that arose out of her fond anticipation of enjoying with him a longer period of privacy? He tried at first to console her. But his vague explanations irritated her, and then he was made angry by her tears. They had their first quarrel as the train neared New York.

The question of where they should live was another point of disagreement. He wanted to live in Bond Street, in his father’s house which was now his own. She insisted on their going to live with her father. He yielded finally, but he felt that he had let himself be overborne. And in the quarrel they had in the train, the smart of it flared up and stung again. 16

James R. Keene was still the spectacular figure in Wall Street. He took Stephen into his room and motioned him to a seat, and sprawled back in his chair, puffing a cigar. “J kept my word with your gang,” he said, reflecting. “Yes, sir. You did.” “Tt cost me a pretty penny.”

He took the cigar out of his mouth and knocked off the ash. With an absent gesture, he held it off and looked at it before he put it back in his mouth. “Howard Ayres said I was a fool. Maybe you thought so, too.” Stephen was minded to tell him about Ayres’ ominous prediction, but Keene anticipated him.

“Ayres is a gyromaniac .. . it’s a word I learned from a wise old prospector. “Look out,’ he said, ‘fer the man who walks in a circle. He’s dangerous.’ Howard Ayres is that kind of man. Today with me, tomorrow with Gould. Maybe, the day after with you.

That’s Ayres. Well,’ Keene’s eyes gleamed with sudden fire, “I walk on a straight line. Whoever’s in my way will find himself scrapped.” Stephen was silent. He wondered what this was leading up to. Suddenly Keene lurched forward, bringing his face near, the cigar uptilted in the side of his mouth.

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“Are your bums reliable?” Stephen assured him. “‘They’d go the limit for you, sir!” Keene’s face relaxed, pleased. He spoke, his voice smooth, the

words hurtling from under his grip on the cigar in a torrent. “Tm thinking of a little bag of tricks,” he began. Stephen listened, while his benefactor unfolded his plans for a gigantic coup such as Wall Street had never seen. Millions were involved. “It will make or break me,” Keene said, “so I’m taking no

chances. These Easterners have been waiting for their chance to get at me from under. Now your gang’ll be earning their keep!” He had heard rumors of a plan to break the corner. Gould, ostensibly playing with him, was really marshaling the opposition. He had tried to do it before. “I discovered it in time, but I didn’t let on.”

This time they were desperate, but he wouldn’t be caught napping. The stakes were too high. “Tl wipe ’em off the map!” He laughed, taking pleasure in his own canniness. He got up, reached in his desk, and produced a slip of paper which he handed to Stephen. “Here they are. Six of ’em.” Stephen scanned the list, and was surprised to find Howard Ayres’ name down. Gould’s was missing. “They’ve got to be kept off the Exchange tomorrow,” Keene said meaningly, “and I’m looking to you to see it’s done.” Stephen promised it would be done, everything would be all

right. They shook hands. And he left the office to call on Ma Mandelbaum. Mrs. Mandelbaum was preéminently interested in any proposition that entailed action and crowned it with a cash benefit. She was, moreover, pleased to see Stephen, her prodigal lamb, who had not visited her in some time, but left her old ears done out of so

much felicity in hearing herself called Ma. These things she made known with winks and ogling stretches of her red peasant countenance, and blandishments congenially purred in his waiting ears. Then she despatched Sam to round up the gang. They straggled in;

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Red Leary, Sheeny Mike, Terence and the rest. Pitney was not called. Nor Leslie.

“The old man ain’t no help, and I ain’t trusting the other too much these days.”

Stephen received their congratulations murmurs of “good luck.” “I hear she’s a purty lady!” said Sheeny need pearls, the clearest a oyster ever hatched “Oysters don’t hatch pearls,” Red Leary bear ’em inside like a woman a baby.”

on his marriage, and Mike. “Maybe if you . . .” corrected him, “they

“Say, listen, stewface,” Sheeny Mike hissed at him, “these ain’t

baby pearls, they’re grown up!” The gang settled down to serious business. Their eyes moved, stuck to Stephen, unwinking. ‘““These six men must be kept away from the Exchange all day,” he said. They did not ask why. He told them nothing, except that the orders came from Keene himself.

Methods of operation were discussed, the seal of secrecy invoked. Red Leary was charged with the leadership. Next morning, as each of six gentlemen prominent in financial circles was preparing to leave his home, a uniformed messenger rang his doorbell and delivered a telegram. The telegrams came over Jay Gould’s name and called for a special meeting at a midtown address. Each smiled as he read the summons. An hour later, six mystified, fuming, swearing gentlemen in frock coats and silk hats sat eying each other desperately in the darkened room of a private residence in Great Jones Street. A masked figure with leveled gun leaned in the doorway. He made no answer to their threats. Howard Ayres was of the six, and he was the most desperate.

“You'll pay for this,” he bellowed to the silent guard. “And so will Keene! It’s his doings. ’ll send you to Sing Sing for life. It’s kidnaping!” His fellow prisoners growled and murmured approbation. After a lapse of time, Ayres suddenly stalked up to the masked man leaning with his shoulders against the closed door. His silk hat was

pushed back on his head, his agate eyes shone with a phosphorescent glitter.

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“Pm not afraid of your pistol,” he shouted, lunging at the guard. “Get at him, men. He’s only one!” The guard kicked on the door. His fist shot out and caught Ayres a hard blow on the chin. He toppled backward in a heap. Then the door was wrenched open and five more masked men plunged through into the darkened room. All carried pistols. “If you know what’s good for yer souls,’ a gruff voice growled, “‘you’ll sit quiet, like the gentlemen you are, till we give the word.” The five prisoners returned to their seats. A moment later, one of the guards left the room and came back with a pitcher. He dashed its contents into the upturned face of Ayres, still stretched motionless on the floor. Ayres sat up, blinking his eyes and feeling of himself, emitting grunts of pain and shock, and presently got stiffly to his feet and joined his friends. Water dripped from his clothes, his mustache draggled over his mouth and one hand feebly stroked his battered chin. He and the others remained in their chairs, regarding one another in baffled, angry silence. Toward noon a tray of food was handed in. None of the prisoners had any appetite. But when several bottles of whisky were introduced by one of the masked guards, they brightened up noticeably. Finally, late in the afternoon, the guard left them with an admonition to remain quiet for half an hour, if they valued their lives. After that they were free to go. At four o’clock they emerged from the house in Great Jones Street, a bedraggled, tired company. They made off downtown to the Exchange, but too late. The carnage was complete. James R. Keene had made another killing. Five millions, the papers said. “Gould didn’t deserve it,” Keene commented to Stephen later, in the privacy of his office. “He was aiming against me. But he makes his pile just the same. Both ends against the middle, that’s his game. But I’m not through.” He went to his desk, wrote out a check and delivered it with a flourish into Stephen’s outstretched hand. Give the boys a thousand apiece as a bonus . . . that ought

to hold them a while. Tell them there’ll be more!” Much wine flowed at Ma Mandelbaum’s that night. Even George Leslie celebrated. If he felt aggrieved at Ma’s failure to call

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him the night before, he did not show it. Without demur or questioning, he pocketed the thousand dollars she handed him and left ahead of the others. “Got a date?” Red called out, as Leslie was sauntering out of the room. “Up Sixth Avenue,” George called back, with a laugh. Red shot a pugnacious look after him, and turned to Ma Mandelbaum. “Whenever you give the word, Ma,” he said, “we'll be in mourning for a few days.” But Ma Mandelbaum shook her head. “Not as long’s ’'m Ma Mandelbaum. But I’m thinking of other things. Maybe one of these days I will be going downtown to sce ure Xk

“Make it life then,’ Red grumbled. “No need of him with Steve around.”

17

Stephen Yerkes was a rich man. He had a hundred thousand dollars now. And he was the head of the house. Thaddeus Pitney was getting old. And he felt his age, he was glad to take life more quietly. Stephen said there was really no need for the old gentleman to drive downtown every day. So Stephen now sat in Mr. Pitney’s chair at the office, and attended the daily sessions of the Stock Exchange. Of late, however, the old man had become moody. He would sit for hours in the parlor, his glance wandering, forgetful even of his snuffbox. One night, when he was in one of his trances, Marguerite asked him a question. He did not answer, he just looked at her in an odd, distracted way, a shadow of fear in his eyes. Mar-

guerite sent a quick puzzled glance toward Stephen. When they were alone, she asked him, “Is there anything wrong with Father? He’s acting so quect ly Stephen said, “Age. It comes to all of us.’ But in his heart he knew better. His father-in-law was afraid. He had lost his nerve. He no longer asked for information about Keene or Ma Mandelbaum,

and seemed

to avoid all discussions.

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Even the Stock Exchange and financial sheets no longer interested him, Next morning, Stephen and Pitney sat alone at the breakfast table, waiting for Hennessy to serve them. Marguerite was still upstairs. “Stephen,” said the old man in the slow brooding tone he had lately acquired, “‘you’re a rich man now. And yov’re still young. The world is before you. Maybe you better quit Keene and Ma Mandelbaum. Keene will bust up, and you with him. And as for that old bitch, the sooner you cut loose from her the better for you and... better for Marguerite.” “Don’t worry about Keene.” Stephen spoke with hearty confidence. “There isn’t any stopping him. His star is still high! And as for Ma Mandelbaum . . . she’s nothing in my life.” What did it matter to him if Ma Mandelbaum was a thief? Or if James Keene and Gould broke all the laws in Christendom? They were his opportunity, chance playing into his hands, He felt himself peculiarly clean. And as time went by he began to feel that he had not made enough from Ma Mandelbaum and her gang. He pondered over it. Those men would die thieves. Even Keene’s generosity had not appeased the itch of their fingers. The scent of the hunt was in their nostrils. But they had no imagination. Men like Keene and Gould triumphed by the power of their vision. All those fellows in Wall Street, they were after big game. Their money was no cleaner than Ma Mandelbaum’s or Red Leary’s or Sheeny Mike’s. But their hunt was more hazardous. The more

they had, the more they stood to lose. Rich today, poor tomorrow. A palace one day, a Bowery dive the next. Mr. X, whoever he was, had the right idea. His fingers reached into every pie. Ma Mandelbaum or James Keene, it was all alike to

him. They paid. Why couldn’t he be a Mr. X? There’d be millions in it. Keene was lying low now. Girding his loins for another smash hit. Time hung heavy on Stephen’s hands. He had time to think. Occasionally he dropped in at Ma Mandelbaum’s. She, too, was complaining, the boys were getting lazy. And Mr. X drew on her constantly.

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“There’s no satisfying that man!” she lamented. “Who is this Mr. X?” he asked her. “It’s about time, I think,

you might do me the honor of disclosing his identity.” “Maybe some day,” she said, patting his hand, and smiling. “You will meet him. Now . . . it iss a little too soon.” It scarcely satisfied him. But he had to be content. “You

ain’t what you used to be, Stefan,” Ma Mandelbaum

said, looking at him more seriously. ““Not long since, you wass a boy, now you’re a man. Already you are serious, and your talk iss . well, different.”

He smiled sententiously. On impulse, in one of her sentimental moods, the woman heaved herself up out of her chair, creaked over the floor and took from a carved teakwood chest one of her prize articles, a pearlhandled pistol. She presented it to Stephen. “Keep it oiled well . . . always,” she added, shrugging her shoulders. “One never knows.” He dropped it into his coat pocket. 18

Rumors of Keene’s imminent downfall flew about Wall Street,

thick as autumn

leaves. He had overreached himself, they said.

Banks began to look to their securities. Stephen began to feel uneasy. For a month he avoided going to Ma Mandelbaum’s. It was an unexciting month. Things were

going from bad to worse. It was clear that the end was in sight. Stephen became sullen and irritable under the strain. He lost interest in Marguerite’s idle chatter. He was impatient with his mother, and silent when he and Thaddeus Pitney were alone. “Don’t let it get you,” Pitney said one night. “It was bound to come. You’re young, and you’ve got savings. There’s nothing to be worried about. If Keene oS another will take his place. That’s Wall Street!” Yet it wasn’t Keene alone that Stephen was worried about. For months he had watched men pulling, tearing, snarling at each other for something they had not earned, and he had joined in the scramble. A hundred thousand was his loot, and with it he won a

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sense of security, not only for the future, but in everything that seemed important in life. Even Marguerite, whose love, he was sure,

found a precarious root in her respect for his genius as a financier. Her pride as his wife was in line with her earlier pride when, as the handsome coachman, he was the envy of all her friends. Keene’s fall would mean the end of Stephen’s reputed genius. More and more his thoughts turned to Ma Mandlebaum. She seemed to have found the secret. She was wholly unconcerned with panics or booms, with Wall Street’s fluctuations. Her income seemed secure, her flow of money was certain. So long as men stole—and men would always steal—her position was assured. They would pay for the privilege of stealing, even as James Keene had done. Ma Mandelbaum or James Keene . . . their objective was the same. Only their methods were different.

It had been a tumultuous day on the Stock Exchange. Prices tumbled in an augmenting avalanche of sales. James R. Keene fought valiantly to hold his position. Stephen marveled at the man’s inexhaustible energy; he was like a raging bull butting a wall. Another star disappeared over the horizon. He did not wait for the gong to confirm his doom. At the close of the session he

was nowhere to be found. Stephen left the Exchange swearing vengeance on Gould for Keene’s and his own losses. There was nothing to wait for. Stephen was clean, as stripped as on the day he became Pitney’s coachman. It had been a furious period. He had embarked hopefully on a tidal wave which had raised him high, then dashed him disdainfully against the breakers of an unknown future. He did not bother to return to his office. He walked homeward. He grinned as he thought of Ma Mandelbaum, but his heart was sore for Thaddeus Pitney. She would take her loss as she had

many another . . . stoically. But the old man would find it hard. Downtown New York was releasing its hordes for the night. He watched the faces of the hastening pedestrians. They showed no

worry,

they were

carefree.

Awaiting

them,

doubtless,

were

the serenity and quiet of home, perhaps the embrace of a wife or sweetheart, and the welcoming shout of youngsters. He recalled those nights when his own father had come home, hauled

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him to his shoulder and to the tune of an old song of the battlefield stumped proudly and noisily into the parlor to greet his tender-eyed mother. But that was in the dim long ago, a faded memory blurred by the recollection of the charred body in the fire-scorched store, with the wooden stump unstrapped.. He thought of Marguerite. How Boul she accept his fall?

He had not been altogether sure of her. Not that he doubted her love, but often it seemed to him that her romantic

nature had

responded to his success rather than to himself. Somehow, he felt as he walked home, his collapse must be kept from her. She could not know. He would have to remain to her the romantic figure she had pictured. He envied his father the love that endured beyond the grave. Perhaps his father also had been harassed by similar fears and had preferred death to the disillusionments of life. Of late, when Stephen felt himself riding on the wings of fortune, he had not thought much of his father. But now memory stirred, he recalled with bitter clarity the twitching mouth that had once been firm, the trembling hands that once were strong, the wavering eyes once steady.

Who was his enemy? He had attempted to carry on, contented with modest returns, happy in his normal home life. Yet defeat had overwhelmed him, as it had destroyed his own being. Allan Yerkes had been a fool. No man can win without being ruthless.

But Marguerite should not know. Nor his mother. Stephen Yerkes would rise from the wreckage. Not as a hireling, but as a master whom even Wall Street would respect. He was about to ascend the stone stoop of his home when ie felt a tug at his sleeve. He turned. Ma Mandelbaum’s Sam stood behind him, wild-eyed. He clucked horribly, and his arms waved eastward.

19 Ma Mandelbaum was waiting for Stephen in the store. Her long nose reached almost to the thin, compressed lips that drew a straight line across her loose, square face. And on the high jutting forehead that curved sharply backward at the roots of her hair,

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giving it an exposed bald look in spite of the thick roll of reddishbrown hair, there were thin puckers of anxiety, strange to Stephen. “You don’t look like you’re licked,” she said, the line of her

lips tightening in a scant smile, as if pulled on a string. Stephen remained sober.

pais that why vce: “No. It wass not you.” Her head jerked upward. “It iss Thaddus. He iss upstairs.” She raised one hand in a symbolic gesture and drew circles around her forehead. “I think maybe he iss cracked!

He don’t look right and talks worse.” They went upstairs together. As Stephen entered the room behind Ma Mandelbaum, his glance from the doorway was blocked immediately by the sight of Thaddeus Pitney, sprawling out of the chair that supported his great ham thighs, the upper half of his body collapsed over the table, under the glare of the spangled, gaslit chandelier. His round head, with its tufts of silvery fleece as fine and soft as baby’s hair, dug into the moat made by his arms flung out across the polished surface. Beside him on the table stood a whisky bottle, almost empty, and a glass. As they came in, Pitney’s head rose, slowly. Stephen was shocked at his pallor, against which the anguished and unnatural glitter of his inflamed eyes proved a frightful contrast. The flesh of his face hung loose, gathered into lumpish dead folds like the skin of a collapsed rubber ball. He struggled to rise from the chair, but the effort was too great. He settled back, his mouth gaping,

the wild red glare burning in his bloodshot eyes. “So,” Pitney’s mouth twisted in a scornful smile, “it’s you, my dear son-in-law!” Then, as if that introduction had torn loose from his heart all

the bewilderment, rage and terror mured up in his past, he vented so torrential a flow of poisonous recriminations that Stephen recoiled in amazement. He watched in fascinated horror as, his face

purpling, Pitney spat out his mad tirade. “You! My former coachman, Mr. Stephen Yerkes! The elegant gentleman and high-flier financier, the master mind! Dreamer of great dreams and beloved friend of crooks and thugs! You took my daughter, an innocent young girl, you’ve brought her to disgrace and ruin and destroyed her happiness. And now, what? What have

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you got to say? Before hell-fire burns you, as it did your father!” Stephen leaped forward, his clenched hands lifted to strike. Ma Mandelbaum flung herself on him, pulling and dragging at his arms. “He iss drunk, Stefan. Half crazy! Don’t mind him. Let him alone!” Stephen stood over the motionless, sagging old man, gasping, his face rigid with agony. Thaddeus Pitney looked up at him, a crafty gleam creeping into his eyes, around his mouth a malicious feeble smile. “Muscles,” he snickered, “I counted on your muscles . . . but not for me.” He stretched an arm toward Ma Mandelbaum. “For her. It was for her . . . to drive her out of my life!” His voice shot up to a scream, dropped as suddenly. “And now,” he continued in a despairing whisper, “‘you’ve driven me back to her. I must be a thief again. And Marguerite . . . Marguerite is married to a thief!” Ma Mandelbaum made a sign to Stephen. Together they got the man up, half carrying, half dragging him across the floor to a sofa.

Ma Mandelbaum sat beside him, stroking his damp forehead. She talked to him in a crooning, pleading voice.

““Ain’t you trusting Ma?” she said softly. “She helped you once, she’ll do it again. Only,” she made her voice caressing, “‘no foolishness. When a man loses money . . . well, it comes and goes. But lost nerves never come back.” Pitney’s eyes closed, he lay limp. After a time he slept. Stephen sat on the other side of the room, his head in his hands. He did not know how the time went by, or how late it was. He was conscious of nothing but his misery. He started up suddenly as he felt Ma Mandelbaum’s hand on his shoulder. “I wass afraid about him,” she said, ‘“‘so I thought to send for

you. The harrying thought pursued him. ““What did he mean about my father?” Stephen asked in a hollow voice, looking up at her with a cold determined gaze. The pupils of Ma Mandelbaum’s eyes contracted suddenly and a hostile light appeared in them.

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“Drunken talk,” she said evasively. “What did he mean?” She did not answer, and Stephen continued staring at her with the same hard expression. “You know what he meant.” “It wass nothing,” Ma Mandelbaum said calmly. “Only your father lost his nerves . . . like Thaddus now. It wass during the panic when he wass facing bankruptcy, and I heard about it. I had a big stock of silks. So he let me put some in his store. “But he lost his nerves . . . and then came the fire.” She sighed. “It cost me plenty.” “Hell-fire,” Stephen said. His hand plunged swiftly into his pocket as he repeated, shouting, “Your hell-fire!” Sam, who had come into the room and was standing watchfully behind Stephen’s chair, leaped forward and wrenched the pistol out of his hand. He threw it on the table, holding Stephen by the arms. Ma Mandelbaum picked up the weapon, chuckling. “With my own pistol!” Waving Sam away, she grinned at Stephen, hesitated a moment, then with a magnanimous gesture handed it back to him. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Stephen asked weakly. “You should have told me. I had a right to know.” Ma Mandelbaum shrugged her shoulders. *“Ain’t I got enough trouble?” He stumbled down the stairs, out into the darkness of Hester

Street. Pushing through the knots of pedestrians and_ hilarious children, he groped along the crowded pavement. He wanted to be alone. The revelation about his father had unsettled his whole view of things. He understood now why the wooden stump had been unstrapped. Hell-fire. Other things were equally clear. Pitney’s objection to his marriage with Marguerite; his mother’s almost fanatical insistence on his father’s integrity, as if to impress him with an ideal she strove to perpetuate and only half believed in. But as he walked the tension in his mind was eased and some of his old belief in his father and sympathy for him came back. He was no coward. The fire had consumed the evidence of his

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shame. Not like Thaddeus Pitney who crawled sniveling to Ma Mandelbaum in every moment of desperation. He was unaware of any direction. He found himself on Water Street. He walked rapidly, following the course of the river. West~ ward, then northward.

Stephen’s pace slackened as thoughts of Marguerite welled up, smarting his face and skin with feverish anxiety. He thought of her delight over his frequent extravagances . . . diamond brooches, necklaces, and whatnot. And when her father protested at his mad prodigality, “Aren’t we rich?” she would exclaim, her head pertly cocked, laughing like a child. But all that was in the long ago. Before he had known about his father. Before he had heard Pitney’s reproaches. Life seemed different now.

He felt his father’s death more acutely, a catastrophe more piercing and more horrible than it had ever seemed before. He imagined Ma Mandelbaum in his father’s store, and Allan Yerkes sitting at her table. And he asked himself, over and over, what

would have happened to them, his mother and him, if his father | had not been caught in the panic? He remembered how, in his boyhood, he had wondered about

panics. In the midst of plenty there was hunger. Money was scarce. Where had it gone? He had sensed, somehow, the magic of Wall

Street, with its famous names . . . men his youthful fancy endowed with halos woven of supernatural gifts and powers. He knew these men now as they really were. He had tasted of their power, and found it comforting. Now it was gone. He was beaten, as his father had been. As Keene was. And Pitney. The future seemed hopeless. He hugged the memory of his father’s death as a sort of justification of his own vindictive attitude that the world owed him something, a debt it could never repay. The knowledge of his father’s

participation

in crime, desperate

though

it had_ been,

wrenched something loose within him. He felt himself severed completely from the past, no longer bound by any of the intimate ties of honor or love. He was adrift, and his bid for power, however achieved, for wealth, however acquired, was the only fixed point upon a limitless sea.

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The thought became a firm resolve, hammered out with growing certainty by each of the footsteps taking him homeward. It was not altogether clear in his mind how he could achieve his ambition, but he did not doubt his ultimate success. Obscurely,

he relied on the old easy association of his hopes with Ma Mandelbaum. Not Wall Street, but Hester Street.

When he reached home, Marguerite was dressing for dinner. Hennessy was in the kitchen. He did not bother to remove his coat, but started up the stairs to his room. In the hall above, Marguerite’s voice came out through the closed bedroom door, she was humming a tune. Happy. Why not? Stephen shrank back from the door. He retreated down the stairs, his ears ringing with the song that echoed through the hall. Softly he opened the street door and slipped out of the house. 20

Stephen raced up the wooden stairs, and without troubling ~ to knock or have himself announced by Sam, stepped into the room in a thick fog of tobacco smoke. ‘Ach, ya.”’ Ma Mandelbaum’s guttural exclamation was borne across to him. “I wass thinking of sending Sam for you.” She indicated a chair at her left and spoke to George Leslie. “Move

away. Stefan will sit by my side. Your sitting here does me no good!” Leslie scowlingly slid his chair over to make room. “You see, Stefan,” Ma Mandelbaum

resumed, when he had

seated himself, “‘we are only nine.” He had not noticed the vacant chairs. His attention was drawn to Pitney, who appeared to have recovered somewhat from his previous dementia and drunken raving, though his face still looked

haggard and sunken. “Missing are Sheeny Mike and Terence and Peck.” ‘Where are they?” Stephen asked, wondering. Oaths ripped from some of the others. Ma Mandelbaum rapped for silence. “Cursing and swearing ain’t the answer. We need less tongue and more brains.”

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She turned to Stephen. “Maybe you ain’t interested?” He did not understand the reference. But in that moment,

seeing her eyes fixed on him in a strained yet eager look, by one of those random connections out of which ideas sometimes come he was struck with an inspiration. As clear as if he had been pondering it hitherto far back in his thoughts, and had come here to announce it, he suddenly saw himself teaching these men the intricacies of their own calling ... organizing them. A king of thieves! “Interested?” he heard Ma Mandelbaum’s voice questioning blandly. It would not do to show too much eagerness. “T think you know,” he said. In a moment she began speaking, recounting the story of three of her own crew—Terence, Sheeny Mike and Peck—who had been slugged by a rival gang. “Bums from Hell’s Kitchen.” She had had trouble with them before. They would not stand

for the fellows from the East Side working in what they chose to consider their exclusive territory. “Rum-soaked bastards! They use brass knuckles instead of brains!” Terence, Sheeny Mike, and Peck were in the hospital, felled like oxen. “We got to go after them. There ain’t room in New York for them and us!”

Stephen smiled, ironically. “When thieves fall out...

bb)

“There’s murder!” Red Leary shouted, pounding on the table. Stephen shook his head. “No use feeding the hangman.” “How about Mr. X?” George Leslie said with sarcasm. ““Haven’t we paid our dues?” “Mr. X ain’t dealing with loafers,’ Ma Mandelbaum said, turning on him abruptly. “Besides, their jaw-slingers’re as good as ours. There was a moment of silence. Then Stephen asked, “Have you ever tried talking with them?” | “Those bastards ain’t the talking kind.”

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“But you never tried.” Ma Mandelbaum looked at him skeptically. “What iss there to talk about? They come at you with their brass knuckles. Maybe they'll stop if you say to ’em, ‘Wait, let’s talk!” And I thought you had brains,” she added, with fierce derision.

“Honey catches flies.” “And spoils the honey.” “So we train more bees!” He laughed. ““There’s no limit to what they can do.” “Tt’s riddles yer talkin’,” Funeral Wells said. ““There’s no sense to it.” Ma Mandelbaum silenced him. “Let Stefan talk.” Stephen talked. At first he asked questions. Who was this gang and where did it operate? Who were its leaders? He asked about other gangs. His questions came sharp. He insisted on precise answers. From Ma Mandelbaum and the others he gained a clear idea of the personnel of New York’s criminal population. The gang they feared most was the Whyos. They were the

toughest. “Brass knucklers,” Ma Mandelbaum said. Then the Gas House Gang, the Dry Docks, the Hook Gang, the Slaughter House Gang, and the Knuckle

Dusters.

All of them roamed

the city,

differing only in their methods of operation. Then, of course, there were the ““Western Crooks,” outsiders specializing in bank robberies and higher types of crime. They owed allegiance to no local group. Stephen sat absorbed in thought, having no more questions to ask. George Leslie was smiling cynically.

“Seems like Steve is learning things.” “Maybe if you learned,” Ma Mandelbaum said, “you wouldn’t be so expensive!”

Leslie shrugged, and with an elaborate gesture flicked the ashes from his cigar. “Well,” said Red Leary, with a grunt. “Now that you Know... 27 “Now that I know,” Stephen answered, addressing Red, “I

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understand why you re low-down, common thieves who'll never be anything else.” Red Leary jumped to his feet. “Who the hell’re you,” he shouted, “to spring preachin’ words at us? A common thief, eh! I been with more mobs’n you c’n count on yer fingers and spilled enough nitro to wreck the town! “Yeah,” he concluded, swaggering, looking around at the others. ““The coppers I croaked would fill a cemetery!” “Ya,”’ Ma Mandelbaum remarked in a dry voice, “they tell me they’re keeping a special rope for you. If it wass not for me, you’d a felt the pinch of it long ago.” She shook her head, sighing. “Don’t fly into no tempers, boys. Tempers iss like boils. There’s no curing ’em except with the knife.” And she added, “I ain’t looking for trouble.” Red subsided, muttering. And she turned to Stephen. “?Tain’t for nothing you asked them questions. Ain’t I told you he iss smart?” She chuckled. Stephen took command of the situation. He outlined a scheme to bring order out of the chaos in which crime and criminals were floundering. Crime was to be organized, patterned after Wall Street. It was to reach into every industry and every section. There would be an end to anarchy, no longer would gangs battle for territorial rights, New York would be parceled out. Each gang would pay tribute to a central organization in return for the privilege of undisturbed operation in its particular field. Also the central body would act to protect them from interference by police and the authorities. Lawyers would be hired on annual retainers; bondsmen would stand ready to act in emergencies. At last crime was to come into its own. | Their opposition died, and now there was no doubt in the minds of the others as to who would head the great organization. - The father must nurture the child. Stephen Yerkes was the master mind. “It’s no job for a woman,” Ma Mandelbaum sighed. ‘Only one thing I ask . . . You should use my house as your headquarters.”

SLEEP REN

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PRM

The old scent was in Stephen’s nostrils. He was realizing his ambition for power. He worked ingeniously. It was no easy matter to whip into line the various, often contrary, groups who made up the important gangs of New York. He visited them.in their strongholds; he argued with their leaders, cajoled the meaner members.

At times his life was threatened, but in the end he had his way. The path was cleared for.a meeting of gang leaders at Ma Mandelbaum’s. And at that meeting he sat in Ma Mandelbaum’s chair, the acknowledged leader of organized crime. New York was in the grip of the most desperate and merciless crime wave in history. This was the beginning of the era jestingly termed “the elegant eighties.” It was scarcely elegant to the general population, floundering between the effects of Wall Street manipulations and Stephen Yerkes’ impregnable czardom in organized crime. ap? Merchants who found their stores wrecked after refusal to pay his collectors did not take their misfortunes lightly. Banks whose steel vaults and secret locks afforded no protection against the improved methods of the expert cracksmen who descended on the city lamented loudly. Brokers whose messengers were waylaid and robbed of fortunes in bonds and stocks complained bitterly. Pedestrians awakening from sluggings to find their pockets stripped,

their valuables gone, did not know on whom to vent their indignation, or to what end. Even gambling dens on the Bowery, whose owners were not members of the crime ring, were constrained to part with a nightly tribute to Yerkes’ emissaries.

Protesting voices were occasionally heeded. Police pointed with pride to the cessation of gang warfare that had transformed the

city’s streets into battlefields. Well-intentioned officials decreed a “deadline” in lower New York, below which burglars were not to ply their trade . . . as a protection to jewelers and stockbrokers, The order was honored by Stephen and his gangs only in the

breach. In the early days of his control, Stephen met the mysterious

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Mr. X for the first time, face to face. They surveyed each other in cold and taciturn appraisal, both in formal evening dress. Stephen was completely at ease in the luxuriously furnished apartment on upper Fifth Avenue. The uniformed, square-shouldered flunkey at the door had not asked his name, but had bowed him in and

led him immediately into the small paneled study where Mr. X awaited him. Neither of them touched liquor nor smoked cigars. Their tones, when they spoke, were as cold as their eyes. And their eyes

as hard as their faces. Stephen had early learned to stare without blinking, and to talk quietly and crisply. He emerged, smiling, from a successful meeting. Police would be encouraged to run down clues as occasion demanded, in deference to public opinion. But the clues would be of Stephen’s own making; they would lead to victims of his own choice, ending, more often, in a trackless maze of indistinguishable

footprints. The cost would be heavy, but the traffic could well bear it.

Stephen was rich beyond his wildest dreams. His army was doing well. The record of daily crime in New York mounted in an ever-increasing toll. Stephen’s daily routine, in that period of seemingly inexhaustible flow of gold, was based on the requirements of his position, for his standing as a successful broker in Wall Street had to be maintained. The old Pitney office had long since been discarded;

now

he rented a suite of rooms

in one of

the newer buildings. Stephen had grown taciturn with increasing wealth. His words were measured, there was a ring of authority in his voice. Ma. Mandelbaum learned to respect it; Thaddeus Pitney feared it. The old man never appeared at the office. Not since the day when

Sheeny Mike exhibited an unusually fine pearl necklace, his latest acquisition, for Stephen’s appraisal. Stephen had learned to understand jewels and how to put a price on them, such knowledge being an important part of his: business. This particular string of pearls had formerly hung from the slender neck of one of New York’s well-known society women. “There'll be a reward,” Mike announced greedily. ‘‘Maybe ten thousand. We'll split.”

STEPHEN!(YERKES—MARIONETTE

5a:

Stephen examined the pearls carefully, and handed them over to Pitney for judgment. The latter confirmed their value. Stephen reached for them, and with a hard direct glance at Sheeny Mike, pocketed the pearls. “You'll have your five thousand,” he said, and added in a half-threatening tone, “but you will forget you ever had it.” Mike looked glum, hesitating. “Maybe we can get more,” he demurred, “business ain’t been so good.” Stephen reached out and gripped Mike by the shoulder, tightly, until he cringed with pain. “You'll forget you ever saw it,” he repeated coldly. Mike submitted, nodding and backing away. “What’s in your mind about that string of pearls?” Pitney asked Stephen as they rode home that night. “Intending to advertise?” Stephen did not answer immediately. “What’s the idea?” Pitney asked again, louder. Stephen was staring straight ahead. “Tm going to restring ’em,”’ he said. Pitney slumped on the seat beside him. In the darkness, he did not see the sudden pallor of the old man’s face. “Not for Marguerite?” he asked in a thin voice. “Why not?” Stephen’s face was impassive, obdurate. “T asked you long ago, Stephen,” the old man pleaded, his hands trembling with emotion, “to keep her clean. Don’t let her wear them... not that kind!”

“As long as she doesn’t know, she’s clean.” Stephen laughed gruffly. Then turning on the old man in sudden fury, “If she ever knows—” he cried, “and it’s you . . . by God, you'll answer to me!”

Marguerite was delighted with her latest gift. It was their wedding anniversary. The star she had fashioned was brighter than ever. She was proud of him, and congratulated herself secretly. Stephen did not confine his generosity to Marguerite. He remembered his mother, too. And Hennessy. It was Hennessy’s birthday

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“And what do you think she wanted, of all things?” Marguerite told Stephen, laughing. “One of those tricycles with rubber tires!”

Stephen grinned. Next day, a tricycle was delivered at the house in Twenty-third Street, marked for Hennessy. They laughed together as they watched Hennessy from the window, gaunt and stiff-kneed, propel the clumsy machine up and down the rough pavement, the small solid tires scarcely easing the large wire wheels over the uneven surface of the street. “My legs ain’t what they used to be,” she exclaimed ruefully, pulling her skirts down, “though they ain’t bad. It was years ago in London, a production man said to me when I arsked him fer a dancin’ job, ‘Yer legs is fine,’ he said, apologizin’ like, ‘now if you hide yer face. ...’” At home, Stephen was gracious and carefree as ever. He submitted indulgently to Marguerite’s social demands, anxious to please her. They became regular attendants at the Opera. Opening nights at theaters nearly always found Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Yerkes among the audience. The gay night life of the city knew them intimately. It was in one of the dance palaces, one evening, that Stephen

was jolted out of his guarded composure.

At an adjoining table

sat George Leslie with a woman. Leslie nodded to him. Marguerite noticed it, and inquired about the identity of the handsome man. Stephen frowned. “Someone I shouldn’t know?” Marguerite asked, pretending surprise. Then provokingly, “I didn’t know you had any friends you wouldn’t care to introduce to your wife!” Stephen called Leslie over to his table, and presented him. Just then the orchestra swung into one of the dance hits of the day. And handsome Leslie offered his arm. Marguerite accepted, delighted with his gallantry. Stephen watched them waltz away. Later on he managed to whisper to Leslie: “She thinks you’re one of my Wall Street friends. See that you act the part!” Leslie laughed. “How long do you think you can fool her? Some day she'll know and then . . .” Leslie whistled, and rolled his eyes.

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“You'll never live to see that day,” Stephen snarled, suddenly conscious of the pearl-handled pistol snuggling against his whitebosomed chest. re,

Mr. X was worried. In the years of Stephen’s control of New York’s gangs things had never seemed so bright. It had been necessary from time to time to satisfy the public demand for police protection. Now and then a lowly gangster was compelled to stand trial or to take a plea and suffer a term in Sing Sing, particularly after an especially rich haul or a brazen bank job. Not infrequently, more important gangsters were advised to disappear for a while, either to a distant state or across the border to Canada,

where, in the absence of any extradition treaties, they were safe from arrest. All this was no more, nor less, than was to be expected. But nothing had happened, so far, to disturb gravely the prosperity and mental peace of Mr. X or Stephen. Their identities were unknown to the rank and file of the criminal world, as they were to the ordinary citizen. Only the inner circle, the individuals most intimately associated with the organization, knew the real power behind them. Loyalty, and more often fear, made their knowledge safe. But now something was happening. A new election was imminent. A group of reformers were battling for power, and their success would spell defeat for Mr. X and all his associates. It would threaten the organization that was Stephen’s creation, and he would no longer be able to provide protection. Gang leaders would be overthrown. Gang levies would cease. Anarchy in crime would return in all its vicious aspects.

But Stephen was not disturbed. He was rich. He had managed wisely. His reserves were unimpaired. He had not gambled in Wall Street. He was not afraid of panics. Marguerite was happy and contented, and she would remain so. At the proper time he would cut loose; the income on his holdings would keep him for life. Then, like a volcanic eruption, came the news that Mr. X was dead. Heart failure, the physician’s report said. Stephen, however,

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suspected suicide. And on the same day he was stunned by the rumor of Ma Mandelbaum’s indictment by the grand jury on an old charge of receiving stolen property, a load of silk hauled from the pier. It was the answer of the administration to the reformers’ outcry against entrenched crime. Sheeny Mike brought word to Stephen of her arraignment and discharge on bail. Stephen planned to see her, but postponed his visit until the next day. It was best to go slow, he considered. Besides, he was sure it was only a gesture. It would blow over. Those fellows in Centre Street were being smart. He quite respected their judgment. The following day Red Leary’s flushed face, as he sat twisting in his chair in Stephen’s office, indicated further troublesome news. It was some time before Red was calm enough to talk. Ma Mandel-

baum was gone. To Canada. Just for a while, she said, until things were more settled. Red suggested a meeting of the old gang, something would

have to be done. The boys wouldn’t stand being left holding the bag. Things looked black. He had better come. The meeting was held in a vacant apartment in the midtown area. Everybody attended, except Ma Mandelbaum. Stephen had asked Thaddeus Pitney to come. “You’re one of the old-timers,” he said, with a laugh. “They might listen to you in case of a showdown.” Pitney had demurred, but Stephen insisted. “What're you gonna do?” Red Leary put the question to Stephen. Stephen smiled.

“J think maybe we’d better lay off for a while,” he said. “You ain’t worryin’,” Broken-nose Tully said, sneering, “you

got yer pile.” Stephen felt the undercurrent of dissatisfaction. He knew he had lost caste. It was not going to be easy. “We got to go back to common thievin’,”’ Red Leary com-

plained. Like the rest, he had become accustomed to easy money, and now the flow of gold from the other gangs would cease. “It ain’t fair.”

Stephen argued with them. He presented the clearest reason-

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ing, and pleaded finally for a respite. But his words went unheeded. They wanted something more than promises. “They'll be huntin’ us down like rats,” Red Leary said. “An’

us with no grease to slide along.” Finally George Leslie spoke up. There was no immediate danger, he said. Ma Mandelbaum’s flight would occupy the public mind for a while. Mulberry Street would be satisfied. Why not make one grand splurge? One big bank job, one big jewel grab, and a dozen Wall Street messengers assaulted, and they wouldn’t need to worry about the immediate future. By the time New York woke up they could all be across the border. In Canada they’d be safe. Like Ma Mandelbaum. Later, when things died down, after election, they could come back. Stephen argued against it. Leslie was full of contempt. It was his hour, the opportunity had at last come to assert himself as a leader over the others, against Yerkes whom he had always disliked. He determined to make the most of it.

“Hiding behind Mandelbaum’s skirt, like you always done,” he sneered. ““Your nerve’s gone with her!” Stephen restrained himself. He knew Leslie was opposed to him, in everything, and would like to turn him out.

“How will you cash in?” he asked. “The boys’ll be in a hurry.” “That’s easy,” Leslie answered. “You'll take care of that. You’re not running to Canada. Your wife .. .”

Stephen was taken by surprise. Marguerite’s name! It capped the man’s audacity. He lunged at Leslie, pistol in hand. Red Leary

closed in on Stephen and held him tight. “None o’ that,” he growled, “when we’re all facin’ trouble.” Stephen was compelled to accept Leslie’s suggestion. But the

gauntlet had been flung down between them. “What will your job be?” he said. “Are you letting the boys do the dirty work and taking your share, as usual?” Leslie glared at him.

“My work’s planned,” he answered sullenly. “Why not tell us?” Stephen persisted. Leslie hesitated. The gang waited.

“We got a right to know,” Red Leary declared, speaking for them.

546

CELL 120: 22a SENIG 9STNC Stephen smiled.

“T’ll give you a job,” he said. “Something you can do better than anybody else.” “T’m listening,” Leslie said.

‘Tonight at Delmonico’s,” Stephen went on in a calm voice, “will be the biggest masque ball of the year . . . society will be out in full force. Gould’s wife will be there wearing her famous

diamond necklace . . . worth a cool half million.” He hesitated. His eyes were staring—not at Leslie, nor any of the others. Just Staruiggee. =

His mouth twisted in a grimace. “Gould and I have an old score to settle . . . remember what he did to Keene.” He paused, a stony ring in his voice. Suddenly he was moved by an intense irrational conviction that he was paying back, getting square with the world on his father’s account. He turned to George Leslie. “You will find your way to the ballroom and mingle with the guests. It will be your job to snatch that string. It won’t be hard with your ballroom manners and the way you handle women.” “There'll be cops around,” Leslie said, protesting. Stephen smiled. “Your make-up will hide your face.” The men surrounding them murmured their approval. “You ain’t worked in years,” Red Leary muttered. “I don’t know why the old lady kept you on . . . now’s yer chance.” Still Leslie hesitated. The crowd’s manner became threatening. “Steve gave you yer job... do it,” Broken-nose Tully said menacingly. “Tl need a woman to help pull it,” Leslie said finally. “The old woman would have given me one.” “You got more women than a sultan,’ Red Leary sneered. “Pick one of ’em.” “It'll have to be one I can trust,” Leslie said thoughtfully. “You mean we c’n trust,” Red Leary corrected. “You might take it in yer head to run off with her and the stones.” “Red’s right,” Stephen said. ““We ought to see her first.” George Leslie contracted his brows thoughtfully. Then a sud-

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den light showed in his eyes, and his body seemed to grow taller, reaching over the heads of the others. He turned an impassive face toward Stephen. “You fellows wait here,” he said, “I got just the woman

in

mind. Pll bring her.” “Don’t be long,” Stephen said. “It’s getting close to the time.” Leslie left hurriedly. Stephen and the others remained in the apartment, discussing plans for the night. The men were confident. It was to be a grand haul. Time-tables were discussed. They were to travel separately. And they would manage to let Stephen know their hideouts. Stephen would contrive to forward the money. It was growing dark. Flaring gas jets cast a yellowish tinge over the street outside. The men stood impatiently glowering at each other, and at Stephen.

“George’s havin’ a hard time with his moll,” Red Leary yawned. A loud snort surprised them. Old Pitney, who had taken no part in the discussion, was clutching his nose, inhaling deeply of the brown powder. “Thaddus is thinkin’!” Red Leary said reminiscently, laughing nervously. “Like Ma would say.” Pitney said in a mild voice, “I’m thinking. About George. Maybe it’s Gould’s daughter he’s after.” The crowd laughed. “Now that would be smart,” Terence Murphy said. “T wouldn’t put it past Leslie,” Stephen said.

Steps sounded in the hall. They fell silent. The door opened, a woman entered, followed by Leslie. Her face was veiled. The men

stared at her slender youthful figure, interest gleaming in their eyes. She was leaning on Leslie’s arm, advancing toward them. Something about her seemed strangely familiar to Stephen. His eyes narrowed in a perplexed scrutiny. Leslie was grinning.

“The lady was willing to come,” he said, with queer emphasis. There was a curious triumphant look in the eyes he turned to

Stephen. He reached out his hand and snatched the veil from the woman’s face. Stephen gasped, his eyes becoming pin points. “Marguerite!” He leaped toward her.

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For an instant Marguerite did not move or speak. She was gazing at the astonished faces surrounding her. She passed over the others, Red Leary, Sheeny Mike, Terence and Funeral Wells, and

spied her father. Thaddeus Pitney’s face was covered with sweat, and his shocked eyes were starting from their sockets. Then she turned to Stephen, standing turned to stone at her side, his face

fixed in consternation and anguish. “So,” she exclaimed, her voice hard with anger and scorn,

“these are your directors! Mr. Leslie told me you sent for me to meet them. He said you would explain.” She paused. No one had seen Pitney slouch from the room. A shot reverberated through the apartment. For a moment the men stood tense. A look of fear and dreadful horror crept into Marguerite’s eyes.

“It’s Thaddus!” Red Leary shouted, and ran into the adjoining room, followed by several of the men. At the sound of his voice Marguerite started, glanced once at Stephen, despair and hatred in her face, before she turned from him and ran into the other room, where the others were bending over Pitney’s body on the floor. Stephen was left alone with George Leslie. “The old man took it hard .. .” Leslie was saying, as Stephen’s hand was gliding toward his pocket. Leslie had started back, slightly dismayed by the pin-point stare in Stephen’s eyes, but his lips drew back in a scornful sneer. He laughed. “She knows now.” There was a flash of fire and a sharp report. . Stephen looked down at the body of George Leslie, writhing on the floor in a widening blood splotch. He felt no pity. Leslie was beating his fists on the floor in his agony. As Stephen listened to the whistling gasps that sank presently

into a single long exhaling sigh, he felt regret. Death had been too easy for him.

Only one of the two bullet’ had been used. To follow George Leslie to the gates of hell . . . it would be easy. He stood perfectly still, keeping the pistol, Ma Mandelbaum’s cherished gift, in his hand.

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But the police came too soon. Marguerite was standing in the doorway beyond which lay the body of her father. She was gazing at him with hard and glassy eyes. The words that fell from her lips struck sharp, loud, like a hammer. “His name is Stephen Yerkes!” The others had fled. But she was still there, in the doorway, when they led him away. All her softness seemed to have departed from her. All of a sudden, he felt that now

better. She was human... loved as desperately.

he understood

her

she could hate. She might have

23 “A tough bird,” the Tombs keepers said of Stephen Yerkes. “Hard’as nails.” They judged him by his cool demeanor, his grim face. He showed no emotion when the warden brought him news of his mother’s collapse in the visitors’ gallery, a paralytic stroke that left her a helpless invalid, bereft of speech. And when he was told that his wife had come and taken the stricken woman away, home with her to the house in Twenty-third Street, he averted his eyes and said nothing. “She has no one else,” Marguerite told the warden. And shook her head firmly, saying she did not wish to see Stephen. To all that he had nothing whatever to say. And to Howard Ayres, who visited him in the Tombs with a curious offer to defend him at the trial, he accorded a glacial rebuff. “Hard as nails.” A rigid shell, behind which fire shot through his head like lightning darts bringing on thunder to beat against his eardrums. It would have been easier, he told himself, to plunge to hell with George Leslie than to drop from the gallows. But that, too, would soon be over. He had made a clean swing around life’s circle. One more swing—the thought amused him. He took no part in the preparations for his defense. He waited six months in the Tombs before his case was called for trial, and

during that time he did not ask for any of the small favors usually

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accorded men facing a capital charge. He ate the prison food without complaint, and listened stonily to the garrulous reflections of guards on the news of the day. Hard times . . . slight panics. The new district attorney’s war on crime.

Once only did he show interest in the prison routine. It was at the noon hour on a day when murderers’ row was unusually silent. He stood stiffly grasping the bars of his cell, listening to the solemn bell echoing along the corridor, conveying to an indifferent world the news of a job well done. A black-hooded figure had ceased its death struggles in the courtyard. Stephen watched Howard Ayres go through the intricate procedure of picking a jury. It was singular, this man’s interest in his behalf. Why should the lawyer want to save his life? Stephen had suspected him from the first, and had he cared enough to take any interest in the matter of his life, he would have insisted upon other counsel. Certainly Ayres had not forgotten the incidents when their lives had crossed and Ayres had retired discomfited. Was it the attraction of an old emotion? Or the zest of battle for which Howard Ayres had become famous? In any case, it was the lawyer’s

eloquent plea to the jury . . . a plea in justification rather than in avoidance... that brought that tight-lipped smile to the prisoner’s otherwise passive countenance. Afterward, when he and Ayres were alone in the courtroom

except for the two guards who stood at a distance while client and counsel conferred, presumably about an appeal, Ayres said, leaning over and speaking close to his ear, “It’s what I was hoping, the

noose would have been too easy. Now it will take you twenty-five years to die. Twenty-five years of death. Torture for you . . . and her.” Stephen understood then, in a shock of revelation. It was merciless, inhuman revenge for the hurt of his mother’s scorn. He lunged in fury, but the alert guards were quicker. His arms were pinioned, the pinch.of steel brought him to his senses. “Devil!” he shouted. ““You’ve got the heart of a devil!”

Howard Ayres’ face remained smiling. “Marguerite

doesn’t think so,” he said, in the tone of cold

malice Stephen knew so well.

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He stood transfixed, uncomprehending.

551

And he knew then

that he would not die. He was determined to live, to come back and show them.

24 Captain Charles Hilbert’s bulging eyes scrutinized the new prisoner. Stephen Yerkes, returning his stare, answered quietly and

calmly the formal questions read to him from the record book. “Occupation?” The fattest, most

lifted toward him. “Occupation?” “Well

monstrous

face he had ever encountered

the hoarse voice repeated with heavier em-

és

“What was your business?” Captain Hilbert asked, frowning. “Wall Street broker,” Stephen replied, and smiled. The officer’s thick lips relaxed in a grin. “I was wonderin’... Wall Street broker . . .” His thick fingers laboriously pushed the pen along the page of the ledger. He finished writing, closed the book and stuck the pen in the desk rack. The chair groaned from the impetus of the sudden shove that moved it from the table. Captain Hilbert’s body heaved itself up

slowly until he stood a colossus anchored on columnar legs, a figure of incredible bulk and girth, whose head seemed to grow directly out of his shoulders, surmounted by a ring of protruding fat. Stephen, himself of more than ordinary height, felt dwarfed as he confronted the Gargantuan form of the captain.

“That’s all right for the record,” the latter growled, pointing to the book on his table. ‘““Wall Street broker answers for a lot of sins. But I happen to know all about you, Yerkes. You’re a big one... maybe the biggest.” He waved his hand toward the prison courtyard. “In there you’ll be meetin’ many of your old pals who served you in the old days. You'll be thinkin’ you’re still the big fish. If you'll be thinkin’ more about those twenty-five years ahead of you and not start somethin’ you can’t finish, you and me c’n be

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friends.” The officer’s eyes closed an instant, and opened in an unwinking stare. “Or we c’n be . . . somethin’ else. If we don’t get along, it’ll be just too bad for one of us.” He grinned. “And it won’t be me. Remember . . . this is Sing Sing.” Stephen was dismissed from the big man’s presence. A waiting guard escorted him to the state shop, where he was ordered to remove his clothing. Curious eyes watched him change into a striped suit. In the yard, hundreds of other eyes looked up as he passed with the keeper, and returned from the bucket rack, swinging the iron receptacle.

Sing Sing! The r1th of June, 1886. Twenty-five years for killing George Leslie! A cheap price. He’d be willing to pay heavier for a chance at Howard Ayres. By God . . . he’d make it yet!

Sitting on his iron cot, he listened to the cacophony of sound that seeped in through the open doors of the cell block . . . hammer blows on iron, the hum of wheels in the knit shop, the whis-

tling whirl of circular saws, an occasional blast on the hillside, sharp commands and the submissive responses of prisoners, horses trotting along the roadway.

A slower death, Ayres had said. Bah! This wasn’t death. Stephen had never felt more alive. Big fish, the captain said. He’d show them all what a man could do in Sing Sing. But he would go . slow. He would play the game carefully. Time enough . . . twentyfive years. And then... To be alive, Sing Sing’s challenge. Howard Ayres’ challenge. And Marguerite’s. The stone walls did not chill Stephen, he did not feel cramped by the narrowness of his cell, he was not blinded by the perpetual dusk. He ran his hands along the walls, they were cool to the touch, even symbolic of the temper that should govern him. Grimly he smiled at the recollection of his first days in the Tombs, remembering the turmoil within him. He felt no such disquiet now. His mind was clear. The arrival of Stephen Yerkes created an unusual stir in Sing Sing, among both the prisoners and the staff. It was the immediate cause of an important conference called to determine the prison’s policy toward this notorious prisoner. Present were the warden,

the principal keeper, the captain of the guards and the chaplain. “T’m thinking of sending him north to Dannemora,” the war-

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den announced. “He’s a dangerous fellow with a long sentence, no telling what he’ll be up to. I’m not keen about these gang leaders, they’ve got too many friends here. It isn’t healthy.” The principal keeper seconded the warden’s opinion. The chaplain was not so sure. “Perhaps we can bring him around ... make him think differently,” he suggested. “His example would help with the men generally.” “Maybe you'll train him to be a missionary,” the principal keeper sneered, “or get him to enlist in the Salvation Army. Wouldn’t that make a headliner for the papers? ‘Notorious bandit gets religion in Sing Sing.’ All the dames’d be painting halos around every son of a bitch inside the walls.” He ignored the flush tinging the chaplain’s cheeks, pursed his thin lips, and with unerring accuracy loosed a stream of brown juice toward a distant cuspidor. Contrary to Sing Sing’s tradition, the principal keeper was a slim, wiry man of medium height. It was the way he squirted tobacco juice that won him his title, “Straight Shot.” Two cuds, one on each side of his mouth, provided him with a constant supply and helped to fill out his sunken cheeks. “There is none so bad,” the chaplain replied mildly, “but might respond to the word of God.” “Preachin’s never yet stopped a riot in Sing Sing.” The chaplain smiled. “Maybe not. But preaching never brought one on.” “You two gentlemen at it again?” the warden interrupted, be)

frowning. “The trouble with the reverend is, he thinks he can coax the

devil out of these men.” The principal keeper spat in disgust. “J don’t recall that you’ve ever succeeded in driving him out of any of your prisoners,” the chaplain replied. “You’re both on the wrong steer,” Captain Hilbert grunted, thinkin’ about the devil when all the while it’s the man himself deserves your attention. Coaxin’ or drivin’ won’t make a man go straight once he’s gone wrong! It ain’t as simple as all that. Some-

thin’ inside of him’s got kinked . . . maybe in the heart or in the brain . . . and until you discover the sore spot and iron it out, there ain’t no changin’ him!”

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Captain Hilbert’s heavy eyes stared at the chaplain, then at the principal keeper. Finally, they rested on the warden’s thoughtful

face. He hunched his huge body in the armchair and eae with, for him, unusual animation.

“T been here longer than any of you... going on twenty years. I ain’t exactly been known as a softy.” He chuckled. “I’m supposed to be without nerves. Maybe it’s because I seen too much, I ain’t never boasted of too much sympathy for the men inside. Most of ’em are yelpin’, yellow, mealy-mouthed croakers without

guts, whose chins are as soft as their brains. They’ll slobber with the chaplain and snivel when the P.K. jooks at ’em. There ain’t no

trick runnin’ a prison for the likes of them. I like to handle a man with a chin. A guy like this fellow Yerkes. He’s taken a beatin’ and is still on his feet. Maybe he’s hidin’ a good punch, and I'll be feelin’ the weight of it. But it sorta makes you feel like you’re earnin’ your salt, handlin’ a guy like that.” “Tt’s a risky business,” the warden commented. “The risk ain’t like we was trainin’ a bearcat. This fellow Yerkes is smart, maybe smarter’n us. There’s nothin’ we c’n say to him or do to him that'll do the trick. It'll happen some time before his twenty-five years are up. Maybe you gentlemen’ll be here then, maybe not. But I think I will. And I’m that curious I’d like to see when it happens and how.” Captain Hilbert was breathing hard by this time. The principal keeper stared at him in amazement. He had never known the old horned toad to be so loquacious. The chaplain, too, looked his astonishment. The warden alone seemed impressed. “Don’t forget, the man’s a killer,” he said. Captain Hilbert smiled. “Tt ain’t for us to judge him. Our job is to keep this man for the time the law set against him ... twenty-five years. I’m for doin’ just that.” The principal keeper was on his feet, moving nervously across the room. He turned suddenly.and faced the warden. “Seems like the captain’s blood’s flowing thin these days,” he sneered. “It’s not like him to be speaking up for a man inside.”

There was the suspicion of a leer in his voice as he asked, “Any special reason, captain?”

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The latter remained calm. “If you mean that I’ve been asked ... . paid for it... I'll say you're lyin’.” The smaller man’s eyes narrowed. Tobacco juice dripped from his mouth. “I didn’t mean to imply—” he said hurriedly. “J know Stephen Yerkes is tough . . . inside and out. That’s what makes him interestin’. Some of the fellows inside’ve got guts. Some have brains. ’Tain’t often a man’s got both. I'll be experimentin’ . . . same as a doctor with his patient.” “To what purpose?” the warden asked, with a show of interest. The captain’s broad shoulders shrugged. “In twenty-five years ... if I pull that long ... I'll be an

old man, ready to cash in. If I c’n send this man out into the world without the hate that’s in his heart now, I’ll feel sure of at least

one decent thing [’ve done. But I don’t want to coax him or drive

him. He’ll be treated like any other prisoner. We'll see what Sing Sing’ll ‘do to a man with guts and brains.” “You’re willing to accept the responsibility, captain?” “Tl answer for any act of mine, warden. . . . What do you say?” turning to the principal keeper. The thin lips pursed. A long narrow stream headed straight for the distant cuspidor.

“We'll have our hands full if Yerkes stays here. He’s dynamite.”

“And you, chaplain?” “The captain won’t mind my ministering to the prisoner?” Captain Hilbert grinned. “You’ve got convincing ways with some of ’em, reverend. I’ll see that Yerkes hears your preachin’, if you’re so minded.” “Then I approve, warden.” And so it was agreed by Sing Sing’s official staff that Stephen Yerkes would not be sent to the northern Bastille, the name popularly applied to Clinton State Prison situated in the wilds of the Adirondacks near the Canadian border. Sing Sing would harbor him during his entire term.

556

CELLAR

22g ING

SING

“The man’s cracked,” the principal keeper whispered to the warden, when they were alone. But Captain Charles Hilbert showed no evidences of a mental

collapse. If anything, his gait was more lively than ever as he emerged from the administration building. It was remarkable, the captain’s agility, despite his net weight of three hundred ten. Astonishing, too, was the amiable expression on his usually taciturn face.

“Jeez! Did y’ hear dat?” Banjo Pete, the colored hall boy, whispered loudly to Black Joe as they bowed low over their wet mops in the corridor of the cell block. “De cap’n gone screwy. He jes’ pass by hummin’ a tune. Jeez! Somethin’ doin’ somewhere wid somebody or my name ain’t Pete.” Together they stared after the swinging figure until it disappeared around a corner of the gallery. They listened to the thud of his massive feet on the stone floor. Pete rubbed his striped sleeve over his ebony face, to wipe the perspiration that dripped into the

water pail by his side. ‘Yo’ shore does rub a shine into dat pan o’ yours wid dat sleeve,” Black Joe remarked, as he heaved the iron pail and slopped the water over the path of their mops. Suddenly his body stiffened, his hands gripped the empty bucket and his eyes rolled like two eggs bulging from the sockets. Banjo Pete’s face was no longer ebony. It had lost its “shine” and was now a dull, ashen hue. His hands were trembling. A gruff, stentorian voice reverberated through the galleries. The captain’s. Then a jumble of words following each other in a torrent of sound that rang through the stone structure like miniature thunderclaps. The thunder. ceased, then began again, the words coming clear and resonant. ““Windjammin’ again . . . this time Ill put you where you c’n have yourself for an audience!” The two negroes stood shivering with oncoming jitters, listening to another voice pleading weakly for mercy. The long wooden mop handles danced in their palsied hands as their bulging eyes beheld the captain’s figure looming around the corner of the gallery, his huge fist buried in the shoulder of the wailing prisoner whom he was dragging toward the door leading to the courtyard. “It’s Tommy,” the negroes whispered simultaneously. Still

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grasping their dripping mops, they hurried to the other side of the building, walking cautiously, and halted in front of cell 202.

Stephen Yerkes was standing at the latticed grating, staring out into the dim corridor. He grinned at the two white-eyed, woolly heads that bobbed toward him. “Ain’t you knowed de rules?” Banjo Pete whispered. “Dey gib you two weeks to cut yer eyeteeth in Sing Sing, two weeks. It’s a sho” pinch if dey catch yo’ talkin’ or readin’. All yo’ c’n do is eat an’ sleep an’... .” “Think,” Black Joe interrupted.

“Yeah, think,” Banjo Pete nodded wisely. “If yo’ got thinkin’ machinery.” His head moved closer to the lattice, his thick lips almost touching the iron strips. ““An’ I’m tippin’ yo’ off. Don’ have nothin’ to do wid dat no-count trash Tommy. Say”—he stepped back, squinting at Stephen—‘‘yo’ ain’t knowed him from de outside?” Stephen laughed quietly. “Tommy Kincaid’s an old acquaintance.” ‘Well,’ Banjo Pete warned, “‘don’ take on wid him here. Dey say as he’s a stool fer Straight Shot . . . yo’ know, de P.K. He c’n sho’ make trouble fer a guy, specially a new one.” Familiar heavy steps sounded on the opposite side of the gallery. The negroes were pushing busily at their mops when the captain came up. He eyed them suspiciously. “How come you’re on this side an’ your pails’re on the other? Are you achin’ for an audience, too?” Banjo Pete’s thick lips opened in a wide grin, his teeth gleaming white against their ebony background. “No indeed, cap’n. No indeed. We sho’ done los’ de power ob speech workin’ in dis cat’comb . . . dere ain’ nothin’ to talk to here but rats, an’ all dey do when yo’ chase ’em is squeal. Me an’ Joe is sho’ learnin’ de rat language, cap’n.” Captain Hilbert moved off. “Get over where you belong, or you'll be squealin’ plenty.” Banjo Pete hummed a tune. ‘Ah allus said Ah’d sleep it away, but dey air’ no sleep in here, Wid silence tellin’ yo’ funny tales . . . a-whisperin’ in yo’ ear.”

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Captain Hilbert, a grin on his face, turned the lock in the door of Stephen’s cell and pulled it open. “Come

out here,” he ordered.

Stephen obeyed, wondering. He watched with amusement the captain stooping and squeezing in. Such a cell would hardly do for a prisoner the captain’s size, Sing Sing would have to make two

in one. And build an extra large cot. The captain emerged, frowning. “T was just makin’ sure there was nothin’ in there that didn’t belong.” His bulging eyes glared at Stephen. ‘““There’s been talk of sendin’ you away .. . to Clinton . . . with all the rest of the tough guys. Sing Sing ain’t hankerin’ for long-time prisoners, it’s too near home. But we’re givin’ you a chance.” “J don’t mind going to Clinton.” The captain’s face showed his astonishment. “Don’t mind . . . why, man, they’ll split your time in half . the other half you'll do six feet under! They don’t like tough guys any more’n we do. But they handle ’em different.” “TI can take care of myself,” Stephen said with an air of assurance. “Yes,” the captain’s eyes surveyed the prisoner, “probably you can. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. All the same, you’re stayin’ in ~ Sing Sing.” He waved his arm at the cell. “An’ this sumptus apartment will be your home for twentyfive years . . . if you last that long. You c’n let it git you or you c’n get it, dependin’ on yerself. Better git acquainted with it. Look it over, stone by stone, inch by inch. You’re supposed to do that in the first two weeks. After that”—the captain hesitated—‘you’ll join the army of wage earners who like to earn without producin’.” The captain waited for Stephen to reénter the cell. Then he slammed the door, turned the lock and walked away. Stephen waited until the heavy footsteps died in the last echo. Then on a sudden impulse he grabbed the iron cup hanging on. its nail and hammered on the latticed door. Hurrying feet sounded along the gallery. Two uniformed guards approached, each carrying a short hickory stick menacingly lifted.

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“Hey,” one of them yelled, “what the hell d’you think you’re doing? Sounding a fire alarm?” “I want a pail of hot water,” Stephen said, “and some soap and a hard brush.” The guard’s face worked convulsively. He seemed to have lost the power of speech. Then he laughed. “How about having your suit pressed and a bottle of French perfume?” “I want to clean my cell,” Stephen replied, ignoring the humor of the guard. “He wants to clean his cell,” the guard repeated to his companion in a shocked tone. And added in a whisper, “Nuts already . on his first day.” It was a matter for the warden. Stephen’s demand reached the administration building. The warden sent for the principal keeper. And Captain Hilbert was summoned. “Trouble already,” the warden told the wheezing captain who had come on the run. “That fellow Yerkes wants to clean his cell with no less than a pail of hot water, soap and a hard brush.” Captain Hilbert slumped in a big armchair, breathed deeply and grinned. “Why not?” The principal keeper spit with his usual accuracy. The warden glowered, but looked thoughtful. An hour later a guard unlocked Stephen’s cell while Banjo Pete handed him the utensils... a pail of steaming hot water, a cake of yellow soap, a hard brush. “Knock on the door when you’re finished,” the keeper said, turning the lock in Stephen’s cell. “Once will be enough. No sense making a racket.” Stephen set about scrubbing the walls of his cell. “Stone by stone, inch by inch,” Captain Hilbert had suggested. Captain Hilbert was sitting at his desk in the office, the door of which opened into the prison courtyard. The record book was lying open before him, the last of a dozen books containing names

and records of the men who had served time in Sing Sing. One entry seemed to hold his eye. “Arnold Brandt. Entered 1866. Discharged 1886.”

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The captain had examined cell 202 when it was vacated. It was his duty. Prisoners might have left intimate belongings, in their haste to depart. The captain’s sharp eyes had noticed the three tracings on the wall. He was curious about them and made it a point to search the records of the men who had spent the years of their confinement in that cell. It was no whim of fate that placed Stephen Yerkes in the same cell. Captain Hilbert’s assignment had been deliberate, as was his insistence upon retaining Stephen Yerkes in Sing Sing for the full term of his imprisonment.

“Inch by inch . . .” Stephen Yerkes would surely notice the writings. What would he write on the wall? What message would he leave? It would be interesting to know. The secret was theirs alone. His and . . . maybe . . . Stephen’s. After all, the captain mused, his thick fingers drumming on

the desk, there must be some consolation in the daily drabness of prison work. One day so much like the others. A continuous watching over rebellious children . . . age hardly mattered .. . even the gray-haired among them and the most keen-witted seemed to have lost their hold on life and, once in stripes, understood only

the language of force and fear. Occasionally a prisoner rose above

his fellows and stood out as a strong mentality. Those three in cell 202 were in that class. They had not lost the sense of weighing life against living. Perhaps this one would also keep his balance.

25 Stephen fell to on his scrubbing with an intensity worthy of Banjo Pete’s analogy. He determined to put his house in order.

Cramped and narrow as it was, he would make it livable. As he soaped and scrubbed the stone blocks of his walls, he felt as if he were cleansing them from all past associations. Just as he himself had cut loose from the life he had known. . . and lived. Tommy Kincaid’s appearance behind the latticed grating of his cell door was as unexpected as it was unwelcome. It shocked him back into the old life, jerking up memories from which he had considered himself safe. Tommy had only been able to call his name, when the heavy hand of the captain hauled him away.

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Stepken welcomed the captain’s arrival; he was in no mood to talk to Tommy, who belonged to the past. A part of the whirlpool from which he had escaped. If only it were possible to live in this cell during all of those twenty-five years! It would be like sitting somewhere high in the heavens and watching the earth fly off into space. Stephen scrubbed industriously. Those stone slabs had probably never before felt the pungent touch of lathered water. Grime, grown thick and slimy through decades of fomentation, gave way

before his onslaught. And Stephen felt a corresponding cleansing of his own body, as if dregs somewhere inside him were being dislodged to join the stream of filth that flowed down the walls, along the stone floor, out under the iron door of the cell.

The three stone slabs held him. The soapsuds sank into the lines etched in the surface. Writings! Names and dates! And words! He paused to examine them. Abner Wilde . . . Edmund Rolphe . . . Arnold Brandt.

. . . Prisoners, no doubt, who had

lived in this very cell. Rebel . . . Cynic . . . Skeptic. Unfamiliar names.

Strange words.

The first date was

1826; the last, 1886.

What did they signify? Funny that those men, prisoners, should have left their indelible records. Foolish business. Childlike fancies. He’d leave nothing behind him when his time was up. Sing Sing would be dead to his future, as the past now was to his present. Rebel... Cynic... Skeptic. Those men had not been able to detach themselves from the years that had catapulted them into prison. Those years had haunted them. He was stronger. They should not harass him. . . . He went on with his scrubbing. The keeper, unlocking his door, called: “Time for mess.” He walked beside his uniformed escort, through the gallery, out into the courtyard. Lines of men in stripes met his gaze, long lines in sinuous movement. Stephen remained standing by the side of the keeper, watching the lines converge at the door of the mess hall. His eyes were glued on the moving sea of stripes, his ears pricked to the steady crunch of sand and dry soil under shuffling feet . . . stripes and feet. He did not look up into their faces. He was not conscious of the stares of the men passing him, nor aware of the stifled whisper

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borne through the plodding ranks, unheard by the alert keepers flanking them with poised hickory canes. “Stephen Yerkes. That’s Stephen Yerkes.” The lines moved steadily. Eyes stared curiously. Lips tightened. Stephen Yerkes had arrived. Yerkes, the big fish. The new-timers’ table was at the far end of the mess hall. Stephen sat with his back toward the thousand and more diners. Hungered by his exertions of the afternoon, he ate ravenously of the plain fare set before him. He did not grimace at the thin coffee—the peculiar mixture, ingredients unknown, which newcomers generally passed up. He did not wait for the nine o’clock bell that night, his cell was dark long before “lights out.” He slept soundly. When he woke at daybreak, he lay on his cot watching the graying streaks of dawn dissolving the darkness of the cell. A slow process; night never gave way willingly in the cells of Sing Sing, and day came grudgingly. But it was not the rivalry of the elements that held his at-

tention on waking. He listened to the clatter at the far end of the galleries; the tramp of feet, men’s voices calling. It was the change of shifts, the night guards giving way to the day company. Stephen was familiarizing himself with the prisoners’ routine. Next to knowing his cell, inch by inch, he must understand Sing Sing, instant by instant. One was futile without the other. He strained his ears to catch the words and sounds that marked the transfer of authority. But they were too faint. Perhaps another dave. cae

Then gradually the cells came to life. An orchestration of seemingly studied dissonance, hollow groans, stifled yawns, snatches of song. Then the overpowering stench of human refuse, emanating from the cells and settling down upon the corridors with a

persistency that barrels of lime could not wholly dislodge. And the thick bass voice high up on the topmost tier, singing inelegant verse set to a melodious tune: “The cast-iron bucket,

The rank oblong bucket, The vich odored bucket,

One knew by the smell.”

STEPHEN

YERKES—MARIONETTE

Then the bell. Sudden silence . . . men

563

standing at their

doors. Slow footsteps along the galleries. Eyes peering into every latticed frame. A few minutes of prolonged siience. “Keys!” An endless scraping of locks. “Lever!” A grating tug of iron. “Out!” Lines of striped men form on each of the twenty-four galleries. “Buckets!” Cast-iron buckets . . . one knows by the smell. “March!” The lines begin their shuffle. And so began in Sing Sing that day of June, 1886. But not for Stephen Yerkes. His lock did not turn, his door did not open. He was not yet initiated into the routine. For two weeks he would

eat alone, walk alone, except for the escorting

guard. Two weeks without the chance to brush elbows with his fellows. Two weeks of silence. Stephen did not resent those two weeks, he would need them to get settled. Acclimatized. He preferred this isolation. He was settling himself to a quiet period of repose, the last line of stripes having zigzagged down the tiers, out through the corridors. This was a restful silence, unsuppressed, and the house of stone seemed no longer stifling. SHist!= He frowned at the sibilant sound that came through the latticed door. A pair of eyes peered in at him. A face pressed close to the iron bars. “Tt’s me, Steve... Torhmy.” He dragged himself unwillingly to the door. “Isn’t this against the rules?” “Rules!” A short, sneering laugh sounded through the lattice. “Me an’ rules ain’t on speakin’ terms!” “Butethe captains. « The head cutside turned one way, then the other, sidling

closer to the grating. “The captain ain’t fond o’ me, but my friends’re higher up. I’m the genuine seesaw. The captain locks me up an’ the P.K. lets me out.”

“What do you want?” A deep sigh slowly filtered through the small, square openings.

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“I’m your friend, Steve. What’s gone’s gone. IJ ain’t holdin’ it against you.”

“Against me!” Stephen exclaimed. “Yeah ... you know ... when the old bitch ditched me for you. Remember in Thaddus’ office?” Stephen did not answer. “You’re the big cheese now,” Tommy said in an admiring tone. “So the word’s goin’ round the yard. They say as you’ve had ‘em all eatin’ outer yer hand.” Stephen smiled. “Don’t believe everything you hear.” “They’re gonna keep a close eye on yeh.” SYies 22" “Maybe they’ll send you away ... you know... up north to Dannemora . . . tough place.” SSolt “I c’n be yer friend, Steve.” “That’s fine, Tommy.” “T’m friends wid all the big fish inside.” “Really!” “I c’n get you news from the outside quicker’n those telephones they’re usin’.”” Stephen was anxious to get rid of him. “Tsn’t it dangerous standing here talking to a new man?” The head bobbed from one side to the other. “Naw,” Tommy said, grinning. “The captain’s in the mess halls Sheet Slow plodding steps sounded in the corridor, coming nearer. A rich, tenor voice was humming a tune.

“?T was he dat put her in de pit Afore he pulled her out of it.” The long-handled broom came first to Stephen’s view. Then a pair of black arms pushing it. Finally the ebony-faced Banjo Pete shuffled along the corridor. In front of Stephen’s cell, the broom halted. And Pete remained, his teeth gleaming between his curled lips. “How’s de godly man dis mo’nin’?”

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56;

Stephen laughed. “The dirt’s all gone, I hope.” Banjo Pete shook his head, and stared at the glowering Tommy. “Not all, mister, not all. Sing Sing’s jest full o’ vermin.” “Git goin’,” Tommy snarled. “Sho Ah’se goin’, mister. Only Ah can’t go far enough.” The broom continued its labors. Tommy turned hurriedly to Stephen. “To show I’m yer friend, I’m gonna spring somethin’ red hot.” “About the prison?” “Naw... yerself. It came in not ten minutes ago. Maybe the warden’ll send for you.” Something about his case no doubt, Stephen thought. He restrained his curiosity. ““Ain’t you achin’ to know?” Tommy asked in surprise. “Tl hear soon enough.” “Tl spill it now so you'll know how to take it.” Stephen waited. *“Tt’s about yer mother . . . she’s dead.” Stephen gripped the latticed bars, his fingers aching. The grating swam before his eyes. ““Are you sure?” ‘““There’s a telegram up front on the warden’s desk.” He was still gripping the iron bars, feeling an almost inhuman surge of relief. ““There’s more news.” He steadied himself. Marguerite... “Another telegram. It says as your wife is in the hospital . . .” More thunder. Devastating pain. A sagging feeling of helplessness. ‘An’ yer the father of a baby boy!” Tommy was gone. Steps were approaching, accompanied by the click of keys. The lock in his door turned. “Out!” a cutting voice commanded.

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It was not the keeper who had opened his door the day before. This was a young man, in his early twenties. “Are you coming, or must I go in for you?” Stephen obeyed finally. He stared dully at the uniformed officer who regarded him coldly. “Bucket.” The officer’s hickory stick pointed toward the yard. “March.” Stephen plodded heavily along the corridor toward the open doorway. “Death and life. Death . . . life.” His feet shuffled to the endless refrain. Three deaths. Each had jolted him farther away from the things that counted. Thaddeus Pitney’s suicide had lost him Marguerite. George Leslie’s death had cut him loose from the world. He had welcomed the isolation. There could be no world for him without Marguerite. She had been the resplendent symbol of his power, a trophy garlanded with his pride of achievement. A coachman wedded to his mistress. . . . Then suddenly she was transformed into the specter of his defeat. He had seen it in her eyes as she turned from him at the sound of the shot.

George Leslie’s death had brought him to the very edge of life. He was prepared for the leap. But instead of extinction, here was Sing Sing. It was like carrying beyond the grave the consciousness of earlier existence, a death that still bound him to life.

His stifled gasp of relief at Tommy’s furtive message about his mother did not indicate filial disrespect. He had loved her deeply. But she had been the single link that bound him to the

outside world. Now he was free . . . free in Sing Sing! Reborn again... fleeting thought. A fleck of fancy. It was over. Tommy’s words hurtled toward hini meteor-like with flaming intensity. They lodged in his brain, with explosive force. Death . . . life. The refrain rang in his ears as he shuffled through the yard a step ahead of the youthful keeper with his menacing hickory stick. Out of death had come life. A child. His child. The walls of Sing Sing no longer marked the limits of his new world. They crumbled before the wail of the newborn infant . out there with Marguerite.

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26

Tommy was right. There were two messages. “Thanks, warden, for telling me.” Stephen’s face betrayed no emotion. “Tm sorry, Yerkes . . . about your mother.” Stephen smiled. “Perhaps you should be sorrier about the child.” The warden turned and looked thoughtfully through the window out into the roadway. “A Child once saved the world . . . maybe this child will save you.” “Maybe I don’t want to be saved,” Stephen said solemnly.

“Neither did the world. It was too damned cocksure!” The warden rose from his chair and approached Stephen, ex-

tending his arm until his hand rested on his striped shoulder. “Who knows but what you might get a break ... your time may be shortened. At any rate, under the law you are entitled to

five years’ reduction for good conduct. You'll be out in time to help the boy find his footing. That’s something to look forward to.

bP)

Captain Hilbert lumbered into the office, followed by the principal keeper. “Are you sending him down to the funeral?” the principal keeper asked. The warden hesitated. “It’s hardly regular .. . this being his second day of a twentyfive year term.” “Til take him, if you’re minded to send him,” the captain suggested. The three officers stared at the man in stripes. “Better keep him in cuffs all the way down and back again,” the principal keeper advised, aiming the familiar brown stream. “It'll be my responsibility,” the captain replied gruffly. “Can I go to the hospital to see the child?” The officers looked at Stephen, then at one another, as if stunned by a problem beyond their comprehension. The warden’s

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eyes opened wide. The principal keeper’s jaw remained stationary, his cheeks knobbed by the bulging cuds. Captain Hilbert grinned. “°Tain’t in the books, I guess, fer a prisoner to visit his wife

and newborn child.” “If having babies were to allow the men to go out visiting,” commented the principal keeper, “wives would be mighty accommodating.” “Then it’s impossible?” Stephen asked in a quiet tone. “Tm afraid so,” the warden said. Stephen drew a deep breath.

“J don’t think I'll want to go to the funeral,” he said listlessly. “Not go to the funeral!” It was unheard of in the annals of Sing Sing. A prisoner facing twenty-five years rejecting an opportunity to pay his last respects to his mother! Refusing to take advantage of the opportunity, short as it might be, to glimpse the outside world before he settled down for the long pull ahead. But so it was.

Stephen did not go. Instead, he was permitted a few minutes of freedom in the warden’s garden, where he gathered a sheaf of roses which Captain Hilbert personally expressed to New York to be placed on the bier. That night he sat on his cot, surveying the south wall of his cell. His eyes were glued on the three square stones . . . Rebel, Cynic, Skeptic... . It had taken patience to dig into those stones. Patience and years. But above all, a tremendous revelatory impulse. Those men had understood. He had never thought of it that way, to interpret his own life in the light of his experiences with other lives. He, too, would need

patience. The years were assured him. He, too, would search for the word. His word. The others, somehow, did not seem to fit....

Two weeks of isolation. Tommy had not come again. Except

for the morning march to the bucket rack down by the river front and the trips to the mess hall where he sat alone, Stephen did not leave his cell. The morning of the fourteenth day found him, as usual, standing by his latticed door, watching the lines of striped men lockstep along the gallery. This time, however, the prisoners’ heads were not turned from him. The keeper had abandoned his station

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beside his door. The period of solitary was over. The lockstepping ranks knew. Loud whispers came his way. “Take it easy, Steve, the worst is over.” “Dey planted you fine. Twenty-five smackers . . . nice pay.” A chorus of stifled laughter greeted this sally. “Hey, kid, don’t let ’im josh you. Dat guy ain’t got no change comin’ to ’im. He’s stowed away fer keeps!” There were other greetings from the striped lines shuffling by the cell door. One was more personal.

“Look me up, Steve. Johnny Hope... the guy that took over the Manhattan. I gotta talk to you ’bout that old bitch. I hear she’s nursin’ her pile . . . an’ us nursin’ time!” At last Stephen Yerkes, biggest of big fish who had ever joined

the ranks of Sing Sing’s striped prisoners, was to begin to comply with the judgment of the court, hard labor. But Sing Sing was not ready to absorb the notorious prisoner. It was faced with the problem of placing him in a safe and suitable shop, a question that taxed the ingenuity of the official staff. Sing Sing in the late eighties was in the transition period. It had definitely broken with the past, but had not yet determined upon its future. The prison system of the state had been forced, through legislative action in Albany, to abandon contract labor. The reign of the contractors who had held sway for half a century, and who had transformed Sing Sing into an arena where flesh and blood and mentalities were sacrificed to the demands of production, that evil reign during which every newly admitted prisoner was so much more fodder to the insatiable demand for cheap labor that could be threatened, cajoled, intimidated, was ended.

Under that system Stephen Yerkes’ physique and mentality would have found favor with taskmasters. But 1886 was the year that brought the system to an end. An aroused public conscience —or was it the insistence of free labor?—demanded the abolition of contract labor. Expiring contracts were no longer renewed. In

some instances the state took over the machinery and equipment of the privately owned shops and attempted to carry on. In most cases, the shops were dismantled and no industry replaced. As the result, hundreds of prisoners found themselves without work.

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“There’s nothing to do but lock the men in their cells,” was

the conclusion of the administration. In the months that followed, the majority of Sing Sing’s prisoners spent twenty-two hours out of twenty-four under lock and key. Stephen Yerkes entered Sing Sing at the time when the prison’s labor problem was

not aware of the worry Nor did he welcome ment. It was comforting, for the infrequent vision

assuming

acute proportions.

He was

his emergence from isolation occasioned. the end of the period of solitary confinethis life of nothingness . . . void, except of the infant at Marguerite’s breast. His

child nestling close to Marguerite’s soft body. What thoughts as she stared down into those fathomless eyes?

were her

There had been the moment the night before, when his body,

relaxed on his cot for the night, had tingled with conscious joy of visioned intimacy with Marguerite. That telegram telling him about the child! Their child. It could not be his unless she willed it. And she had willed it. Had she not sent him word? Perhaps a hint of her restored love. Tomorrow he would write to her. His first letter from Sing Sing would be to her, a greeting to the son who had brought him back to life. And now it was the morning of the fourteenth day. He had returned from the mess hall where he had eaten his last solitary meal. At noon he would march with the others in the long line of lockstepping stripes. Banjo Pete stood grinning at the cell door. “You’s “lowed to talk today, mister, so we’s payin’ you a visit. . . me

an’ my

mate.”

Stephen peered out of the lattice from side to side. “I don’t see anyone with you.” Banjo Pete’s eyes rolled white as he raised his hand, grasping a broom stick. “Interducin’ you to de bes’ mate a fellah ever had, mister. We done ten years together.” “Ten years! Brooms don’t last ten years.” “Mine does, mister. When he gets wore out I rejuvenates ?im

. .. gets ’im a new set of whiskers an’ he’s like bran’-new. But say, mister,” Pete whispered confidentially, ‘you c’n write home

STEPHEN

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today. If yer wantin’ any paper an’ pencil . . . Banjo Pete knows how to get ’em .. . an’ he’s no peddlin’ grafter.” An hour later Stephen had written his letter. It was the kind of letter a shy lover sends to his newly acknowledged sweetheart, breathing penitence and pride in their new bond.

A Child once saved the world [he wrote, using the warden’s thought] as this child has saved me—us. I was mistaken about you and me. It was the thought of your love turned to hate that made me do that to. . . Leslie. Had I been sure of it, we might still be together... « “A letter for you, two-o-two.” He had not heard the approach of the hall keeper. ‘It came in the day after you got here, but new men don’t get their mail until after the reception period.” He tore into the envelope. A letter from Marguerite? ... He stared at the typewritten sheet. Cold to his touch. And im-

personal. He steeled himself to read it. I am sorry to be compelled to bring you tidings of your mother’s death. I wired you today. Several hours later news came to me of the birth of your son. That prompted a second telegram. I hope the second compensated you somewhat for the first. Lest you be under a misapprehension about your wife’s attitude, I am constrained to advise you that she sent for me today to consult me about the possibility of a divorce or annulment of marriage. Toward that end I am investigating your intimate relations with Mrs. Fredericka Mandelbaum and if in my opinion the facts warrant it, I shall institute proceedings on behalf of your wife. The name signed to this letter was—Howard Ayres. They fitted perfectly, the two sheets of paper—the letter he had written and the one from Howard Ayres. He folded them together slowly. Deliberately he tore them into strips. Curious, how they stuck together. Still smaller strips. He held his hand over the iron bucket and watched the scraps of paper drift into the slimy interior. Tomorrow he would empty them at the river front.

Funny he hadn’t noticed the signature on those telegrams. Not Marguerite after all.

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The child was not really his. Hers alone. Nothing remained of his earlier life. No bond. No memory. He watched the last scrap of paper disappear into the foul bucket. Facing him across the gallery was the dense stone wall, the outer limit of the huge cell block, pierced by rows of barred openings through which he glimpsed patches of green and gray. Green treetops and gray granite, on Sing Sing’s famous cliffs. The outside world . . . He had died in that world. Died in the Yerkes tradition, as his father had died. To escape the shame of defeat. He listened to the distant tramp of feet. Companies of striped men marching from their shops. On a tier near by. Banjo Pete’s rich bass voice hummed a tune. The fourteenth day. He waited impatiently for the keeper to open his cell. ‘You may write a letter home today.” The hall keeper was talking to him through the door. Stephen peered out at him. “Do I get out of here today?” The keeper looked at him in surprise. ““Ain’t you writin’ a letter to the folks?” He shook his head. The keeper turned away with a puzzled look. “Hard as nails,” he muttered, “like they said he was. There’ll be doin’s when he gets out in the yard.” “Do I get out of here today?” Stephen called after the retreating keeper. The keeper walked on without replying. The less you told the likes of that, the safer. . Extraordinary problems call for extraordinary measures. Stephen Yerkes was Sing Sing’s big problem. The warden was determined to play safe. It was a difficult task, this business of putting him to work. One after another the shop foremen were summoned to the warden’s office. “Tl take *im if that’s your orders,” grumbled the stove contractor, one of the few still carrying on, “but I’m warnin’ you I’ll not be responsible for what happens. Now,” he added reminiscently, “if it was the old days when a man could handle his labor

like they should be handled . . . we had our ways then .

. it

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woulda been different.”” He shook his head sadly. ‘Prison ain’t prison nowadays.” “You know my preference,” said the foreman in the laundry, with a sly wink. “The laundry’s the place for them crooked ’ristocrats. There’s Ferdy Ward and Pells and the rest 0’ them white-

collar guys. All short-timers. And kinda flush . . . all rich. There ain’t no tellin’ what a guy like Yerkes’d do with the likes 0’ them. Orders is orders, warden, but ..

.”

“I got enough o’ them tough guys,” said the foundry foreman, “‘with all them dangerous tools bein’ handled, I never knows

when somethin’ll break. P’ve learned to see through the back of my head, bein’ that scared 0’ some 0’ them doin’ murder or somethin’ when my back’s turned. I'll take ’im if you insist, but . . .” “There’s a lot o’ youngsters on my floor,” was the explanation of the man in charge of the clothing shop, “‘an’ there’s no tellin’ what a fellow like Yerkes’ll do to them! You know how they look up to big guys! Of course, it ain’t my business to advise you, warden, but...

.”

So it went down the line. In the end it was decided to assign Yerkes to the coal pile. He would be out in the open, with less likelihood of conniving against the peace and quiet of the prison. Immediately after the noon mess Stephen was escorted to the railroad track close to the river front, where a line of freight cars piled high with coal waited for Sing Sing’s man power to empty them. “Grab yourself a shovel,” the keeper ordered. Stephen obeyed eagerly. He bent himself to the task with a willingness that surprised the keeper, chagrined the observant principal keeper, and pleased the watchful Captain Hilbert. Certainly there could be no complaint about the man’s industry. Owing to the nature of their work, the coal gang was allowed extra privileges. There was, for instance, the half-hour’s rest before

each mess call. A period when the men were allowed to remain at ease, and to converse quietly. It was during these rest periods that Stephen became intimately acquainted with his fellow workers. Most of them

were

newcomers

like himself, for whom

definite

assignments had not been found. It was through the medium of the newcomers in Sing Sing’s

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coal gang that much of the news from the outside world seeped into the prison. The ban on newspapers and the infrequent visits—only one in sixty days to each prisoner—gave the coal gang an enviable position among the prisoners. “News from the coal pile” was sought after by every man who still retained an interest in current affairs. Occasionally, in this way, bits of intimate gossip became

common property in the prison yard and in the shops long before the prisoner concerned was aware of it. Thus, for instance, Stephen learned about the activities of the

new district attorney, who had declared war on crime and criminals. Ma Mandelbaum’s flight across the Canadian border had saved her from prosecution. The rest of the gang boasted no such immunity. Practically all of them, with the exception of Red Leary, had been arrested. Even Sam, the mute, was now awaiting trial in the Tombs. Sheeny Mike had been the only one able to raise bail. Stephen was not particularly concerned with news from the outside. For the moment the coal pile was his immediate objective, cars to be unloaded, coal piled high alongside the powerhouse. It was his job. “Hey there, lay off!” It was on the morning of Stephen’s eighth day on the coal pile. He had just filled the waiting wheelbarrow. As usual, he LSE given it a full load. “Get wise to yourself.” The big fellow, instead of Ring the wheelbarrow away toward the growing mountain of coal heaped against the powerhouse wall, lifted the handles and de-. liberately emptied its contents at Stephen’s feet. “I’m not breaking my back for Sing Sing!” he growled as he straightened up and faced Stephen.

They were about the same height. Their faces black with soot . . their torsos baked brown in the July sun. For a moment they stared at each other like pugilists feinting for an opening. Then, without a word, Stephen bent to his shovel and began to refill the emptied wheelbarrow. Shovels ceased their clatter, barrows stopped in their tracks, while the men waited tensely for the next move.

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Stephen labored with his shovel until the load was equal to the one emptied. Then with a cold grim glance toward Stephen, the other man stooped, raised the handles, and toppled the barrow, heaving the coal again at Stephen’s feet. Stephen dropped his shovel. The prisoner squared off, but not quickly enough. Stephen’s arm shot forward, catching the other clean on the chin. The man dropped, but was up in a flash. Immediately a circle of brown-bodied men surrounded them, heedless of the warning shout of the keeper. “Aw, let ’em ’av it out!” one of the prisoners begged. “It’s years since I seen a good scrap.” The gray-haired keeper looked around at the circle of eager faces, then hastily at the distant administration building. He grinned. “All right, boys. If it’s a scrap you want, and these fellows’ll oblige, we'll let °em put on the show. “Fight fair. And no shoutin’,” he warned the spectators. The two men sparred a while. Then suddenly Stephen’s arm

struck out and jabbed the fellow’s chin exactly where he had hit before. His head snapping back, the man reeled, lost his balance and fell full length on the ground, his head striking the wheel of the freight car. The circle of witnesses gasped. The keeper bent by the side of the limp form. One of the prisoners came up with a pail of cold water which he dashed into the inanimate face. The man’s eyes flickered and opened. In a few minutes he was grinning. He raised his hand to Stephen, who was standing over him. “You sure got a wallop, man,” he said ruefully, “and I’m not the guy to stop it again.” Stephen helped him to his feet. “Here, Steve,” the guard called, handing him a blue card,

“here’s a pass. Take him to the hospital. Have the doctor look over that head, maybe it’s cracked. I thought for a while we’d have a murder on our hands!” “You’re pretty tough, coming out of it as quickly as you did,” Stephen said to his opponent as they walked across the yard toward the prison hospital.

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“A thousand years out in the air and wind and sun did that,” his companion replied solemnly. Stephen paused and stared at him quizzically. “It’s the Indian in me... full blood,” the prisoner explained. ‘““When my father dies I’ll inherit his title, Pll be a chief. Fly-with-the-Wind, they called me at the reservation. The boys here call me that, too. It wasn’t that I was so fast on my feet, but because I couldn’t stay put in any one place. Always on the go. I ran away from the reservation, went to New York, and now I’m in Sing Sing.”

Chief Fly-with-the-Wind sighed. “No more flying now, they clipped my wings. Ten years for manslaughter.” “How come?” Stephen asked. The Indian shrugged his shoulders. “The chief—my father—says it’s the white man’s education.” Stephen said nothing. “I outgrew the reservation, American schools and English books helped me. What

I read about New

York, fast life and

great wealth, fascinated me. They wouldn’t let me go, so I went. You can guess the rest. An Indian ignorant in the ways of white people . . . and the women.” They were in the hospital. A man in white looked up at them from his desk cluttered with reports. “What’s up, red man?” “The red man’s black and blue, Doc.” “Fighting again?” “As one con to another, Doc,” the Indian admitted, winking,

“Tm through, though.” “It’s about time. You’ve been throwing ’em around like ninepins.” “Tenpins,’ the Indian corrected him. ‘“You’re behind the times.” “What d’you expect?” the doctor demanded, glaring. “Behind the bars . . . behind the times . . . one follows the other.” There was nothing seriously wrong with the Indian. A bruise

on the chin, a lump on the head. Nothing to worry about.

STEPHEN

“What’re

YERKES—MARIONETTE

577

you two gallivanting in the hospital for, when

you’re supposed to be shoveling coal?” They had not heard the approach of the principal keeper. His rasping voice jerked all three men to attention. “This man was sent up here by the keeper to be treated for bruises,” the doctor explained in an apologetic tone. The P.K.’s jaw worked industriously. His eyes sought the cuspidor, then fixed themselves on Stephen’s companion. “Fighting again? I warned you the last time.” The Indian hung his head.

“I hit him, sir,” Stephen spoke quietly. The principal keeper scowled at him. His lips pursed for the inevitable spout. A clean hit. “What the hell is this,” he sneered, ‘ta Red Cross outfit? Hit-

ting a man, then bringing him in to get healed?” “The keeper . . .”’ Stephen started to explain. But the official had already turned away. He beckoned to the officer who had accompanied him. “Lock ’em both up,” he ordered, “till we get a chance to look into this,” and walked away. Chief Fly-with-the-Wind and Stephen were placed in adjoining cells. “Coolers” was the name given them by the prisoners. Cells without windows

and with double doors; the inner one of

the usual barred variety, the outer one of solid oak. No ray of light had pierced the darkness of those coolers since they were built far back in the days when Captain Lynds’ iron fist closed

down on Sing Sing. Coolers were supposed to cool tempers. An impossible feat, for a July day and night. The air was thick and foul like the atmosphere of a sealed tomb. Stephen felt that with each breath he was sucking into his lungs the slime that clung to his fingers as he ran them along the walls. He groped his way to the steel barred door and dug his face into the openings, to catch the faint flow of fresh air that seeped in through the cracks. In the cooler one lost all sense of time. One gauged it only by the opening of the small slide near the bottom of the heavy oak door, when a hand reached through to deposit the slice of thin bread and the tin cup containing a gill of water. It was morning

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then. One knew by the sudden shaft of light that pierced the darkness and disappeared with the hurried clamp of the slide into place.

Prisoners in the cooler lost more than the sense of time. The foul, slimy blackness seeped into their brains. Generally, after prolonged confinement in the dungeon, prisoners avoided sunlight. They became the shadow men of Sing Sing, furtive in their search for the prison’s hidden secrets, those that might suggest a way over the walls. Stephen was determined not to crack under the weight of trackless time. He submitted to this new situation with a philosophy that vitiated the evident intent of the principal keeper’s challenge. He would not be broken. He stood with his eyes closed for endless stretches of time,

facing the wooden door, whiffing the thin flow of outer air, his ears straining for the muffled sounds of life. This was but another facet of Sing Sing’s blustering challenge to Stephen Yerkes. He would meet it boldly. Howard Ayres’ prophecy should be proved

false. Stephen Yerkes would find life in Sing Sing, life as he himself would shape it. This was but the beginning. For the third time the slide in the wooden door had opened. It was the third day in blackness. He did not rage over the morsel of food that was shoved toward him by the unknown hand, nor did he gulp it hurriedly. He made it last for hours. A drop of water and a small bite of bread, his nibblings repeated at long intervals, helped to pass the hours and stifle his hunger. It was some time before the steady thud broke his reverie. A.

dull sound, like the echo of a heavy tread. It came with unerring regularity. He listened for a while, intrigued by the strange repeti-

tion. He could have sworn it was a signal. Someone trying to call to him. Perhaps the Indian! From the adjoining cell. With a sudden inspiration Stephen slipped his shoe from his foot, swung it back, and hammered on the stone wall through which the signal seemed to come. He waited. In a moment there

was an answering thud. The Indian had caught his reply. Chief Fly-with-the-Wind. At the end of two days of thudding Stephen was able to spell out the words. Another day and

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both prisoners conversed freely by means of signs. A fourth day and Stephen was amazed to hear the Indian’s message. “Fly-with-the-Wind will fly again, out into the world.” “How?” Stephen thudded in reply. “T am filing the bars.” Chief Fly-with-the-Wind had secreted a file in the sole of his shoe, had kept it there for months awaiting his opportunity. It had come now; there was no keeper on post at the dark cells. There was no need apparently to guard prisoners buried behind two locked doors with no possibility of contact from the outside. But Chief Fly-with-the- Wind—whose civil name, Harry Saunders, was known only to the official staff—had bided his time. “Will you come along?” the Indian asked in their peculiar code. “I can force the lock on your door when I’m out .. . and there’re no guards on the walls at night.” What a laugh that would be! Stephen’s heart bounded at the thought of returning to the world. To face Marguerite, see his son. But the enveloping darkness could not hide the vision of Stephen Yerkes cowering before the light of day, fearful of every strange eye lest it be that of a pursuing officer, desperate even in the privacy of his secret lodging lest a furtive tread herald the collapse of his dream of freedom. That could not be his way. “Count me out,” he thudded back. “J am praying to the Great Spirit to make my wings strong,”

was the message on the following afternoon. “Tonight I fly.” Stephen remained standing by his barred door long after his sagging muscles craved for the sleep which even the slimy stone floor could not withhold. He held on with the tenacity of a man gasping for his dying breath. The Indian would be cutting through his last inch of steel. “Good-by.” The thud startled him. Then all was still. He waited at the cell door, hoping in vain to hear the voice of the escaping prisoner. But nothing broke the stillness of consuming blackness. He was awakened by the sound of scraping locks. The door of his cell swung open. Hot and humid though it was, the sudden

rush of air was like a dash of cold water on his burning face. He

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struggled to his feet, and still dazed from sleep, emerged into the sunshine, to find himself surrounded by a group of scowling officers. The warden was there and the principal keeper and Captain Hilbert. “Where’s Saunders?” the warden demanded, as if certain that

Stephen knew the secret of the prisoner’s disappearance. “Yeah,” the principal keeper growled, lapsing into the vernacular which he usually avoided, “better talk quick or you'll die in that hole.” Captain Hilbert stared at Yerkes with studied deliberation. Stephen looked calmly into the searching eyes and shrugged his shoulders. “There’s ways to make him talk,” the principal keeper said in an audible aside to the warden. “I’ve still got some of them paddling machines stored away for emergencies.” “None of that,” the warden said sharply. “Well, then,” snarled the keeper, ‘throw him back in the

cooler to think it over!” And so Stephen remained in the cooler and Chief Fly-withthe-Wind was out somewhere among the hills, gliding rapidly through a thousand years of sun and wind and air, always a safe margin ahead of his pursuers. At the end of four weeks Stephen was released.

27; The old cell was like a cozy shelter after a night in the storm. Stephen stretched his aching body on the straw mattress, languidly content and pleased with himself. Five weeks on starvation rations had reduced his girth and softened his muscles. His eyes were blinded by the blazing August sunlight pouring down

on his pallid features. His legs bent under weakened body, his feet lagged.

the weight of his

A bath cleansed him of the slime which had caked in the pores of his skin. A new suit of stripes in place of the one run riot with vermin. A meal in the mess hall where, the cynosure of a thousand pairs of eyes, he ate sparingly after his long fast but drank greed-

ily of the hot coffee, and he felt fit to face the future, with con-

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fidence renewed in his physical endurance. He refused to go to the hospital. Hazily he wondered about the Indian who had found his wings. To the nomad, in mind or body, Sing Sing was indeed a crucial test of survival. The Indian’s instinct for roving, suppressed by the physical barriers of stone and steel, would have destroyed him mentally and physically. Stephen felt no such restraint. To him Sing Sing was a world, small, compressed,

but distinctive, in which men

could live and

develop and find expression for their preferences as they did in the larger world that had rejected them. His experience in the cooler he regarded as his baptismal, a necessary process through which one absorbed the moods and tempers of the prison. It had not been easy to decline the Indian’s offer for a safe getaway. There had been the momentary pull that stung at his nerve centers. He had suppressed it quickly. He remembered the challenge—Howard Ayres’ and Marguerite’s, the world’s and Sing Sing’s. He would stick it out. When his time came to go, Sing Sing would have as little hold on him as the outside world had now. It was not physical liberty he wanted so much as freedom. So he communed with himself. But as he lay on his cot the night of his release from the cooler, weakened physically by privation, with subnormal powers of resistance, he grew conscious of a chill creeping through his body; his chest heaved under the labored palpitation of his heart that seemed to be pumping ice through his veins, a glacial sweat that oozed out through his skin

until he felt himself lying in a slough of freezing filth. There was no stopping the straining heartbeats, no stemming the flow of chill. He felt his body sink deeper into the frozen quagmire, almost to thé point of suffocation. He raised himself slowly on the cot. He was strangely free of pain, and his head was clear. But something seemed to be gripping it, like the clamp of cold steel on his brain. The cell block was in darkness. Nothing stirred in the crypt-

like silence. He heard the keepers change shifts. It was past the midnight hour. What

if he were

really ill? Perhaps dying? He

climbed down from the cot and stood at the latticed door, peering out into the soundless shadows, his fingers gripping the bars

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of iron to steady himself. Howard Ayres was right. A slow deatheaorn Then suddenly his muscles tightened as he felt the old familiar tongue of flame in his brain, melting away the cold steel grip, and the thunder in his ears, and the hot blood stream warming his body. He groped back from the door, slumped down heavily, and buried his face in his hands as if to avoid some hateful vision. It was there, confronting him, that which had made his blood run thin and frozen his brain—Fear! He had felt it creep over him, a clammy dagger of fog stabbing through his nostrils into his vitals. Fear! Stephen Yerkes a coward! Not sure of himself, afraid of the past haunting the future. It was too funny. He laughed, quietly at first, then louder. He sprang to his feet and swung his fists at the vision on the wall, roaring with terror and rage, uncontrollably jibbering as the specter vanished... . He looked with wonder at the grim face gazing down at him. His cot felt uncomfortably soft. He sniffed the pungent odor of chloride and catmint. Curious thing about that face. It was long and thin, forbidding. The lips were locked together. But the eyes were round, he liked to contemplate them. They soothed, like amber-colored velvet... . “SS symptoms,” Dr. Albert Suydam said. “It’s not mentioned in the books,” he explained to Captain Hilbert who had called to inquire about the patient. “Nothing Asculapius or Hippocrates or Galen ever suspected or experienced. It is common to every prison. It is a poison exuded by stone and steel, it seeps into a fellow’s blood. Sometimes it’s fatal. Sometimes it goes to the brain. and results in idiocy. Most frequently it is just a temporary derangement

. . . an acute case, like this man’s.”

Stephen listened without any outward show of interest. He recalled, vaguely, hammering at the wall of his cell; it had been a violent impulse, like a flash of spouting flame. He felt the wound inside him extending up into his throat. It was hard to breathe. The doctor had turned to bend over Stephen, poking his long, slim fingers into the patient’s eyes, and listening to the heartbeats through his stethoscope. A keen, knowing look flashed into the doctor’s eyes. With a

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quick glance at the captain, he reached for Stephen’s throat, pressing his fingers against the windpipe. Stephen squirmed and raised a hand protestingly, then clutched at the doctor’s arm to tear it away. The doctor’s face was grim, his lips tighter than ever. Captain Hilbert edged forward in alarm. Stephen’s face had turned blue, and his eyes were bulging. He gasped for breath. Then, as suddenly as he had seized it, the doctor released his grip. Stephen breathed again. “Just nerves,” the doctor said, turning to the captain. “‘A case

for extreme measures.” A few hours later Stephen was sitting up in bed, trying to figure it all out. He could not imagine himself weakening so badly. Some subtle force seemed to have gripped him, something

he had fought against. That vision. He was convinced he had driven it off. Stephen Yerkes was unafraid. He was sure of himself. He knew. He felt better after a breakfast of hot cereal and lukewarm milk. He studied the figures and faces of the men lying in the cots spread in rows along the walls of the large, airy room of the hospital. Most of them lay motionless. Some were sitting up, eying him silently. Sing Sing’s wreckage. The men who, like him, had succumbed to Stone and Steel. Their faces were the color of dried paste. Their eyes were dull, lifeless. Stephen cringed inwardly as he returned their vacant stares. He feared their contaminating influence. To be like them was to surrender to Sing Sing. Something he had determined to meet. He would have to return to his cell. It was dangerous, being in the hospital with the weak-minded. A man in a white uniform entered, the one whom Chief Fly-

with-the-Wind had called Doc. A tall, robust-looking man, sharpeyed. Stephen was to learn later that he had been, in civil life, a prominent physician; he was doing a ten-year turn for manslaughter. ““An accident,” Doc told Stephen when they were exchanging confidences. ““The woman was in trouble, some damn fool love affair. She had no choice. I took pity on her . . . and took a chance with her heart. But she died.” Doc did not tell Stephen that he himself had been the guilty lover, nor that he had sought to hide his “mistake” by dismembering the woman’s

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body and stuffing the remains in a furnace. The well-informed Tommy Kincaid whispered the information. One of the pet morsels with which Tommy regaled his listeners. Doc’s entrance was the signal for a general stir in the hospital. He was the head nurse, Dr. Suydam’s assistant. “Hey, Doc, they’ve got me marked for discharge,” a voice called, whining, “‘an’ I ain’t cured. Can’t you fix it fer me?” Doc paid no attention to the complaining fellow. Instead, he approached Stephen’s cot. “So. You’ve joined the SS squad.” He smiled. “‘I’d have bet my ten years on you.” And without waiting for Stephen’s reply he hurried to his desk, from which he hauled out a large, square mahogany chest. “Ready for the pill line,” a voice yelled, amid general laughter from the invalids. A guard outside the door shouted an order. In a moment a

striped figure appeared in the doorway. He was the first of a long line of prisoners on the morning sick list. They marched solemnly to the desk where Doc awaited them. The business was quickly done. Each prisoner explained his ailment to the patient Doc, whose keen eyes stared, unwavering, at the voluble sufferer. Even before the anxious patient had completed an analysis of his symptoms, Doc’s hand was reaching toward the mahogany chest. Several pellets dropped into the unwilling palm of the disappointed

prisoner. “One every three hours,” Doc droned, and waved him away. Three hundred pills was Sing Sing’s daily ration.

The pill line was an institution. Doc’s pills were the panacea: for every conceivable ailment. They cured cramps and headaches and were known even to make dull eyes brighter. Common colds especially yielded to Doc’s pills, as did heart palpitations. An epidemic of smallpox, diagnosed by a group of anxious prisoners, was averted by a double dose of the useful pills. Whispered comment in the yard ascribed a magic potency to them. The principal keeper alone was skeptical. He would view the pill line, spit copiously, and denounce the nervous ranks as idlers, “wanting a few

hours off from your shops.” There was a sudden halt in the slow marching pill line. Loud

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voices sounded in the hallway. An officer appeared, dragging two striped prisoners. The face of one was a mass of blood. Red splotches showed through his shirt. He reeled as he walked. The other staggered in, pale and tremulous. Doc rose quickly from his desk and hurried toward them. An anxious murmur swept through the hospital. “I caught ’em knifin’ each other,” the keeper explained. “Looks like they’re pretty bad.” Stephen watched Doc tear their clothing from their bodies and hurry them to two cots immediately adjoining his. Doc’s deft hands stopped the flow of blood. It was a full half-hour before he had made them comfortable. They lay on either side of Stephen.

Men in the pill line had called their names. The one with jet-black hair and round face was Pickles. The other, a puny fellow with shrunken features, was Pimples. Pickles and Pimples had lunged at each other with knives, the climax of an old feud. Both of them, neither over seventeen,

had aimed for leadership in their local hangout, over in New York’s Tenth Ward, and had carried their rivalries into Sing Sing. “Another inch and you’d have been done for,” Doc told the half-conscious Pickles. Pimples, the less stricken of the two,

lay motionless in his bed, scowling at the ceiling. A sudden hush had descended on the hospital. The pill line resumed its slow march. Doc’s pills continued to drop into unwilling palms. To Stephen the incident of Pickles and Pimples was a revelation. He sat on his cot, looking first at one, then at the other. Neither had stirred since Doc had dressed their wounds. Pickles,

apparently,

was

exhausted.

His eyes were

closed, and he was

breathing hard. Pimples lay motionless, his eyes wide open, stony. The long, hot August day at last faded into a humid night.

Lights out. Stephen lay on his cot with eyes closed, waiting for sleep to still his mind. His experience of the night before had left him somewhat chastened. He would return to his cell . . . the cell that had threatened to subdue him. He, not stone and steel,

should be master. He, not Sing Sing. He did not know how long he had slept. It must have been well beyond midnight. He had a strange feeling that something

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close to him was moving stealthily. He listened. Only the soft breathing of the row of invalids sounded in the heavy darkness. There it was again. Coming, apparently, from underneath his own cot. He smiled at his alarm. Probably one of Sing Sing’s nocturnal army of rats, foraging on familiar ground. Damn those nerves! A slight shuffle on his left. His eyes opened wide at an apparition showing faint against the blackness. Another vision! But this time he would not lose himself. He would wait . . A piercing, agonized cry startled him into instant alertness. A stifled, gurgling wail. The hundred patients were jolted into wakefulness.

Bedlam

broke loose in that awful moment.

Shouts,

yells, oaths, curses. A dozen lanterns swung at the door, held by as many nervous keepers. “Quiet!” The sharp command from the head keeper. Men sat up on their cots, watching the gas jets break into yellow flame and dissolve the shadows. Long rows of blanched faces stared furtively at one another, seeking the secret of that fearful cry. Stephen, too, was watching. The dozen keepers, their hickory canes poised for action, passed along the floor, scrutinizing each white robed figure. “Hey there!” A keeper was nudging Pickles. He alone of the entire invalid company had not risen. Stephen’s eyes were glued to the blanket covering the inert prisoner. He gasped with horror as the keeper tore it away, revealing the wooden

knife handle

sticking up in the man’s chest. “Holy Christ!” One could almost hear the heartbeats of the hundred invalids as the keeper bent over the silent form. “Dead!” “Who done it?” The keeper stared hard at Stephen. ‘‘Ain’t you seen or heard nothin’?” Stephen returned his stare, but gave no sign of having heard. “By God, you'll talk all right when the P.K. gets at you!” But the principal keeper, entering a moment later accom-

panied by Doc, who had been summoned from his cell, did not “get at’? Stephen. Immediately on ascertaining the facts, he strode to the cot on Stephen’s right, stretched out his arm, and hauled

Pimples to his feet. The pinch-faced prisoner stood in his white

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hospital gown, shivering like a frightened animal. The wiry little man’s eyes narrowed to slits; his lips pursed and emitted a stream

of brown juice straight into Pimples’ face, followed by a short, quick jab with his fist at the loose-hanging jaw. Pimples dropped, his thin, bony figure sprawled out like a shattered scarecrow. “Take ’em both away,” the principal keeper ordered. “One to the morgue . . . the other to the cooler.” The morgue and the cooler! Stephen lay wide awake, thinking of them. He had experienced the one. Would he reach the other? Disquieting thoughts did not yield even with the dissolving shadows pursued by the long, gray streaks of dawn. His eyes were drawn to the cot on his left, on which only a few hours ago tragedy

had descended with hawklike swiftness, leaving a trail of blood along which two lives slid to perdition. One to the morgue. The other to the cooler. He was convinced that spleen alone had not actuated the fellow called Pimples to plunge his knife into the heart of that helpless boy. It was rather, Stephen told himself, the explosion of a long-smoldering rancor against a dimly comprehended inner impotence. That dwarfed, dull-eyed, pinch-faced Pimples had declared war against an objective obscured by his own mental fog, he had stumbled blindly along the line of battle that led to Sing Sing. Then, in that lucid interval, all his venom and hate, yes, and terror,

stood revealed in the person of the ruddy-faced boy called Pickles. Nothing mattered except that he must destroy that image. And

then it was over. And the murderer had stood shivering, as if caught in a blast of freezing revelation. Stephen knew instinctively that Pimples would not struggle long against the unrelenting pinch of the noose. He would go not with the assumed bravado of a

braggart, but as one who was dead long before his march to the gallows. Such a one might even be induced to utter a word of prayer, facing eternity. Stephen would have liked to join Pimples in the cooler. Perhaps in that impenetrable but intimate darkness blotting out those repulsive features, he might detect the incorporeal image which he could claim as his own. He remembered that he, too, was a killer.

Stephen had refused steadfastly to attend church service. The urgings of the chaplain had not influenced him, But on that morn-

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ing after the murder, the call, “Bible Class,” caught his interest.

Why not? There might be something to it. He felt the need of a soothing message, an hour of forgetfulness, perhaps, from the night that had passed. “Bible Class” was not a regular church service. It was more like a camp meeting, led by a mild-mannered clergyman who hoped to interpret the Word of God in the language of Sing Sing. It was interdenominational. The Reverend Amos Hinckley had volunteered his services. None knew his creed. Even his congregation, simple folk of one of the county’s hinterland village churches, was not exactly sure of his dogma. But they followed his involved discourses with the intensity of lost wanderers seeking the guideposts of life, no less intensely than his Sing Sing audience to whom the clergyman appeared as the exponent of Christ’s universality. 28

Stephen joined the group of hospital patients who were physically able to leave their beds for the trip to the school floor immediately above, where one of the rooms had been reserved for the weekly meeting. The Reverend Mr. Hinckley was seated at his desk when Stephen entered, one of a line of ten from the hospital. The man’s face, ruddy behind the heavy beard streaked with gray, lighted up with a pleased smile as the men from the hospital took their’ seats. “And the sick shall be healed,” he said softly, his rich voice sounding the words reverently as if each were endowed with some special significance. Stephen stared around the room, eying his neighbors. It was a mixed congregation. Black and white. With one, at the far end of the room, whose yellow complexion and flat nose bespoke a Mongolian. When the men were all seated, and the keepers standing at their posts by the window, their hickory sticks in full view of the assembled congregation, Mr. Hinckley slid the chair from under him, rose, and extending his arms in an enfolding gesture, opened the session. “Welcome to the newcomers in our midst,” he said, with a

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smile toward Stephen, “who have come to seek comfort in the Word of God.” Then he proceeded to expand on the message of the day. Stephen thought he detected a reference to the incident of the night before. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Let evil not be stretched beyond its immediate confines, was the theme of the talk, a plea, Stephen interpreted, against any possible reverberations from the murder in the hospital. “And now let us join in song,” the speaker said at the conclusion of his remarks, his deep voice leading his striped congregation in the familiar words and tune of “Lead, Kindly Light.” A hundred voices sang, shouted the hymn. Not reverence, but enthusiasm sent forth the words with a will and lung power seldom heard in ordinary church meetings. The song was ended. The clergyman resumed his chair, opening the large Bible on his desk. “Our

lesson for today,” he announced,

“is the chapter in

Daniel describing his experiences in the lions’ den. It is one of the most beautiful of all Bible stories, emphasizing the necessity for man’s abiding faith in God, and its fulfillment.” He read the entire chapter, slowly, the words following each other with clear precision as if his listeners were children. Every eye in the room was fixed on the reader as he expounded the text, every ear attuned to the melodious voice. Finally he finished. His audience leaned back, relaxed, here and there a sigh. On one face Stephen detected a scowl as of disbelief. But nobody spoke. Stephen could not quite understand the sudden benignity of the principal keeper. After breakfast, on the following morning, while he was resting on his cot—Dr. Suydam’s special order—the keeper strode into the hospital and, after a hasty glance around the room, walked quickly over to Stephen’s bed. The knob-cheeked

head, its lips dripping brown juice, bent over him. “There’s no hurry about your leaving the hospital,” he said, the benevolence of his voice in strange contrast with the calculat-

ing stare of his eyes. “I'd like to go back to my cell,” Stephen replied.

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The officer’s eyebrows jerked upward, his eyes opened wider. “It’s comfortable here,” he suggested. But Stephen was not thinking of physical comforts. In the

hospital he was the weak man, reminded constantly of what Dr. Suydam diagnosed as the Stone and Steel ailment; he himself knew it to be only fear, an intangible fear of an intangible vision, to

which he had succumbed in a moment of despondency. He told himself that there was only one way to overcome it. He must return to the stone and steel, live with them, feel the cold touch,

breathe the fetid air and have it seep into his blood. “[’m not used to idling,” he explained to the scowling keeper. But he remained in the hospital. No notice, apparently, was taken of his restlessness. The grim-faced Dr. Suydam answered his

daily insistence with a silent shrug. Even Doc, the Pill Man, gave him no encouragement. “Easy there, man,” he whispered when Stephen questioned him. “Enjoy it while it lasts.” Stephen did not know that he had become the subject of an intensive and curious controversy in the shops, among the prisoners. Though no one had questioned him, somehow word had spread —perhaps through the mysterious grapevine—that Stephen Yerkes was an important witness to the investigation of the midnight murder in the hospital. “Will he talk?” became the momentous question debated in hushed whispers. None knew definitely what his testimony might be. They knew only that his cot was not three feet from the scene of the stabbing. Had he been awakened by the furtive movements of the assassin? Had he actually seen the man raise his knife and plunge it into the heart of his victim? If he told, Pimples would surely hang. The tragedy itself was forgotten in the face of this new problem. Stephen Yerkes’ silence would save the life of the accused. He might be convicted of murder in a lesser degree, but certainly without direct evidence there could be no verdict of first degree with the sentence of death. Would Yerkes talk? Even the administration debated the prisoner’s attitude. Actu-

ally, his retention in the hospital was to keep him under constant observation. Word had gone out that he was to be kept incom-

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municado. The keeper who had permitted him to attend the Bible Class was severely censured. Stephen was unaware of the emotional furor surging through Sing Sing, in which he was the central figure. It did not occur to him that his word could hang Pimples—not until Captain Hilbert ambled to his cot one morning, a week after the murder, and stood staring down at him thoughtfully. “T hear you’re wantin’ to get back to your cell,” he said. “And to the coal pile,’ Stephen laughed. “Gettin’ soft?” the captain asked, smiling. SLazyea

“No, I guess you’re not the lazyin’ kind.” And after a pause, “Whatever else they say about you.” Stephen solemnly returned the captain’s bulging stare. “What else?” The captain’s huge bulk responded to his deep chuckle. “Well, you’re mighty quick with your fist.” Stephen smiled reminiscently. “And slow with your tongue.” “Being dumb is no crime.” “No,” the captain agreed in a serious tone, “but it c’n be mighty foolish.” And he added, “Especially, when talkin’ ’ll square you.” “Square me?” The captain nodded. “There’s a chance for you to cut your term. The District Attorney’ll be askin’ you about the murder. If you'll open up an’ tell what you seen an’ heard—if you seen and heard—it’ll mean a recommendation for you to the Governor.” “You mean, they’ll call me as a witness?” “eure: “When?” “Today; this afternoon.” The captain lumbered away without waiting for Stephen’s comment. A recommendation to the Governor! His eyes followed the retreating figure. A pardon, perhaps. The heart within him became

suddenly alive. Not blood but fire ran through his veins, and the

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old, familiar thunder hammered his eardrums. All his earlier plans and misgivings were dwarfed before this mighty hope, like snowdrifts in the mellowing sun of spring. A pardon! He would be free! He knew now how false was that urge to be away from the living. From Marguerite, and his son. He would seek out Howard Ayres and give him the lie about his letter. There could be no divorce. Not with him back. He waited nervously for the call to meet the District Attorney. It came soon after mess. Captain Hilbert came to summon him, the invalids in the hospital craned their necks for a last look at him, then turned to whisper to each other. “He'll talk,” said one, with a dark look in his eyes.

“Not him,” said his neighbor. “He’s straight.” “What the hell,” a third whispered, “that kid ain’t no better than the lad he stabbed.”

“Yeah,” the first yawned, “but killin’ this one ain’t gonna bring the other one back!” Stephen was facing the group of officials in the warden’s office. An important-looking young man was seated at the warden’s desk, writing industriously. The warden greeted Stephen with an amiable smile. The principal keeper’s jaw was grinding incessantly. Stephen, cap in hand, waited expectantly. Finally the young man looked up, eying the prisoner with a swiftly appraising glance. “Your name is Stephen Yerkes?” he asked in a matter-of-fact tone. Stephen nodded. “Doing twenty-five years for murder?” Stephen did not answer. “Tm investigating this . . . killing in the hospital. I understand your bed was alongside that of the fellow who was stabbed.” Stephen remained silent, tense. “Are you willing to make a statement, so we can use you as a witness before the Grand Jury?” Stephen eyed the inquisitor calmly. Then shot a quick glance at Captain Hilbert who had turned away to stare out the window. Stephen breathed deeply, a long whistling sound like a gust of wind

presaging an oncoming storm. It was not an idle gesture, the sud-

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den lifting of his hand over his eyes. There was the awful specter . a fleeting image of a slight figure, hooded, with hands tied behind its back and feet bound together, dangling, swirling, winding unendingly. Another deep breath, deeper and longer than the first. The specter vanished. He was staring into the impassive face of the District Attorney. “It depends,” he was saying. A frown cut into the features of the inquisitor. He moved back from the desk with an impatient gesture and jumped to his feet, pointing a long finger toward Stephen. “Tm not here to bargain with you, Yerkes,” he almost shouted. “It’s your duty!” Stephen was calmer now. He smiled slightly. “My only duty is to serve my sentence.” The District Attorney’s face paled with anger. He moved toward Stephen, then halted, as if to avoid possible contact. But his finger darted forward again. “With killers running loose in Sing Sing you might not live to serve your sentence. Isn’t that something to think about?”

Stephen shrugged his shoulders. “Tt would save the state the job of keeping me,” he answered, smiling. “SA wise guy!” the District Attorney taunted. “But what is it you want?” he asked suddenly. ““We’ve got to hang this fellow; it was a deliberate murder.”

SO nlyatbige® fan’?

There was a sudden commotion outside the door. It was flung open. A keeper entered hurriedly, beckoning to the principal keeper. For a few moments they stood whispering to each other. The District Attorney frowned at the interruption. The warden stepped toward them, but stopped short as the principal keeper turned toward the now impatient District Attorney, his jaw see-

sawing nervously. “No need to go on with this,” he announced, “the boy’s dead.

Suicide.” The District Attorney slumped back in his chair... The war-

den’s eyes looked troubled.

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“Take him back,” he ordered Captain Hilbert, nodding toward Stephen. The captain escorted Stephen to the hospital. At the entrance he paused, looked around to make sure they were alone, and leaned over toward the prisoner.

“Too bad. If the kid woulda waited, you’da had your chance.” Stephen lay back on his cot, ignoring the knowing winks and stares of his neighbors. “Did y’ hang the kid?” a voice asked in a subdued whisper. Stephen turned his head. “He hung himself,’’ he whispered back. “You ain’t meanin’—” Stephen shook his head. “No. He didn’t talk. The kid’s dead.” “The Dutch act!” Stephen nodded. “Good boy, Pimples!” Another voice whispered, “I never thought he’d have the nerve. Cheatin’ the hangman.” The prisoners lay back on their cots, their bodies limp, their eyes closed. Perhaps they were living over with Pimples his last moments in the slime-crusted cell. Stephen, too, lay motionless. He was conscious of a deep resentment against Pimples. If only he had known the boy had not cared to live, that he had planned death! The boy could have had death. And he life. Now it was over. The opportunity would never come again, he might as well acknowledge it. No more nonsense about cutting his term. Five years off for good behavior. Twenty

years to go. And then... Stephen was returned to his cell that afternoon. He was gidd to be back. Here he was again in Sing Sing. Here he was alone, alone with his visions and his thoughts.

Chastened, he sat in his cell waiting for “lights out.” He was wrong about Sing Sing. It bore him no malice. It was doing life’s bidding. Just as his pearl-handled pistol, Ma Mandelbaum’s gift, had done his bidding and sent death into George Leslie’s heart. Memory no longer rankled. But it brought him no remorse. The cell somehow seemed larger. Why had he thought it so narrow? The metamorphosis was in himself. He had lost the exalted |

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stature his imagination had evolved into an invincible being striding heroically toward power. Perhaps Pimples’ suicide had dragged him down. He had deemed himself an opportunist. Swinging to freedom on the same gallows that would hurl the boy to eternity. But Pimples had mocked him. “You’re not the man you think you are.” Not a creator, only clay to be fashioned by others. Not a superman in league with fate, shaping lives, restraining or unleashing at will the tugs of pain by which men were subdued. But puny. Like Pimples, in whom passion and emotion reached their zenith in overwhelming hate for his victim. Unconsciously, his eyes were drawn to the wall with the three inscriptions. Not so foolish, after all. Those writings were not vain gestures. They were not etched for him and others to follow him. Each man had unburdened his own life in the lines he had scratched. It was to understand his own emotions that each had labored so diligently. Stephen was not yet sure of himself. He knew only that vision had given way to reality. Perhaps, like the other three who had lived in that very cell, he, too, would untangle himself. Sing Sing would be worth while if it could do that for him. It would take years to dig into the stone. And patience. He would begin as they did with the year of his admission. The word would come to him

later, perhaps not until the very end of his term. It was but a few minutes before “lights out.” Just time enough for him to bend down on his hands and knees and explore the

floor of his cell. What a lucky find... that long nail in the corner. In the morning Captain Hilbert made his customary tour of inspection while the prisoners were at mess. He peered into every cell. But made a minute examination of number 202. After a while

he emerged grinning.

“2 But in the days and weeks that followed, Stephen got back his strength at the coal pile. A new line of cars had been shunted into the prison yard. Shovels heaved industriously. Wheelbarrows trundled busily. The coal gang worked steadily.

Stephen did not resent his aching muscles, but looked for-

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ward to the silence of the cell block at the end of his day’s labor, where he lay on his cot, staring idly at the stone ceiling, watching it hide behind the thickening gloom as the day faded into night. Not bad, this brain void.

He did not even respond to the gallery boy’s offer of a book from the prison library. Reading meant thinking. He preferred the void. It was restful. Days merging into weeks, weeks into months. Summer mellowing into fall. The sharp river winds heralded the oncoming winter. In those days and weeks and months he paid little heed to the stone on which he had begun incising. The long nail lay almost forgotten in the corner of his cell. He had been half tempted to throw it out. All his earlier inner turbulences seemed stilled. He had found the answer to Sing Sing. It was to allow oneself to be swept on, lulled by the swing of time. The awe which had stirred Sing Sing at Stephen’s arrival had long since subsided. The controversy with the Indian which had thrown him into the dark cell was regarded as a measure of the man’s stature. Now he had quieted down. Seeing him pushing his shovel into the high coal mounds, filling endless barrows as they passed before him, his face black with dust and his striped suit hanging in loose folds from his bowed shoulders, Stephen Yerkes became less and less the hero they had imagined him. Just another convict. Nerveless. Without guts! Nor did official Sing Sing fail to notice it. The warden, complacent in the belief that Sing Sing had subdued so dangerous a character. The principal keeper, assuming that his drastic measures had beaten him into submission. Captain Hilbert, satisfied that his judgment had been verified.

And to Stephen it did not seem at all hard, this holding on to time’s long swing. All you needed was the firm grip, and the will to dissociate yourself from everything that had gone before. Toward midwinter a new set of keepers joined the staff. The prison had been undermanned. The increasing number of idle prisoners, resulting from the continued shutdown of shops as the result of expiring contracts, was alarming. An idle mind makes a dangerous prisoner, idle hands seek furtive employment. The administration sensed danger in the restlessness of men

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who were confined in their cells twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four. They pleaded for additional keepers. The Legislature at Albany heeded the request. A dozen men joined the force that was to guard the peace of Sing Sing. Among them was a young man from the sparsely settled counties of upper New York. John Briggs was the name he had signed on the register, a slim man, who walked with pantherlike strides. John Briggs was a serious-minded fellow. Twenty-three years of age, he had spent his youth on his father’s farm. Everything he had known in life had been sterile, everything except his mother, who had brought ten children into the world. He was the oldest. The farm had never been able to produce enough for their support, and so John had determined to seek his fortune elsewhere. He walked two hundred miles to Albany where a distant relative,

a member of the Legislature, chairman of the Committee

on Penal Institutions, had suggested Sing Sing as a possible chance foriiar cateer, John had never thought much about crime, much less about criminals. In his home country people did not tempt fate. They acquiesced passively in nature’s insolvency and, though they knew of God only by hearsay, not being able to maintain the luxury of a preacher, were far from unbelieving. Christenings and funerals were the high spots of their religious lives. John Briggs was determined to begin right. “Those men are devils in human form,” his mentor, the Albany politician had told him. “You’ve got to put fear into their hearts. Make ’em respect you. And remember,” he added, con-

cluding a long and involved harangue, “I’m behind you. If you see anything wrong, just let me know.” It was natural that the new keeper should be assigned to the reception company. Keepers usually began their service with com-

panies whose duties were not too technical. All he was required to do was to lead newly admitted prisoners from their cells to the bucket rack, then to the mess hall,.then back to the bucket rack

where they picked up their portable plumbing and returned to their cells to await the call to the next mess. A simple duty. But John Briggs was a simple fellow. And fortune, which knows no law and is often swayed by coincidence,

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decreed that on the very day of John’s arrival a large group of prisoners reached Sing Sing from New York, among them being three of the most desperate of New York’s criminals.

The coal gang paused in their labors, resting on their shovels and leaning against their wheelbarrows, as the long reception line passed them on the way to the bucket rack. Stephen stared at the lockstepping prisoners without definite interest, until he spied three familiar faces gazing at him. He straightened suddenly as he

recognized the sad features of Funeral Wells, the animated glare of Sheeny Mike and the animal gleam of Dumb Sam. Then all three grinned. And Stephen smiled back at them. Keeper John Briggs noticed the exchange of greetings. Sealto? The line ceased its shuffling. Keeper Briggs trod selfconsciously to the center of his company and stopped beside the three grinning men. “You ain’t supposed to laugh, see!” he admonished them. “Don’t you try any o’ yer slick tricks on me.” Funeral Wells looked sad. Sheeny Mike’s face was immobile. But Dumb Sam grinned. Keeper Briggs’ long arm reached out and hauled the grinning prisoner from the line. “What’s yer name?” he asked in a loud voice, his hickory stick raised threateningly. Dumb Sam’s face worked convulsively. Keeper Briggs’ temper rose perceptively. ; “Yer name, I said.’ His face showed crimson above his blue uniform. Sam opened his mouth wide, pointing into it with his finger,

and shakng his head. “Spoofin’ me, eh?” Keeper Briggs yelled, at the same time raising his stick and bringing it down hard on Sam’s head. The latter retreated before the fury of the maddened keeper. The line of prisoners closed in menacingly. “Can’t you see the man’s.dumb?” Stephen Yerkes yelled. ‘His tongue’s been cut. You’ve no right to hit him!” Keeper Briggs turned toward Stephen with a blank stare. Before the keeper of the coal gang could intervene, a loud guffaw broke the tension. It was Big Swede. A chorus of laughter fol-

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lowed. The entire reception line was grinning. Even Funeral Wells allowed himself a smile. Dumb Sam was patting his head ruefully. Keeper Briggs’ face reddened, then paled. He walked toward Stephen. “It’s your tongue you should be guardin’,” he said, with an ominous thrust of his stick. “You can’t talk to an officer unless you’re asked.” “And you can’t make a dumb man talk by striking him!” Stephen had spoken hastily. His own keeper came up, smiling. “Be careful, Yerkes. Better keep going, Briggs,” he suggested to the still blustering officer. “No use getting into a heat. March your men along.” Keeper Briggs and Stephen Yerkes exchanged glances. Briggs’ eyes were the first to drop. But his face was still frowning as he marched his men away. The arrival of Funeral Wells, Sheeny Mike and Dumb Sam disturbed Stephen’s peace of mind. He had felt safe from the past. Now he was jerked back into consciousness of life. The void was being filled, peopled with memories and visions he had hoped to escape. The scene of their last meeting returned to him that night as he lay in his cell. Thaddeus Pitney’s startled face stared at him through the darkness, and Marguerite’s frightened eyes. George Leslie’s dying gasps echoed in his brain. There was no escaping them, it seemed. The link was too strong. His was but a fancied security. The lines he had spun had followed him into Sing Sing. They would stretch along with him through the years. Uncon-

sciously his hand reached for the nail he had not touched for months. Stephen Yerkes put the new keeper in his place! Sing Sing did not overlook the incident. Stephen became a heroic figure overnight. Sing Sing needed a leader. The men in the cells, idling away the hours, were becoming impatient. It was a curious thing, to have sixteen hundred men clamor for work. Somehow it did not ring true. Prisoners were supposed to prefer idleness. Supposed to hate labor. Old-timers among them recalled the reign of the contractors and feared their return. Yet anything was better than sit-

ting out the years. The controversy that had raged for decades about Sing Sing’s

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industries had focused public attention on the prison. It was not uncommon for large deputations to tour the institution, to see for themselves the conditions that were so frequently debated in the public press. Others came out of mere curiosity. Husbands brought their wives, lovers their sweethearts, parents their children. Keepers would show them around. They would stand in the yard, watching the prisoners line up for mess, and gape at the long lines of striped men lockstepping before them, like paraders on review. Sing Sing was electrified one day—the report spread over the

grapevine—by the rumor that no less a personage than Cornelius Vanderbilt was expected on a tour of inspection. Vanderbilt, the millionaire, who controlled the New

York Central, the railroad

which ran close by the prison wall. The day before the big man’s visit, keepers and prisoners worked desperately to make Sing Sing presentable. Squads of men were assigned to clean up the yard. Barrels of lime were emptied in the cell block to cleanse the air. Cells were inspected. Prisoners

were ordered to the laundry for changes of clothing. Sing Sing would be on dress parade. Vanderbilt was coming. To Stephen the name Vanderbilt was another link that drew him back to the old life. Vanderbilt and Wall Street. Wall Street and Gould. Gould and Keene. Wall Street looking Sing Sing over. The great day dawned at last. Sing Sing was prepared. Work was improvised for the idlers. The great man was to be escorted through the prison by the warden and a committee of officers, the principal keeper and Captain Hilbert; also a prisoner, representing the men. Such was the word that was whispered at the mess tables, and through the ranks, as the prisoners paraded across the yard. Nobody lene the identity of the fortunate prisoner. A special train brought the visitors to Ossining, and a specially upholstered carriage conveyed them to the prison gate. Stephen indulged himself in the fantastic hope that he might be ordered to accompany the Vanderbilt party through the prison. He remembered the great man, having seen him often on the Exchange in the days when he was fighting with Keene. It would be

like a touch of old times—walking with Vanderbilt. Then came the whispered revelation, passed from cell to cell, as the men awaited the morning gong. Ferdy Ward’s cell had been

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unlocked, he had been summoned

6o1

to the warden’s office. He was

to be the lucky one. Stephen had not yet encountered Ferdinand Ward, Wall Street’s most famous contribution to Sing Sing. He had heard about him, of course. A ten million dollar swindler who

had dragged his partner, former President Ulysses S$. Grant, to ruin by his fraudulent manipulations. Ferdinand Ward was Sing Sing’s aristocrat, who had won the respect of his lowlier neighbors as the man who had successfully duped America’s most popular figure. He had reached for a star, something worth going to Sing Sing for. Stephen had been anxious to meet this man Ward. Perhaps to measure lives with him. Was there a Ma Mandelbaum in his path, too? And a Howard Ayres? Or a George Leslie? Or had he, like Keene, attempted the impossible in trying to storm Wall Street? The mess hall, at breakfast, rustled with the news of Vander-

bilt’s arrival. Keepers wore clean linen, a sure sign of an important event; their uniforms were pressed, the brass buttons polished. To top it all, the warden appeared in the mess hall, strode to the keepers’

platform

and faced the prisoners sitting at attention.

After giving them the official news of the impending visit, he proclaimed the special orders for the day. “You are not to look up from your jobs as the party passes through your shops. There is to be no staring. Certainly no talking.” The men in the cells, those without work, were to remain

absolutely quiet while the party passed through the cell block. For several days there had been no work for the coal gang. Stephen expected to be among those who would remain in their cells during the inspection. At ten o’clock, however, almost coincidental with the arrival of the visitors, a line of freight cars was shunted into the prison grounds. They contained supplies for various departments and had to be unloaded that very morning. The coal gang was called out to do the work. The gang was lockstepping from the cell block through the yard toward the river along which the freight cars were stationed. Stephen was leading. He marched with his arms folded, shuffling with short strides, the entire line in close formation, each man’s right hand resting on the

shoulder of the man ahead.

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In the center of the yard they encountered the visiting party. Stephen easily distinguished the portly figure of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Beside him stood a woman, fur coated, a diamond brooch in

full view. She was Mrs. Vanderbilt. Flanking the visitors were the

warden and the principal keeper. Standing near by was a prisoner in stripes, a tall, lean fellow, blue-eyed, with brown hair. Stephen stared at him curiously. So this was Ferdy Ward, whom the warden had presented to Vanderbilt as the personification of Sing Sing’s

prisoner population. Stephen saw Vanderbilt turn to whisper to the warden as he led his line before them, and caught the startled gaze of the visitor. The warden’s hand rose, signaling to the company’s keeper. A sharp command, and Stephen halted. He stared straight ahead, though conscious of the group’s approach. Vanderbilt leading, they walked along the line of prisoners.

In a few moments the portly visitor was facing Stephen, the deep set eyes looking out from under their shaggy brows. Stephen remained standing with his arms folded. “So... you're Yerkes,” Vanderbilt’s voice was harsh, but friendly. “A damn shame to find you here.” He hesitated. “If there’s anything I can do...” A sudden rush of memory engulfed Stephen. “So, if there’s anything I can do...” Stephen flushed. “You can look after my son,” he said impulsively. Vanderbilt listened with interest to Stephen’s explanation of the child’s birth. “You can find out about him from Howard Ayres.” ;

Vanderbilt nodded thoughtfully. He stepped back. His eyes followed the lockstepping line of prisoners until it disappeared behind one of the prison shops. When they were in the freight car, hauling huge crates toward the door, “A word from him to the Governor,” Big Swede remarked, “‘an’ you’re a free man.” af “Hell, no! Look at dat guy Ward. Maybe you think there ain’t been words to the Governor about him . . . high an’ mighty words, too ... . but Ferdy’s still here.” Big Swede spat copiously.

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“You're dumb, all of you. Ferdy ain’t hankerin’ fer a pardon. He’s payin’ his debt to society. He’ll leave Sing Sing without any strings—so he c’n enjoy what he’s cashed in. That’s how them big fellahs work.” Stephen did not enter into the discussion. He was too keyed up with his interview. He felt mysteriously happy. The crates marked “Sing Sing Prison” had all been removed. Stephen, impelled by a strange excitement, did more than his share of the work. But the freight car was not entirely emptied. Curiosity led him to draw aside a heavy canvas that seemed to mark another consignment. Three large kegs stood uncovered. The gang of prisoners stared at them curiously, then anxiously, finally with interest. “Think it’s tar?” the Big Swede suggested. ““Maybe lime.” A sandy-haired, smooth-faced fellow almost as tall as Stephen was examining the tags. He was a strange man who sang huge chunks of coal into the wheelbarrows. He was a rhymester. Although his verse was not always original, his repertory was extensive. His fellow prisoners called him Poet.

“The nectar of the gods,” he announced in a stentorian voice, looking up with shining eyes. “Not rum!” a dozen voices exclaimed. ““°Tis wine, boys, *tis wine; God Bacchus, a friend of mine,”

the Poet intoned, his tongue protruding between his lips. “De Poet’s lady . . . Miss Muse . . . she sent him a present,” Tony, the Italian, whispered breathlessly. The prisoners grouped around the kegs, staring at them in silent wonderment. Stephen stood, with them, smiling at their eagerness.

Big Swede

hurried

to the door, looked

around,

and

returned quickly. “The keeper’s down by the river,” he said, winking, “an’ there ain’t nobody gonna miss a cup or two from those barrels.” Perhaps it was Stephen’s newly inspired happiness or his sympathetic response to the gang’s long-standing thirst. He grasped a hammer which had served them in breaking loose the crates, raised it high above his head and brought it down hard on one of the wine casks. The prisoners gasped.

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for the Poet,” a voice shouted. The striped

prisoners crowded around the man who was already bending over

the opened keg, and watched him lower his head into the liquid. They heard him gurgle. His head rose finally. The dream in his eyes was gone. Instead they flashed fire. “Drink, boys!” he shouted. “To Bacchus!” The boys drank. Stephen looked on, at first startled, then in fear as man after man dug his head into the rapidly emptying Caske wees A half hour later Cornelius Vanderbilt and his party stopped short in their tour at a dozen striped reeling across the them to the tune

of the prison yard, gazing in dismay and wonder men who had just emerged from the freight car, tracks, forming in line, with the Poet leading of a chant.

“A goodly man is Stephen Yerkes, O better is he Than grape or tree And the best of all good company.” The guards on the wall grasped their rifles. Keepers appeared at windows. Prisoners, heedless of rules and regulations, crowded . at the doors of their shops, all amazed at the swaying, chorusing line of stripes zigzagging through the yard. Shouts and laughter greeted them throughout the prison. Mrs. Vanderbilt chuckled. Mr. Vanderbilt struggled to maintain a solemn face. The warden looked stricken. The principal keeper’s jaws wagged industriously, streams of juice issuing from his lips in successive spurts. Captain Hilbert, alone, maintained his poise. ’ Stop grinnin’ at ’em,” he yelled to the still startled keepers. Stop ’em where they are.” A dozen keepers ran toward the marching file of prisoners. “Where’s Yerkes?” the captain shouted. Stephen emerged from the freight car and stood, hesitating, at the open doorway. With an agility belying his bulk, the captain hauled himself into the freight car. It did not take him more than ¢ a few

seconds

to trace the source

; of the merriment.

toward Stephen, regarding him seriously.

He turned

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“You had any yourself?” Stephen shook his head. “You’ve got will power,” the captain sighed. “Well, you got those boys into an awful stew. There’ll be no holding the P.K.

with him putting on a show fer Vanderbilt.” He hesitated a moment, winked slowly at Stephen and went hastily toward the open keg. His big hands dipped into the liquid, scooping it up toward his mouth. Three times he repeated the operation. Then he straightened up, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and grinned. “T ain’t blamin’ ’em at all, Steve,”’ he chuckled, ‘“‘but they’ll

be payin’ heavy fer the fun.” He clambered down into the yard. Stephen followed. “Throw them all in the coolers,” the principal keeper roared, disregarding the warden’s panicky gesture. “We're going to the cooler, boys, To sleep off all our joys.” The Poet sang as he struggled in the grip of two keepers who advanced on him. “T thought we had missed something,” Cornelius Vanderbilt remarked blandly to the warden. ‘““Why not show us the punishment cells? Coolers, the gentleman said.” Unwillingly the warden followed in the wake of the struggling prisoners, accompanied by his guests. The principal keeper had ordered the drunken prisoners locked two in a cell. The six outer wooden doors were flung open. Then the iron inner doors were unlocked. Officers and keepers and guests froze in their tracks as a black figure stumbled out of the end cooler, a slimy apparition, dripping froth. It stared wild-eyed at the principal keeper, then at Cornelius Vanderbilt, and dropped at the feet of the startled visitor. “If yo’ is Jesus,” Banjo Pete pleaded, whining, “lead dis po’ niggah to de golden chair, so’s Ah c’n bow low to de Lawd ob Hosts an’ purify a black man’s soul.” The groveling negro paused and lifted his wild rolling eyes toward the amazed Vanderbilt.

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“But if yo’ is de debbil hisself,” he shouted hoarsely, “Ah’se

tellin’ yo’ Ah’se Banjo Pete, jes’ come from Sing Sing, an’ Ah’se felt all de fires ob hell. Dis niggah’s clean an’ pure.” Banjo Pete’s voice died down into a smothered gasp. ““An’ Ah wants to see God!” Mrs. Vanderbilt was dabbing her eyes. Mr. Vanderbilt, after an agitated glance at the groveling negro, hurried to her side, took her arm and led her away. The warden whispered earnestly to the principal keeper and followed them into the administration building. ‘Never mind the coolers for these men,” the principal keeper ordered. “Put ’em back in their cells.” Captain Hilbert nodded to Stephen. ‘Help me with him to the hospital.” They carried the frothing negro up the stairs and stretched him on a cot. Doc washed away the slime from the man’s body. His eyes were closed now, but his lips still muttered. ““Ah wants to see God.” Stephen was back in his cell. Cornelius Vanderbilt was in the warden’s office. He sat with Mrs. Vanderbilt, facing the three administrative officials. ““Are they necessary—I mean the dark cells?” The warden remained thoughtfully silent. “Without them,” the principal keeper explained, “there’d be no handling the men. Our lives wouldn’t be safe. Those men in there are desperate.” Captain Hilbert stirred impatiently. “I been here longer’n any of you. I was a youngster when I joined up. An’ they put iron cages on the prisoners’ heads in them days, an’ stretched their arms on iron crosses; yes, an’ they used the paddle to enforce the rules. An’ I recall when orders came from Albany forbiddin’ all them punishments, the warden was

stark mad, an’ the P.K. wrung his hands, an’ half the keepers threatened to leave. They was all that scared. They said the same

words as you said now. Sing Sing wouldn’t be safe. But nothin’

happened.” He shook his head. “Dark cells ain’t no more important than those other things were!” “But how in hell—” The principal keeper caught himself.

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“Beg your pardon,” he apologized to Mrs. Vanderbilt—‘‘could you put fear into them?” “If you’re thinkin’ of fear,” the captain explained, ‘the coolers ain’t strong enough. But fear never got you anywhere. The boys’re whisperin’ now about Banjo Pete. An’ what d’you suppose they’re sayin’? or thinkin’? About keepin’ rules? Not much. They’re frettin’ about squarin’ scores with you. A human being’s same in prison as outside. As long as you keep on threatenin’ him, he’ll live to an inch of that threat. Just enough to get by, an’ then sometimes he’ll reach out further. “Tm thinkin’ of the time when prisons won’t have any dark cells, maybe no cells at all, and keepers won’t carry those damned— beggin’ your lady’s pardon—hickory sticks.”

The principal keeper could restrain himself no longer. He hurriedly rose from his chair and strode through the door. He returned in a moment, a relieved look on his face.

“You’re forgetting,” he said, nodding to Captain Hilbert, “these men are criminals, convicted of every crime on the calendar, from jostling to murder. They’re hard.” “You ain’t makin’ ’em any softer by puttin’ fear in their hearts.” “J was taught to fear the Lord.” “Lovin? your neighbor is more important to my way of thinkin’.” ‘“There’s no love in those men’s hearts.” “We've never tried to find out.” The warden had not participated in the discussion. Now he moved uncomfortably. “Mr. Vanderbilt isn’t interested in your debate, gentlemen,” he suggested. “T am indeed, warden,” the railroad magnate replied. “I’ve never thought much about it. I am very grateful for the opportunity.” “These things are not really important enough for men of your standing.” “Well,” said Mr. Vanderbilt thoughtfully, “‘we’re interested in property rights, and property rights are based on mutual respect. If some people have lost that respect, it’s up to us to find out why.”

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“That hardly concerns prison morale,” the warden said, smiling. “Tt might, warden, if you succeeded in restoring that respect.” “That’s not what the law asks of us, Mr. Vanderbilt.” “Then the law should be changed, warden. I quite agree with the captain.” The visitors rose to go. The carriage took them to their special train. In a few minutes it rushed by the prison, a long, shrill whistle sounding farewell. The great man’s curiosity had been satisfied. “Well, what do you make of it?” the warden asked the principal keeper. “He’s forgotten it already,” the latter replied. ‘“Those money kings are too wrapt up in Wall Street to think of anything human.” “After all, what would you want him to do?” “Td like to send a few of our men down to him for jobs,” the captain remarked. But though Sing Sing was still a jumble to Cornelius Vanderbilt, and as much of a mystery as ever, he remembered vividly his talk with Stephen Yerkes. He would not forget about the man’s son. After all, he had really cleaned up that day of the kidnaping. 30

Funeral Wells, Sheeny Mike and Dumb Sam had joined the coal gang. The Poet and Big Swede had been taken off and assigned

to the powerhouse squad. Stephen Yerkes and Tony had not been transferred. “] never work in a shop,” Tony explained to Stephen, exhibiting his calloused hands, “always wid pick an’ shovel; dat’s why I no like inside.” The principal keeper had granted Tony’s plea to remain with the coal gang.

But Stephen had made no request. It was simply that the few functioning shops were still wary of him. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s

visit, like so many

other happenings

in Sing Sing, was fast becoming a fading memory. But Sing Sing continued large in the public eye. Pulpits, forums, political con-

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ventions, legislative halls resounded with discussions about prison labor. It was generally agreed that the old contract system, in reality a form of slavery, was vicious. But few could agree on a substitute. Then followed the new and more piquant controversy about capital punishment. The gallows, still functioning in the Tombs Prison courtyard, in downtown New York, was offensive to the cultured element of the city’s population, though a hanging still retained its fascinating, if not entertaining features to hundreds, thousands of the curious. Then, too, it was whispered around that various influences intimately associated with the city government

suffered excruciating pangs of conscience as the Tombs bell scno-

rously proclaimed the extinction of a life which had served them in devious and dubious undertakings. The telling argument against the retention of this abomination was its barbaric setting. The ceremonial escort to the specially erected gallows, the sudden drop, and the long minutes when the twirling body gasped agonizingly through the inexorable noose, became abhorrent to their sensibilities. Six long minutes. Death came too slowly. A quicker, surer method was necessary; one that could be imposed without attendant publicity. This moronic curiosity was wrong, it whetted the blood lust. Besides, was there not an element of the sacrilegious in permitting the open heavens to

look down upon man’s traditional imbecility toward malefactors? So, after endless discussion and torrents of oratory (not excluding the lobbying of power companies who gloried in the advertisement), it was decided that electricity would be the proper medium of death. There followed the struggle for recognition by rival exponents of direct and alternating currents in which Thomas A. Edison,

interested

only in the scientific problems involved,

actively participated. Each school of thought proclaimed its particular current as a more perfect instrument of death. Actually, the difference between them was infinitesimal, probably onehundredth of a second. Yet so intent were legislators and scientists, and not a few penologists, upon dealing a swift death that tons of

ink and endless hours were consumed in learned dissertations upon the humane aspect of enforcing the death penalty. Out of this furor grew the death house at Sing Sing. Where,

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if not among the men who had trampled upon the law and insulted its majesty, should the judgment of death be carried out? Prisons were the logical places of execution. Prisoners would feel the proximity of death. Its effect would be salutary. Necessarily, the execution chamber would have to be enclosed. No longer would there be the possibility for satisfying public curiosity. Only twelve witnesses were to watch the proceedings. Twelve privileged gentlemen, to make sure that the condemned man paid the supreme penalty. 31

“A letter for you, Steve; seems like someone’s thinking of you.”

It was almost a year since his last . . . the one from Howard Ayres, telling him of Marguerite’s plans for a divorce. Stephen did not immediately open it. He stared at it curiously, fumbling it with his fingers. News! It was not that he feared it. Letters were a nuisance. Good or bad, they disturbed one’s sense of calm. Finally, he tore it open.

Complying with your wish, I investigated your I am informed he is in an orphanage under an assumed I am not at liberty to disclose its identity. Your wife as a seamstress. She did not take kindly to my offer when I told her of my talk with you. I am extremely

son’s status. name... . is employed of assistance sorry.

It was signed, Cornelius Vanderbilt. “In an orphanage under an assumed name.” So that was it. Stephen Yerkes was forgotten. Dead. Marguerite was determined. He would oblige her. And the world. He would remain dead. But only until the gate opened for him. Then he would find resurrection and reclaim his own. It was the old challenge. That night he worked long hours on his stone wall. Z2

The eyes of the world were focused on Sing Sing Prison. It was to be the seat of the new experiment. The gallows had been legislated out of existence. After innumerable hearings and con-

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siderable study, the Governor had approved the new method of execution. The world had gone far since the old barbaric days when men were tortured to death, when boiling in oil, the rack, quartering, the iron maiden, the block, the guillotine, the iron col-

lar and the noose succeeded one another as man’s death-dealing instruments. This was the day of enlightenment. Death was to be instantaneous,

life extinct in one-seven

hundredth

of a second.

Practically no suffering. It was to be a consoling thought to the condemned, that swift flight into eternity. The chair was symbolic of man’s moral tone. To kill with the speed of a thunderbolt! The instrument of death had to be housed. Who was to build the temple of death? There arose the old clamor for preference to outside labor, but the prison administration was adamant. Here was a chance to employ their prisoners, most of whom by this time were idle. They had their way. Sing Sing would build its own death house. The principal keeper was directed to organize the squad for

that purpose. Perhaps it was mere coincidence. No one, not even the warden, dared accuse the principal keeper of ingenious malevolence. Perhaps he did not intend it, as he combed the records for likely laborers. Recruits were summoned from every shop and gallery. Stephen Yerkes topped the list and headed the company lined up for inspection. Captain Hilbert came ambling up, appraising the gang of prospective builders. He scrutinized each face. Then turned with a bulging glare to the principal keeper. “How did you happen to pick all the men sent up fer murder?” The principal keeper’s pursed lips projected an elongated brown stream. “It seems to me the right kind of a job for killers,” he said,

grinning. “It won’t be the first time they planted death.” “You’re

not

considerin’

these

men’s

nerves,”

the captain

muttered. “No more’n they considered their victims’,” was the reply. There was a deep frown on the captain’s face as he walked away. Thus Sing Sing’s death squad, as the prisoners termed them,

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came into being. Killers who had escaped the extreme penalty building a halfway house for those who had not. Sing Sing did not take kindly to the death squad. They became its pariahs. That they were drafted for the task was no extenuating circumstance. Like most of their fellows on the outside, prisoners are not given to analyzing motives. Mean men doing a mean job. Nothing else mattered. But Stephen Yerkes felt no qualms for the work he was doing. The coal pile, where he had labored over a year, had become irksome. Change was welcome. Disreputable as it was, life was no longer passive. He was conscious of a great force. And even though he was laboring in the interest of death, there was the satisfying sense of constructive effort, as well as the faint self-extenuating fancy that death would be welcome to those who would tenant the house he was building, as it would have been to him in the hours and days following his own crime. As it was to Pimples. He had experienced a mental upheaval with the receipt of Vanderbilt’s letter. His variant earlier moods, influenced by his intimate

reactions

to the events

he had encountered,

had been

dominated by a single purpose. To sever himself completely from every tie and emotion that had shaped the course of his life. He

would be a free man, in Sing Sing and out. In that desperate urge, Ma Mandelbaum and Marguerite stood on an equal footing. Neither one nor the other should influence him any longer. Both represented a phase of his existence to which he could not look back with complacency. Not that he was remorseful. He felt, merely,

that he was done with the old life. But he was still strong enough to build a new one. To accomplish that he would have to be reborn. Sing Sing would be the place of his reincarnation. The birth of his son had threatened to destroy his conception. He had been swayed, momentarily, by a human

mining his sense of security. Howard

instinct under-

Ayres’ letter conveying

Marguerite’s desire to be free of him and relieving him of his natural paternal responsibility was, in a sense, gratifying.

But Vanderbilt’s letter had aroused an emotion surprising even to himself. It took hold of him with a surging rush which he seemed unable to resist, a tide responding to its mysterious lodestar.

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She should not determine his destiny. It was is prerogative, and his alone, to fashion his life. Marguerite’s hate might persist

to the end of time. She might even hide his son under the cloak of anonymous parentage. But he would not be denied, he would claim his own. It was all wrong, this tearing away from the past which was inextricably bound up with the future. The child would grow to manhood. A tall, stalwart fellow

conscious of his powers, he would be seeking a place in the sun, unmindful,

unaware

of the shadow

that had marked

his birth.

And perhaps, under the tutelage of Howard Ayres, resentful toward the parent he had never known. . . . Then the gates of Sing Sing would swing open, and the past would emerge to confront the future. The child would know its father. Stephen Yerkes would live again, build anew, make permanent for his son that which, for him, had been ephemeral—wealth,

power

over men.

The strength to shape destinies. Yes, Stephen Yerkes would live again in his son.

He labored with brick and mortar, building for death while he dreamed of life. It was not unnatural that Yerkes should have assumed a sort of leadership of the death squad. He easily acquired the mechanical ability essential to the building process. Even the civilian foreman looked to him for advice and suggestion. It was the beginning of a closer association with the administrative branch of the prison, and marked, as well, the period of his estrangement from the prisoner population.

For obvious reasons, perhaps not least important of which was the care and caution required in erecting the building that was to house the condemned men, the death squad was kept apart from the rest of the prisoners. It marched alone in the courtyard, and had its separate table in the mess hall. Prisoners studiously avoided it. Even Tommy Kincaid ceased his furtive efforts to communicate with Stephen. Funeral Wells and Sheeny Mike and Dumb Sam

were still on the coal pile. Except for the hours he spent in his cell, from five in the afternoon until six-thirty the next morning, and from Saturday noon to Monday morning, Stephen had little contact with the main prison. All his thoughts were concentrated on the job he was

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doing. In time he was relieved from all manual labor. He became a sort of supervisor, directing the work of the other prisoners. Through the intercession of Captain Hilbert, he contrived to have a small table built in his cell, upon which he would study plans and draw new ones made necessary during the progress of the work. The members of his squad learned to take their orders from Stephen. They also aired their complaints to him, and in not a few instances made him their confidant. He listened patiently to

their recitals of intimate incidents relating had been convicted of murder. Some had preparing for the final march to the gallows had been allowed to plead to second degree,

to their crimes. All been reprieved while in the Tombs. Others carrying sentences of

from twenty and twenty-five years to life. Most of them were young men, ranging from eighteen to thirty-five. Only one was past fifty. He was Adolphus, a Frenchman, a gray-haired, sturdy fellow. Everything about him was mobile—his hands, his mind and his tongue. And his eyes. He spoke eight languages fluently. At last the death house was completed, a massive structure of stone and steel, a small replica of the larger, squat cell block. Stone and steel, cells somewhat larger than the others. The death squad was disbanded. Stephen and Adolphus alone were retained to do the remaining odd jobs. October 26, 1889. Sing Sing was tense. The grapevine flashed the news. The death house would receive its first tenant. Stephen and Adolphus were setting a door in place when the condemned man was escorted in. He was not over twenty. Swarthy, his dark eyes staring wildly and his hand tugging nervously at his black tousled hair, his figure seemed small and shrunken as he stood:

flanked by Captain Hilbert and the principal keeper. “So young,” Adolphus whispered to Stephen. He did not turn

until the man had been placed in his cell, and the steel-barred door locked behind him. The captain and the principal keeper left, leaving a keeper on

watch. From that moment, Sing Sing has never relaxed its death watch.

The death house has never

been vacant.

Death, working

with the speed of a thunderbolt, has never been kept waiting.

Stephen was conscious of a gratifying sense of accomplish-

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ment. His labors had borne fruit. The death house was functioning. But Adolphus was strangely quiet that afternoon, and again the next day. “It ees nothing,” Adolphus said. His words came with measured thoughtfulness. “Only sometimes I feel like I am killing this boy. It was my hands that built this thing.” “Nonsense,” Stephen replied. “We've got nothing to do with the killing. That comes later.” Adolphus did not answer. He sat by Stephen’s side at evening mess hardly touching the food placed before him. His feet seemed to drag as they shuffled through the yard toward the cell block for the night lockup. In the morning, the keeper hammered at the Frenchman’s cell door. “Wake up for the count!” Adolphus did not respond. The galleries were tense with divination. There was a strange absence of the general morning restlessness. The entire cell block seemed to hang on the keeper’s hushed comment. The grapevine caught it up and breathed it into every cell. “Dead!” “Died in his sleep,” the prison doctor said. ‘““Weak heart.” But Stephen knew that Adolphus was the first victim of Sing Sing’s death house. He wondered about himself.

2) Stephen would have preferred a new assignment. His work in the death house was completed. Its population had increased. There were now four men, three white and one Japanese. He was beginning to understand the strain that had snapped Adolphus’

heart. He felt as though he were watching dead bodies. These four men, the first of the endless line of men to die in the electric chair, appeared like so many ghosts. It was odd, their functioning like living beings. Only the decision of the Appeals Court and the

Governor stood between them and actual death. Already they were speculating on this new experiment, the electric chair. From

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his station in the room adjoining the death house, which was being fitted up as the execution chamber, Stephen heard them give expression to their feelings, reflecting some of the dissension that preceded its adoption. “There ain’t no current strong enough to jolt me to hell,” said the oldest of the four, a giant with a voice like a foghorn. “Why, when I was a kid I’d climb the highest telegraph pole and swing with me bare hands from the wire. An’ all I felt was a ticklin’ down my spine. I’m tellin’ you . . .” “Pye heard of some as has been tickled to death,” one of his

neighbors shouted amid general laughter. “My lawyer tells me it’s unconstitootional,” a third voice called out. He was the first of the men to occupy a cell in the death house. ‘““When I aimed my pistol there weren’t any thought of the chair . . . they shoulda give me the rope.” ““Ain’t it a damned sight better to die sittin’ down? It’s more gentlemanlike than stretching the wrong end of a long rope.” “Ah, who’s talkin’ of dyin’? Not me, I tell you!” The youngest fellow fairly screeched the words. Then followed several minutes of silence. The fourth man, the Japanese, had not joined the conversation. But now, his sharp, nasal twang took up the conversation. “Death no scare me. It like going from one life to another. We all die some time.” Nobody attempted to deny this philosophic observation. The daily debate between the condemned men, the constant talk of death and dying, began to pall on Stephen. It was gruesome. He began to regard himself as one of the condemned, to feel awed by his freedom. Did he not really belong in one of those cells?’ He, too, had killed. Why had he not paid the penalty? He im-

agined himself sitting in the chair. Waiting for—he could hardly visualize what. But it would end it all. But he was not ready for death. He had not done with life. These men were killers without purpose. It mattered little whether they lived or died. His work was still undone. Broken ties to be mended. Old memories to be resurrected. There was Howard Ayres. And Marguerite. And, of course, the son.

Captain Hilbert turned a deaf ear to his request for 2 trans-

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fer. Something might go wrong and he alone could help in an emergency. Stephen continued on at his post in the death house. July 7, 1891. A hot, humid day, important in the annals of Sing Sing. Four men were awaiting execution. The Court of Appeals had affirmed their convictions. The Governor had denied clemency. The law was to take its course.

The new warden, he had taken office in May of the same year, prepared to do his duty. He was much firmer than his predecessor, who had been content to have the principal keeper administer the prison. He was meticulous about rules and procedure. Eleven o’clock was the hour set for the execution. Stephen was awakened at dawn. The electric chair had to be put in place. He and Tony had been assigned to help. The controversy between the various power companies still raged. Predictions persisted that death would not be as quick as had been hoped, that the condemned would be burned rather than shocked to death. Some of this agitation had seeped into Sing Sing. What to the outside world was a scientific experiment was a matter of intimate concern to the prisoners.

Symptoms of unrest alarmed the officials. Rumors of a mass attack upon the death house and the destruction of the chair reached the administration building. Prisoners were not concerned so much about the executions; they would have been resigned to a gallows in the courtyard and to having the proceedings carried out in full view of the shops or the galleries. They would, in fact, have relished the spectacle, as learned penologists would have explained, from records of other prisons where it had been tried out as a futile measure of repression. But this was something different. Men were to be tortured to death, burned by hell-fire, mutilated. Sing Sing seethed with resentment. The world outside was equally stirred. Early that morning the roads surrounding the prison were crowded. The cliffs overlooking Sing Sing resounded with the animated voices of thousands of curious sightseers. Though nothing was visible except the gray prison walls, and an occasional striped prisoner hurrying through the yard, the very sight of the death house squatting low and forbidding amid the prison structures held them. Nor was it an altogether contented crowd. It would have been

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more pleasing to their sensibilities if the chair could have been brought out into the yard and the condemned man executed in full view. Too bad that soft-headed ecclesiastics and moralists had swayed the Legislature toward secret execution. Gone were the old days when a hanging was the occasion for a holiday, and when merrymakers could spend a pleasant afternoon watching a fellow

swing into eternity. Here one could only sense the scene that was being enacted within the grim-looking chamber. That was some consolation. It was worth the trip from New York. And the time and effort. “No work” was the order of the day. Prisoners were not to leave their cells. Sing Sing was playing safe. Nothing would be permitted to interfere with the day’s events. Keepers walked their galleries cautiously, hickory sticks in full view. Guards stood on their posts on the wall with rifles cocked. The July sun was already high. Within the death house all was quiet. The four condemned men had been prepared, heads sheared, trousers slit, to make sure of proper contact for the electrodes.

“No use your botherin’,” grinned the oldest of the four. “There ain’t no ’lectric gonna kill this bird. It’ll just run through this carcass like a dose o” salts.” He had refused spiritual consolation. “No use prayin’ unless you’re sure 0’ goin’.”

His two white neighbors were not so hopeful. The younger of them, his eyes glazed, stared at the clergyman praying by his side, but he made no response to the minister’s promptings. The Japanese alone remained

calm. A fatalist, he accepted

with resignation the dissolution he was facing. Stephen Yerkes was in the execution chamber with Tony, the

Italian, helping the prison electrician adjust the wiring. They had set the chair in position, “It don’t look like there’s killin’ in dat ving.” Tony’s eyes were glued on the wooden frame. “Wanna try it?” queried the electrician, smiling.

Tony paled, his eyes bulging with fear. His hands shook. “°Tain’t my time, mister, not yet,” he said nervously.

Stephen did not join in the conversation; he was fighting against the nausea that swept over him. By every law of man he

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himself should have suffered the same fate. He searched his memory for the slightest thought of consequence in that moment when he had aimed his pistol at George Leslie’s heart. Was not all this futile? None of the four condemned

men, not all the murderers in

history, gave even a fleeting thought to the consequences of their acts. Nor would they ever. The ‘“‘chair” was no more the answer to murder than had been the most brutal tortures of long ago. Where they had failed, this new instrument could not win. The thought occurred to him that all this fuss and furor about quick and easy death was not really conceived from motives of humanity, but as a sop to public conscience. Unwilling to break entirely with tradition that called for death to the murderer, perhaps unable to apply themselves rationally to a problem which involves more than the relationship between the killer and his victim, the public could at least console itself in reflecting that death could be made easy. “Tt will be terrible if this thing fails us.”” The warden had entered the execution chamber and was looking on as Stephen and Tony and the electrician labored. Pilastent » Stephen’s ears strained to catch the low chorus that came from the cell block. It was increasing in volume. Sixteen hundred men hammering with tin water cups on their cell doors, and above it their voices jeering, shouting. It was difficult to understand the words. Finally the clanging ceased, and the shouts became a chorus, chanted in unison by sixteen hundred voices. “Choking out the breath,

Is better’n burning ’em to death.” A dozen times the chorus chanted the words. A few minutes’ pause. A stentorian voice resumed the rhyme. Sing Sing’s chorus

responded with vigor. “We'll make sure,” the warden decided. He left hurriedly.

In a few moments the galleries seethed with the rumor that the efficiency of the chair was to be determined in a final experiment. Ajax was to be put to the test. Ajax was Sing Sing’s pride,

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the best groomed horse in prison, who had never failed to spurt ahead to victory in the annual ice trot on the Hudson—the single winter event which the prisoners were permitted to enjoy through their shop windows. “Why in hell don’t they try it on an old nag?” a voice asked. But the warden decided on Ajax in order to test the resistance of a vigorous body. The horse was led from his stall into the execution chamber. The chanting had subsided. The four condemned men waited nervously, hardly daring to breathe. Stephen watched the electrician adjust the wires and attach

the electrodes to the horse’s legs and forehead. It was a pity, he thought, to sacrifice so fine an animal in this grisly experiment. Ajax neighed and quivered slightly, as if anticipating his approaching doom.

Galleries were hushed. The warden was standing at the far end of the room with the principal keeper and Captain Hilbert. “Ready!” the electrician announced. “Switch!” the warden called. A low whir. Ajax trembled. A loud whistling drone. The horse tugged desperately at the ropes which bound him. Louder. He leaped into the air. His mouth yawned open for the neigh that

never sounded. He settled back upon his feet, then sank slowly to the floor. “Dead!” The word went out to the hushed galleries. was no response. The experiment was a success. Ajax had martyr to the electric chair. Science was vindicated. In the death house, the big prisoner who had boasted prowess with electricity sat silent and moody. Finally he up at the keeper standing by his cell and grinned.

There died a

of his looked

“Better send for the preacher,” he said, “‘so’s I c’n be intro-

duced properly to St. Peter. Looks like I’m gonna crash the golden

gate, an’ I don’t aim to be kept waitin’.”

34 “You done a neat job.” Captain Hilbert was staring down at Stephen. His face looked worn, his skin flabby.

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“They took it good,” the captain continued in a voice that seemed as tired as his eyes. “Better’n we did.” Stephen was wholly unprepared for the man’s emotional display. “Tve never been so intimate with death. I don’t see the use of it anyway. Four men gone yesterday, an’ three more came in today. If choppin’ heads off did no good in the old days, this electric contraption’ll do no better now. I’m thinkin’ there’s somethin’ more than legal killin’ necessary to stop fellows from murderin’ and butcherin’ each other.”

The big man’s breath came in short puffs as if the effort had taxed his heart. He was silent a moment. “But that’s nothin’ to you, Steve,” he went on. “You done

your job, an’ I’m rootin’ to have you shifted. Maybe where you c’n help fellows live instead of dying.”

Stephen expressed his gratitude. “How'd you like to work in the library?” the captain asked a week later. “Maybe it’s not what suits you, but it’s better’n this, or spendin’ all of daylight in your cell like most of ’em are doin’ now.” Stephen Yerkes became the librarian of Sing Sing. His immediate superior was the prison chaplain, who welcomed his new aide

with an impulsive handshake. “They asked me about you, if I objected to a fellow with a long bit,” he said, smiling, “and I said, ‘Of course not. Look at

the bit I put in, close on to twelve years. And I’m not through Stephen liked the chaplain. His eyes resembled those of Dr.

Suydam—brown and soft, and soothing. “This man looks more like a fighter than a clergyman,” Stephen thought, noting the strong jaw and the firm grip of his hand. “I’m not asking if you are a praying man,” the Reverend Mr. Edgerton said, his white, even teeth showing in the open

smile which was reflected in his eyes. “Because there’s many a man who prays without think they are too who wouldn’t pray So I wrote one out

knowing it. Maybe you are one of those who tough to pray. I once had a fellow—a lifer— ‘nohow.’ Said I was teaching him weasel words. especially for him. Something like this .. .

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‘Hello, God. P’m in for keeps this time. 1 don’t mind puttin’ you next, because

I know you're on the level. I waswt innocent,

like 1 kept hollerin’ to the jury. 1 pushed that gun, all right. Aw’ I was lucky to get myself the book. I ain’t yelpin’. But Pm betw honest with you, God, thinkin’ maybe when this long shuffle’s ended an’ you see me comin’, your gang’ll let me through. ’Cause there’s somethin’ inside 0? me 1 don’t understand, an’ maybe you c’n help a fellow out.”

The chaplain laughed reminiscently. “The prisoner read my writing slowly. He looked up at me with a suspicious gleam in his eye. Then read it again. And grinned. I knew I had him. ‘I never heard or seen a prayer like that,’ he said. But he was holding on to it tight when he left my room. “The men will be straggling in here asking for books to read. Some will want to have letters written, others to have letters read

to them—there are a great many illiterates. It will be up to you to build your job so as to help as many as you can. And I'll stand back of you, if you’re in doubt.” Stephen took to his new job eagerly. He familiarized himself with the catalogue, listing somewhat over six thousand volumes. For the first time since his arrival in Sing Sing his interests were concerned with his surroundings rather than with himself. It was an absorbing task, this measuring prisoners’ minds. They came to him singly and in groups, seeking information about books and studies

and

religion;

confiding

intimate

problems;

complaining

about wives or children; asking for guidance. At first they came hesitatingly. Some, especially the younger prisoners, reverently, awed by the person of the great Stephen Yerkes, whose fame had not dimmed with the years. Others were suspicious, thinking it strange that Yerkes of all men should have

been chosen as the chaplain’s assistant. The warden’s stool, maybe. But gradually Stephen established himself in their confidence. Steve

was safe. He could be told things, and his judgment was good. Even the keepers sauntered into the library during their off hours. They were not permitted the same freedom as the prisoners, but some of them would sit for hours at the table, reading. The library had never been so popular. The new scheme of

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things met with the approval of the administration, for in those years of idleness, anything that kept the prisoners’ minds occupied acted as a safety valve. Three years passed by quickly. Stephen had not really noticed the time. The old chaplain resigned, and his successor retained Stephen as his assistant. The Reverend John Weills was a young man who took his job seriously. Sing Sing was his pasture, and the prisoners his flock. For them he would have to answer to God. His was a slim, athletic figure, with the eyes of a zealot. His prayers were long and earnest, his sermons longer. The prisoners had assembled for the usual church service on the first Sunday of his ministration. He sat on the platform in the

chapel, waiting until his congregation was silent. Then he rose and faced them, determined, fire-flashing eyes gauging his audience. The prisoners waited for him to speak. He stepped to the edge of the platform and raised his right arm toward the throng of upturned faces. “Let those who believe in God rise!” Men looked at each other first in surprise, then in amazement. Mr. Weills remained standing with outstretched arm. A few prisoners in the front rows stood up. Then, as if by sudden mass impulse, the entire congregation followed suit, the men rising to their feet with a loud, sweeping movement. The clergyman smiled, and motioned them to be seated. He launched into a sermon on saving souls. It was a long dissertation. Keepers walked through the aisles, eying fidgeting prisoners. At last it was ended, with the reading of the Lord’s Prayer. The prisoners filed out. Sing Sing became God-conscious in the weeks that followed. Prisoners,

white, black

and a few yellow, came

to the library,

pleading with Stephen for an interview with the chaplain. They wanted

to talk with him about God, and their souls. And

the

chaplain listened patiently to their questions, prompting them, cautioning them. Not infrequently, threatening them with dire consequences if they continued in their agnosticism. But God did not bring peace to Sing Sing. The keepers did not quite understand the sudden religious fervor and doubted the men’s sincerity.

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In the usual shift of prisoners, Snowball became Stephen’s neighbor, in the adjoining cell. Snowball was an aged coal-black negro, not ebony; his shade a dull finish like dried ink. But he was fat and round, with white fuzzy hair. Snowball had responded joyfully to the chaplain’s message. Snowball was worried about his soul. It was hardly possible that the negro quite understood the minister’s appeal. Certainly the idea of God living with him in Sing Sing seemed odd. He was among the first to come shuffling into the library on Monday morning. “Mistah Steve,” he whispered, making sure that no one was eavesdropping, “de preachah done said de Lawd right yere among us. But Ah ain’t never seed Him. Hev you?” Stephen saw that the man was in earnest. He explained patiently that it was the Spirit the chaplain meant. ‘An’ yo’ think Ah can talk to this Spirit, like Ah can to you, Mistah Steve?” Stephen assured him. ““An’ is dat how Ah can save mah soul?” “You sure can, Snowball, if your soul needs saving.” “Yas, indeed, Mistah Steve. Mah soul sho’ need savin’,” the

negro muttered, shuffling away. “An’ dis nigger’s gonna ’complish jes’ dat.”

And so Snowball began to chide his soul. In the early hours of the night, with the galleries in darkness, he spoke to it with

parental tenderness.

“Ah’s brought God down here, Soul, an’ He’s gonna save yo’ fo’ life everlastin’, so don’ go an’ git too cantank’rous, or yo’ an’ mell be followin’ Satan way down deep to de bowels ob hell, where de flame’s higher’n mountains an’ de pitch deeper’n oceans.” The first signs of dawn found Snowball awake, continuing

where he had left off the night before. “Hey, there, nigger, who you talkin’ to in that cell?” It was

the keeper making his early rounds. “Jes’ me an’ de Lawd yere, officer,” Snowball whispered back. “Well,” the keeper laughed, “the Lord will have to go in His own cell. I’m takin’ the count.” A few days later Snowball was promoted. He was assigned to

duty as porter. He was given a cell nearer to the door, where he

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would be within easy reach in the morning. Thereafter Stephen’s nights were more restful.

51) He had gone far with his stone writing. Almost two lines completed. The first marked the year of his admission, 1886. The second, his name. Eight years. Not that years mattered. Time had rolled along smoothly, it no longer bothered him. His earlier emo-

tions had subsided. It was not that he had become resigned or indifferent. It was merely that his vision had cleared. He saw his destination plainly. That young fellow out there was growing up. Time was kneading them both. Their paths were different now, but they would meet. And when that moment came . . . Stephen dug into his stone vigorously. This soul business, so earnestly emphasized by the chaplain, intrigued him. Weills was sincere, but had he not set himself an impossible task? Was it possible to separate the soul from life itself?

These men, even those in the condemned cells waiting for death, were thinking of life. Physical life. Every emotion was bound up with it. And it was measured, not by accomplishment, but by time.

Sing Sing had made them time-conscious. Their deity, the god of time, was intimately associated with stripes and bars and bad food. And the electric chair. “Now I lay me down to sleep.” What if you can’t sleep? What with the snores that surround you, and the vermin that creep over you, and the visions that haunt you. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” In wakeful hours stretching through the night the soul retains its earthly abode. No safekeeping. The same fetid air. Close by the stinking bucket. And the morning finds it listless and tired and reckless. Stephen had never bothered about his own soul. He had never experienced the feel of religion: that deep sacrificial sense, the submergence of self. A curious thing, this listening to Sing Sing’s pulse. A thousand men, more than half its population, staring idly at the passing hours. It was awful . . . the brutality of the contractors. Legislators had been touched by the stories of bestiality. Hearts bled.

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Preachers stormed. Evangelists shrieked. Women wept. Yes, the thing had to be done away with. So it was. And hearts were soothed. There it ended. For three years a thousand men, sitting

alone in their cells, marked time by the shadows creeping up the stone cliffs overlooking their granite tomb. Three years . . . during which the chaplain besought them to think seriously of their souls. Then came a day when minds cracked. The men had been marched to the mess hall for breakfast, and returned to their cells

to wait—for the shadows to creep up the gray cliff. The keepers had turned all the locks. Everything seemed safe. Suddenly the quiet was broken by a shout from the topmost gallery. Keepers blanched and tightened their grips on the ever-present hickory sticks. Guards on post heard and hurriedly examined their rifles. The warden rushed to the cell block, where the principal keeper and Captain Hilbert had preceded him. “Why in hell don’t you give us work?” It was Sing Sing’s battle cry. Other voices took up the chant. In a moment the galleries resounded with the chant from a thousand voices. “Work!”

“Open up the shops!” Caged men stamped their feet on the stone floors of their cells. They rattled tin water cups against the steel bars. They jeered and shouted and swore. “Work!” Sing Sing was helpless. Noon came. Still bedlam reigned. Even the fortunate companies, those who had been assigned to special tasks, were confined to their cells. The situation was desperate. No one dared think where it would end. Stephen also remained in his cell, listening to the wild clamor in the galleries. He could have foretold this. He had seen it in the drawn faces of the men standing by his table in the library, in their sullen eyes. This thing had not been planned; it was a spontaneous outburst of nerves.

At noon there was no call to mess. But hunger did not stay the riot. For the first time in the history of Sing Sing prisoners disregarded food. The warden paced up and down the galleries,

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irascible under the incessant jeers and boos of the maddened prisoners. The principal keeper’s appearance was. the signal for renewed clamor. Prisoners clapped their hands and hammered on the cell doors to the accompaniment of Captain Hilbert’s heavy

tread through the galleries. It was an inspiration of the moment, Stephen’s shout to Captain Hilbert, standing there in the gallery in front of his cell. The captain bent down to catch his words, nodded and went immediately toward the administration building. He returned in a few minutes, followed by the warden and the principal keeper. The clamor redoubled. The three officials raised their arms simultaneously, like soldiers signaling submission to their enemies. The din thinned down. A few scattered shouts and then quiet. Captain Hilbert’s voice rang out, reaching into every cell. “Tm talkin’ for the warden when I tell you men it’s a damned shame there’s no work for all of you in Sing Sing.” “Let’s work on the hills,” a voice yelled. The galleries voiced approval. “There’s more out there now than is healthy, the captain shouted. be)

“Build another death house,” another voice jeered, amid a chorus of laughter. “I’m thinkin’ we got one too many already,” the big man replied. “Good boy, captain,” the voice shouted. “Give ’im a cheer!” The galleries responded vigorously. “It’s been proposed,”

the captain shouted, when

the noise

subsided, “that a committee of prisoners meet with the warden to see if they c’n work out somethin’ about work. The warden is satisfied. Now, you c’n name the men, providin’ there’s no more of this trouble.” A short silence, then a general shout of approval. From all the tiers names were proposed as candidates for the committee. A score of names, simmering down finally to one which seemed to receive the unanimous support of the prisoners. “Stephen Yerkes!”

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“Are you all satisfied with Steve Yerkes?” the captain yelled. “Steve’s the guy!” Stephen’s cell was unlocked. It was a remarkable tribute and an astounding incident, this designation of one prisoner to represent sixteen hundred before the prison administration. Stephen would have been more than human had he not been conscious of his power. But he also realized its danger. He was standing in the gallery with the prison officials. “There’s nothing to be gained by violence or losing your tempers, men,” he called in a loud voice. “We

missed the noon

mess, and we’re the ones who are hungry. I don’t know what I can do, but I'll try. And now let’s get out of our cells and do away with that food that’s been waiting.” The principal keeper doubted its advisability. The warden and Captain Hilbert overruled him. The cells were opened. The men formed in ranks, the lockstep wound toward the mess hall. It moved back again without disturbance.

Through the afternoon Stephen Yerkes was closeted with the three administrative officials of the prison. “Don’t think you’re running the prison,” the principal keeper said to the man in stripes, as they sat around the warden’s desk. ““There’re more ways than one to deal with those fellows.”

Stephen smiled into the furiously churning face and watched the long stream reach for the distant cuspidor. “Now, P.K.,” said the warden mildly, “losing tempers won’t get us anywhere.” “In this place, it’s losing either your temper or your job,” the principal keeper grumbled, glaring at the placid-faced warden. “Have you any suggestions?” The warden had turned to Stephen ignoring his subordinate’s taunt. They talked back and forth. To increase the road gangs, to attack the granite cliffs with more prisoners, to send an emergency message to Albany for immediate appropriations so the shops could be reopened. The Legislature was in session. Perhaps a joint committee of legislators might be induced to come to Sing Sing to see for themselves the urgency of prompt consideration of the problem of prison labor. One suggestion from Stephen met with violent opposition

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frem the principal keeper. There could be no easing up on the rigid routine. The rule of silence could not be abrogated. The dark cells could not be done away with. “I'd rather hand in my resignation,” the lean-faced official said with finality. “If anything happens,” Captain Hilbert chortled, “they won’t be waitin’ for your resignation; you'll go without that little formality.” “Tl take my chances. I won’t take dictation from convicts 1?

“Tt’s not dictation, man. It’s just bein’ smart.”

“What do you mean, smart?” “Ease up on one thing an’ tighten up on the others.” “It’s as clear as mud,” the principal keeper muttered. “Well, supposin’ you tell ’em, ‘Boys, there’s no need of your sittin’ in your cells broodin’. Providin’ you don’t strain your voices, you c’n talk to your neighbors an’ feel human. It’ll help you pass the time. But if there’s any sign of disrespect or violatin’ any other rule, we'll clamp you down so hard you'll forget the meanin’ of words.’ ” ; “That’s going only part of the way,” Stephen commented. The three officials stared at him in silence, then listened in

amazed incredulity as he spoke. The idea of permitting the men out of their cells to gather in the chapel where they might enjoy an entertainment by volunteer artists! A preposterous thought. The warden was stunned, the principal keeper suspicious. The captain was doubtful. “You’re forgetting,” the warden said, sighing deeply, “that this is a prison and that these men are convicts.” Stephen, for the moment, was supremely conscious of the striped suit he was wearing. “Yes,” the principal keeper added icily, “it’s destroyin’ the whole theory of the law!” “T’ve never heard of any law against it,’ Captain Hilbert >

remarked quietly. “But the rules,” the principal keeper insisted.

“Those who make ’em c’n change em.” “Next thing you know those fellows’ll be asking for a change of clothes. They’ll be objectin’ to stripes.”

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““An’ if they do,” the captain’s eyes bulged aggressively. “I’ve never seen much use in stripes. It’s not what a man wears in prison,

as what he thinks that counts.” “Take away those stripes, and he’ll be thinking he’s as good as you.”

“I hope he does!” With a quick glance at Stephen, he added, “Prisoners hear so much about their bein’ bad they really get to believe it.” “I’ve never yet seen one with the wings of an angel.” “I’m concerned with men, not angels. I’d rather they walk straight than fly high!” It seemed endless to Stephen, this sharp dialogue between two officials representing widely separated schools of thought. It was getting them nowhere. Suddenly the warden smiled. He banged his fist with what for him was unusual energy. “We'll try it, gentlemen!” The grapevine took up the rumor and spread it with lightning speed through the galleries, a rumor that blossomed into fact. The Governor was to be petitioned for immediate plans for new workshops. There was to be a departure from the old, a step ahead into the future. Stephen Yerkes had suggested it. Officials had bowed to the judgment of a convict. Sing Sing was to feel the touch of life, something that would dissipate its gloom. There was to be talk, and laughter. More! The outside world was to be invited to help. Stephen Yerkes was a hero, Moses leading his hosts from bondage.

To the principal keeper the thing smacked of danger. He sensed it in the sudden popularity of the library. Prisoners had never

been so eager to read. Stephen petitioned the captain for

assistance. Two men were assigned to help him. One was the Poet, Stephen’s associate on the coal pile, and Victor Hugo, like his namesake an octoroon and a lover of books. 36

Stephen’s prestige took a sudden bound when the announcement was made that plans had been perfected for a series of enter-

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tainments for the prisoners. For days nothing else was talked of in the cell block or at the mess tables. Idleness was forgotten. Intimate problems faded before this innovation that Stephen Yerkes had brought about. Finally, the great day arrived. It was on a Wednesday. The few companies with jobs were given a holiday. After the noon mess the men were marched into the chapel, and the curious, tense ranks

of striped men settled into their seats. Keepers crowded into the hall, sticks poised and alert, fearful of the consequences of this event unparalleled in Sing Sing’s history. Amid a sudden hush, two men strode out on the platform. One was the warden. He was followed by a tall, straight figure, bearded in the Vandyke fashion, who advanced toward the edge of the platform and bowed, smiling upon the audience. The sixteen hundred men scarcely breathed. Then came one vast whistling suck of air, and a shout from somewhere close by, followed by a delighted yell from a thousand throats. “Hermann!” It was, indeed, the great magician, the first of a mounting

number of renowned entertainers who were willing to come to Sing Sing and bring cheer with their art. The keepers made no effort to check the roar of applause or to subdue the cheers that hammered into the rafters. Gradually the noise subsided. There were a few words of welcome and appreciation from the warden, and then the great Hermann stood alone on the platform. Presently, to the astonishment of the prisoners and the keepers, the magician stepped down from the platform and went along the main aisle. “For my first trick,” he announced, “I need a dozen gold watches. Will some of you gentlemen hand them up to me? I assure you they will be returned.” A burst of laughter followed the last sally. “We left em outside,” somebody yelled. Hermann ignored the laughter, and continued on up the aisle. Finally his hand darted toward one of the prisoners sitting in an end seat. “Stand up!” he commanded.

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His hand fumbled at the man’s striped suit, then rose high in view of the entire audience. A gold watch and chain was suspended from it. The audience gasped. A dozen times Hermann repeated the gesture, and a dozen gold watches and chains hung from his hand. Keepers jumped forward, intent on identifying the transgressors. Gold watches in Sing Sing! Hermann grasped the situation. Still dangling the watches from his hands, he strode to the platform, mounted, and faced the mystified assembly. “T understand this is contraband,” he said, with a smile, “‘so

the keepers better come for these watches and save the poor fellows from trouble.” One of the keepers advanced, his hand stretched to take the watches. But his hand clutched air. The watches had disappeared. The keeper stepped back, grinning sheepishly. Renewed applause shook the building. The memory of Hermann’s magic lived on in Sing Sing. The prisoners speculated on the next entertainment. No more riots. Sing Sing was safe. The warden was a good fellow. Steve Yerkes was more popular than ever. Entertainments became regular institutions. The principal keeper grudgingly agreed that the temper of the prison had never been so congenial. For a full week the dark cells had been unoccupied. Here was the new penology in the making. But the cheers that greeted Hermann the Great resounded outside the prison walls, and traveled to the halls of the legislative assemblies in Albany. It was an unheard-of thing, this pandering to convicts.

These men

were

criminals, hard men

who

merited

hard treatment. Was it not enough that the whip and the iron cage and the paddle had been abolished? And the shower? But there it must end or Sing Sing would get soft, a paradise enticing to all the criminally-minded. Crime would become more rampant, lives would be jeopardized, property rights violated. Stephen felt keenly the warden’s going. Weak and vacillating though he was, he had been capable of periodic independent thought, and in Stephen’s heart there had awakened the will to serve. Perhaps it was a self-extenuating intuition to salve a troubled conscience, perhaps the old urge for power over men. Whatever it was, he was more contented in mind than he had ever been, and

SLE P' HEWN

TERRES

—MARTONET

TE

633

he accepted eagerly the homage and respect of the others. The earlier thought of danger was gone out of his mind. Like the sudden withdrawing of the ocean tide came the news of the warden’s forced resignation. Stephen felt himself standing naked on the wind-swept shore, a target for every lashing wave. Out with the new, back to the old. Rules were

rules. The new

warden was a strong man, who understood criminals and knew how to handle them. There had to be order in Sing Sing. There could be no order without silence, nor was it consistent for the

world outside to bring cheer to the men inside. Prison meant segregation, a principle that must be rigidly enforced. A new gloom settled over Sing Sing, more profound and more disturbing than in the old days. Only Captain Hilbert’s strong words kept Stephen in his post in the library. But the library was no longer popular. Two keepers were stationed there. No talking was allowed. The order was definite. The name of the book wanted was to be written on a slip of paper, the librarian was to hand it out. No greetings. No intimacies.

But a thousand alert keepers and an equal number of hickory sticks could not prevent eyelids from drooping and minds from brooding. Nor could the vigilant principal keeper detect the transformation that was gradually stiffening Stephen’s brain. Again he experienced the horrible consciousness of failure, the same feeling that had overwhelmed him on that day of Keene’s defeat, a sense of void. It was essentially his inner struggle against impending bankruptcy of soul. He might have been resigned to brood on in silence, aware of the futility of vainglorious visions. Here was no Ma Mandelbaum to dangle before his yielding whim the possibility of supreme authority over men or the accumulation of riches. Stephen did not really understand the nature of his

sudden restlessness. Yet he found himself digging nervously into the granite stone of his cell, as if he were really working against time. Many years still stretched before him; there was no need for haste. But he scratched on feverishly, like an amateur sculptor hacking at his marble, still uncertain of the lines of his creation. He found himself more than ever unmoved by Chaplain Weills’ ponderous appeals during chapel hours on Sunday. He remained unimpressed by the gradual reopening of Sing Sing’s shops,

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SING

modeled on the old routine except that tasks were fewer and silence more intensive.

It was ironic to the point of idiocy, this feeling of solitude amid the congestion of Sing Sing. In his earlier years he had wel-

comed it. Now that life had receded far beyond his reach, he resented solitude. His resentment grew suddenly more poignant when Tommy Kincaid whispered good-by, on the day preceding

his discharge. “You got a message fer Ma?” he asked, with a furtive glance at the watchful keeper. “I’m aimin’ to shoot over the border to Canada. I hear she’s got a fine setup.” Stephen shook his head. The old life seemed empty. Not that

he had reformed; it was simply that that woman’s ways were no longer his. Her methods now seemed crude, loose like the jowls of her face.

SE Coincidence is in real life a prolific forger of sequences.

Stephen at first resented the intruder in his cell when the growing population again made it necessary to double up. Two men were locked in quarters scarcely large enough for one. The law forbade it. But Sing Sing, along with all other prisons, being the — repository for lawbreakers, recognized no law. It could not. There were only twelve hundred cells for sixteen hundred prisoners. How accommodate them except by placing two cots in the narrow cells? It was common knowledge. Judges knew when they sentenced men to Sing Sing that they were offering sacrifices to abomination. Adolescents, mentally warped but still sound morally, would be contaminated. But the law was the law. Doubling up in cells was an accepted evil which prison officials were powerless to avoid. When red-cheeked Jimmy Blaine was delivered to Sing Sing’ by the sheriff of New York County to serve a term of from three to six years on a conviction of grand larceny, Captain Hilbert was sorely perplexed. Jimmy had just turned sixteen, he was the youngest prisoner in Sing Sing. The captain studied Jimmy’s flaming hair and ruddy cheeks. Large round eyes, like miniature saucers, looked boldly into his.

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“They shoulda sent you to a reformatory,” the captain grumbled, as the boy signed the register. “T ain’t a kid,” Jimmy answered, tossing his red head. “You ain’t even lost your freckles.” Jimmy grinned. It was only after considerable thought that Captain Hilbert led the boy to cell 202. Whatever else Stephen Yerkes was, there was no doubt of the man’s moral make-up. The boy would be safe with him. Stephen did not greet Jimmy with overwhelming enthusiasm. It would be a bother, this breaking into his privacy. And a youngster at that. Bad business. During the first few days he made little show of hospitality. Like all newcomers, Jimmy was assigned to the coal pile. Stephen understood the boy’s taciturnity. The city-bred body ached from unaccustomed physical exertion with the shovel. Jimmy would lie for hours on his cot after the evening lockup, straining in the dim light at the book which Stephen’s grudging benevolence made possible. It was some time before Jimmy learned, through his more worldly associates on the coal pile, that his cell mate was none other than the Stephen Yerkes. The name had become a tradition among fledgling criminals. Stephen was surprised one evening to find Jimmy staring at him wide-eyed.

“You look sort of wild, sonny,” he whispered, ‘“‘anything up?” “Nothing, Steve, only I shoulda known,” Jimmy replied, grinning.

“Known what?” “That you an’ me ain’t strangers.” Stephen was puzzled. migdon tethink s ) ..% “No, you ain’t ever seen me. But really you’re my uncle.” “Uncle!” Jimmy laughed quietly. “My grandma was your Ma.” A great light and a great fear shocked Stephen into alertness. SINOtea a6? “Yep,” Jimmy nodded solemnly, “Ma Mandelbaum. She is my mother’s ma.”

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SING

That was Jimmy Blaine. Ma Mandelbaum’s

grandchild by

the daughter who had married the detective. Jimmy, the offspring

of Ma Mandelbaum’s union with the police department! Her daughter’s marriage intended to safeguard her position, to cement her contacts, had for a time succeeded. But in the end it had failed

her. Now she was safe across the border. And Jimmy, her grandson, was in Sing Sing.

Jimmy knew little about his grandmother, hardly remembered her. He had seen her for a fleeting moment at his mother’s bier when the elderly woman had come secretly to New York on hearing of her daughter’s death. “She stayed only a few minutes,” Jimmy explained, “‘afraid the cops would nab her. She cried a lot. Said something about takin’ me to Canada with her, but Pop wouldn’t let me go, and besides . . .” Jimmy hesitated. “Besides?”’ Stephen said. “She said the way she was livin’, with crooks, wasn’t any place for a kid.” Stephen remained silent. The boy’s eyes clouded. “Comin’ here cost me a nice bit o’ money.” “How’s that, Jimmy?” “Pop kept askin’ the old lady fer money an’ she wouldn’t | come across. Said if he kept me out o’ jail till I was twenty-one, she’d put me in her will.” Jimmy sighed deeply. “T had four years to go.” “What brought you?”

“Pa was fired from the force, an’ he took to drink; jest a bum, I guess. So I aimed not to wait fer the old lady’s will, an’ made a grab on me own.”

That night, long after “lights out,” Stephen lay staring at the cot overhead, listening to Jimmy’s healthy breathing. The third generation of Mandelbaums. Even that steel-eyed woman who had not hesitated to use her own daughter as bait for her perfidy had stopped short with her grandchild. Out of jail. Sing Sing. Such had been her hope for Jimmy. But the kid had followed in the tracks she herself had left. He wondered if the woman

knew.

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As the night wore on, his restless brain cast up memories and troubling reflections. Somewhere his own son, also the third generation ...

his

father,

then

he, and

finally . . . Somewhere

under a strange name his boy was growing to manhood, perhaps unconsciously following familiar paths. A restless child growing into discontented maturity. If he could see him! If only to look into his eyes. He wondered about the three portraits hanging on the wall of his home up there beside the curtained window. What had become of them? Out of the mouths of babes! It was Jimmy Blaine who made the suggestion. He had watched at the cell door, listening to the receding step of the keeper taking the count. Then he came and sat down beside Stephen.

“You never thought of goin’, Steve?” Going! Not since that night when Chief Fly-with-the-Wind had made his escape from the dark cell. He had been tempted, for a moment. The thought of his son had stayed him then. An escaped prisoner, in hiding and ridden by fear, was worse than dead. To himself and those he hoped to join. But now that sudden twinge as of hunger stretching far down his vitals, the irresistible urge to look into those young eyes... only that... and to see in them that calm he himself could not feel. “If I could only get to Canada, to see the old lady, ’'d make

her come across.” Jimmy’s voice was eager, his Sing Sing and its troubles faded. But border, he in New York. A few minutes with away. Roam the world. An unshakable longing

eyes were burning. Jimmy across the his boy . . . then . . .

The Poet’s eyes glistened. The placid Victor Hugo turned white with eagerness. Sheeny Mike, standing by his table in the library book in hand, gave no evidence of having heard. But there was a twitch of the lips. And then later in the day Funeral Wells decided suddenly to exchange his book. He stared sadly into Stephen’s questioning eyes. Dumb Sam came, too, his face convulsed without apparent cause. Tony sidled up to Stephen’s side. He nodded slightly to the whispered order. Tony in the foundry. Sheeny Mike in the laundry. Funeral

Wells in the clothing shop. Dumb Sam in the knit shop. The days had never been so long. Stephen worked feverishly

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SING

on the stone. He had not made much progress. Only two lines. His name, and the year of his admission. The year of his discharge would not be necessary, he would not finish the job. It would never be finished, at least not in Sing Sing. The next fellow would read and wonder. An endless week. The long, sinuous line of stripes was lockstepping from the mess hall across the yard toward the cell block. Sing Sing’s day was done. A few hours more of October sunlight. The first man had already entered the door. Would it never come? “Fire!”

Four wisps of smoke from as many buildings. ‘Fire!

Tony looked surprised. Sheeny Mike’s bland face was worried. Funeral Wells was crestfallen. And Sam looked dumber than ever. The long line of stripes wavered. Then broke. Buckets! Hose! Ladders! The bell atop the cell block clanged the alarm. While guards posted on the wall gripped their rifles the striped men battled with the flames that threatened to level their prison. Shouts, yells, orders! Pandemonium! The warden in the thick of the smoke; the principal keeper coaxing the fire fighters to greater effort; Captain Hilbert climbing at the head of the companies into the blazing buildings. No one noticed a group of eight prisoners — huddled together. Waiting. Watching. The gates opened to admit the village apparatus. “Break now!” Stephen leading, the eight men made for the gate. Now! A loud shriek sounded somewhere near, ard a shout of horror

from the striped fire fighters. A man up Trapped! Another! Two men unable to furnace. They appeared at the window on out. There was no ladder available. No

there in the knit shop! escape from a blazing the upper floor, leaning one dared go into the

building. Stephen wavered, uncertain. “We can make it, boys, before the flames reach them!”

But Sheeny Mike

and Funeral Wells and Dumb

Sam

and

the Poet and Victor Hugo and Tony did not stir. “It'll be too late if we stop for anything like that. Let ’em

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639

burn, the—” The Poet lapsed into the vernacular. “You can’t let us down now!” But Stephen and Jimmy Blaine were already on the run, back to the blazing building. Striped and civilian fire fighters shot streams of water into the building. Two figures fought through the thick smoke, avoiding shooting flames, treading carefully over cindered flooring. They _ groped toward the window on the upper floor, bent over two limp bodies. Hauling them toward the window, they motioned to the men below, grouped in a hollow square, their hands gripping a blanket. First one—Snowball, the negro porter who had harangued his soul; the second—John Briggs, the keeper.

“Jump!” Stephen yelled. Jimmy climbed through the window and dropped into the blanket. Stephen jumped after him. “Run!” The wall was crumbling. Everybody ran. All but the young

redhead, who seemed dazed. A crash! Jimmy Blaine disappeared from view. Two hours later they dug him out of the ruins, a limp,

crushed figure. Jimmy had achieved his hope—he was over the border. And Stephen was in the hospital nursing his burns. The Poet and Victor Hugo, Tony, Sheeny Mike, Funeral

Wells and Dumb Sam were among the missing. Prisoners speculated. Officials wondered.

The origin of the conflagration was never ascertained. That it was incendiary was certain. Four buildings burning simultaneously! But who among the prisoners were the guilty ones? Perhaps the escaped men. Sing Sing determined to trace them, bring them back and, if necessary, put them to the screw until they

told. Sing Sing was outraged. But weeks and months passed and the escaped prisoners were not returned. It was rumored that they had crossed over into Canada. Just hearsay, of course, but if true

there was no hope for their return. Escaped prisoners were safe from pursuit in Canada. Extradition treaties had not yet been drawn with their present all-inclusive finesse. Out of Sing Sing’s ruins arose a heroic figure. Stephen Yerkes had risked his life to save his cell mates. Not all the rules of silence nor the indulgent frowns of a hundred keepers could restrain Snowball from reviewing with eloquent pantomime and graphic

640

CHL E 20s —-SSUNIGt SING

detail those moments

when he had stood on the threshold

of

eternity. ‘““Ah see de flames comin’ toward me. Hev you ever see flames wropped in smoke? Dat’s what dis niggah done seen! An’ Ah says to maself, niggah, right yere’s God comin’ to lead yo’ to Glory!

An’ would yo’ believe it? Ah heered ma soul talkin’ to God, prayin’ fer me. Glory be! An’ den Ah feels de sprinkle ob holy water comin’ clean outer de fire. A miracle! An’ Ah knows Ah | was saved!”

“Bah!” jeered one of his listeners. “It was only the fire hose sprayin’ the flames.” Snowball vehemently denied the blasphemy. “Dat man Steve’s mah puhsonal savior!” Even Keeper John Briggs, now a taciturn, hard-boiled official, unbent sufficiently to express appreciation to Yerkes. As a special courtesy, Stephen was permitted to attend the burial of Jimmy Blaine. No one claimed the body. Stephen stood

beside the open grave on the hillside beyond the prison walls— Gallery 25, it was called—listening to the chaplain intone the

prayer that was to speed Jimmy’s soul to eternal peace. He stared down upon the white pine coffin, conscious, perhaps for the first time, of a deep-stirring pity welling up inside him, a grim feeling seeking outlet through eyes which had never felt envious of the peace of the hillside outside the prison wall. It was the first time that he had stepped out into the world; he had schemed for a breath of life and had scented death. And now he was back in his cell, dreaming of the chance he had won and lost. If only he had not stopped! He would have been out with the rest of them. He felt a returning ache, more poignant than ever, to free himself from what Dr. Suydam termed Stone and Steel, a keener desire to look upon the face of the son he had never known. It was for him a newly revealed instinct of parenthood. To stand before a wondering lad and say, “I am your father.” He brushed away, impatiently, the lurking image of a distrait and agonized

Marguerite witnessing the hateful revelation. The months wore on. He dug into his stone. For he had discovered now the word he was

seeking. Master.

Stephen Yerkes

had always mastered

STEPHEN

YERKES—MARIONETTE

6,41

his own destiny. Sing Sing. The fire. Only temporary gaps in the stride he was planning. And he was still the strong man; not like the men around him, with their doglike faces and tired eyes. His long nail scratched the outlines of the letter M. Captain Hilbert furtively entered his cell one day. In a few moments he emerged and passed on down the corridor, his brow creased, a puzzled look on his face. A month later Stephen was taken from his post in the library and assigned to one of the outside companies working on the hillside beyond the prison walls, grading new roads, tearing at the granite surface, clearing ground for what men hoped would later become the foundations of a new Sing Sing. “Youre reachin’ pretty high,” Captain Hilbert remarked one morning. “You’re a trusty now. See that you don’t lose it.” He kept on with his slow, stubborn digging into the wall. Now he need not resort to fire and ruin to accomplish his purpose. Those who succeeded him in 202 should know that he and not Sing Sing had been the victor—over Marguerite and Howard Ayres.

In an orphanage . . . He would find the orphanage. “I am your father,” he would say to his son. “You belong to me.” To-

gether they would roam the world seeking a new home and a firm anchorage. He became indifferent to food. Lines showed in his face, fur-

rowing deeper and longer as the months wore on. Since the fire Keeper John Briggs had lost his truculence. His new assignment with the road company was not as strenuous as the one inside. Here on the hillside rules were not so rigidly enforced. Prisoners did real work. They were entitled to periods of relaxation. Now and then the keeper himself lent a hand in wrenching loose an immense granite bowlder. Briggs was begin-

ning to understand his men. Not so bad after all, he decided. Really no need for the pistols road-company officers were obliged to carry. The men were trustworthy. And Stephen Yerkes had once saved his life. It was in the early spring. Keeper Briggs was brimming with

bucolic nostalgia. Sing Sing was to have a real farm. They were plowing the ground. It was all so homelike! The smell of green

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sod; plowing; sowing. John Briggs felt like a farmer directing his hired men instead of a keeper guarding his prisoners. They had advanced beyond the range of the prison wall. Past the principal keeper’s residence, where once Sing Sing had housed its female prisoners. Down by the hut where Old Adam lived in solitude, tilling his little patch of ground adjoining the prison property, tending his one cow that supplied him with milk which he sold to parched pedestrians. Old Adam was standing in the doorway watching the company of striped prisoners toiling in the

sun. These convicts plowing ground. Once a keeper, ignoring the strict rules of the prison, had permitted his men to turn over the bit of farmland in Adam’s tiny estate; the old man had been grateful ever since. He stared benevolently at the company of prisoners. “How about a swaller 0’ good old-fashioned milk?” he called out in a shrill voice, his grizzled white-whiskered face bearing a grin. ““Now don’t you fellers ask for anything stronger, ’cause I ain’t a drinkin’ man. An’ besides, I ain’t aimin’ to get you into

any bad habits!’’ His laugh sounded like the cackle of a strutting hen.

Keeper John Briggs hesitated. ““An’ no charge,” the old gaffer cackled, coaxing. Still the keeper hesitated. Finally he smiled. “Guess it won’t do no harm, Adam,” he called back. “Milk

ain’t give no one the jitters!”

Keeper Briggs saw no harm in the old man mingling with the prisoners. An old bird with one foot in the grave, swapping yarns and pleasantries. Keeper Briggs watched his men like a hawk—anybody would know he never missed a trick. And he watched with a benevolent eye. His own father would be about Adam’s age, now, living alone somewhere in the country with his one cow and one pig, and all his children gone to seek a livelihood with class to it, in faraway towns. The keeper’s romantic reveries kept him company through the long afternoon. The prison day was nearly over. In a half-hour the gong would sound the call to mess. The company already was gathering up its tools, Keeper Briggs checking them as usual. It

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was the vaunted pride of that meticulous man that no farm implement ever was missing from his company. A careful fellow, with an ingrowing instinct toward conservation! Old Adam emerged from the cow shed, carrying a heavy bucket filled with the evening milk. Keeper Briggs spied him. “How about one o’ the boys totin’ that, Adam?” The old man set the bucket down, winded.

“T don’t mind turnin’ it loose!” Keeper Briggs nodded to Stephen, who of milk and walked with it into the hut. The rest of the company formed in line hill to the prison yard. Keeper Briggs stood feet from the hut. A minute went by. Two.

picked up the pailful for the march downwith them, not fifty Three.

““Hey there, Yerkes, we’re waitin’.”

There was no reply. “Yerkes!” The keeper’s voice became gruff with impatience. Still no reply. Four minutes. The company was restless. The supper gong would be calling the men for the march to the mess hall. It was a serious breach of discipline, failing to line up one’s company in time. Keeper Briggs frowned. Ordering his men to remain where they were, he strode commandingly toward the hut. “Steve!” he called, in a voice mingling anger with injury. And still there was only silence. Keeper Briggs, his face red with anger, stepped inside the door. His shocked eyes momentarily beheld a tall man attired in a tight fitting, shoddy suit of clothes, with pants halfway up his

calves, glaring ferociously at him. The man disappeared behind a shower of sparks that came from nowhere. There was an instant of intense pain in his head—then darkness. Stephen Yerkes bent over the prostrate form of the keeper,

his hand reaching into the pocket of the unconscious Briggs. He extracted a loaded pistol. Then, with a farewell glance at the palsied old man standing in the corner, Stephen ran to the rear window. He leaped through it and disappeared in the adjoining

woods. The old man found his voice in a yell.

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“Help!”

The company of prisoners exchanged glances, wavered and went rigid with surprise as Old Adam appeared in the open doorway of the hut, a grotesque figure in red flannel underwear, his eyes staring, his hands gesticulating wildly. “He’s gone,” he yelled. “Better come look at the keeper, maybe he’s dead!” The company hurried in and gathered around the stricken Briggs. One of the men stooped and felt of the keeper’s pulse. *There’s life in him.” A dash of cold water. A sigh. Briggs opened his eyes. He looked with a puzzled expression at the group of men surrounding him. His hand reached up and felt his head. Suddenly he sat up, his eyes darting cunning recollective glances into every face. “Yerkes! Where’s Yerkes?” The prisoners in silence looked at one another, and then at Old Adam shivering in his flannels. *“He was like a madman,” Old Adam screamed out in a shak-

ing voice. “Murder in his eyes! He pulled the clothes off’n me, cursin’ like the devil hisself, said he would slit my tongue if I as much as opened my mouth.” The old man swallowed his tongue in his excitement. “He sure was a fast worker. He was gone afore

I could holler fer help. Right there through that window!” “Which way did he go?” Keeper Briggs demanded. Old Adam thought a moment, only a moment. His small, shaking arm rose to a level with his shoulder and swung around toward the woods. “He was sayin’ somethin’ about Canada; guess he took the road north.” . Keeper Briggs sighed despairingly. He ordered his men into company formation and marched them down the hill. A few minutes later the bell sounded the alarm. A prisoner had escaped. The prison grapevine went into action. “Steve Yerkes made a getaway!”

Sixteen hundred men in the mess hall gulped their sodden hash in silence. Keepers stalked through the aisles, alert, their sticks beating the air. Not a sound. But the grapevine transmitted endless rumors.

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Posses turned out, scouting the woods and roads to the north. Steve Yerkes was making for Canada. But the grapevine was wrong, and the posses were wrong. Stephen was already well on his way, pushing furtively, steadily southward toward New York. Several miles of breathless running, then climbing into a barnloft to await darkness and a safer onward flight. Old Adam stood in the warden’s office, the leathery skin of his face blanched with fright, his hands trembling. He was coatless, the trousers hanging from his waist a crazy-quilt of patches, The warden was frowning. The principal keeper eyed the old man suspiciously. Captain Hilbert seemed nervous. “Tm tellin’ you his eyes was like fire an’ ice, first one, then th’ other; an’ he made me strip my clothes . . . helped me, in fact. I was scared, thinkin’ he wouldn’t stop with that.” “Why didn’t you cry out?” the principal keeper asked, unbelieving. Old Adam looked hurt. ““He’da choked me as sure as your squirt hit that spittoon.” He jerked himself up, and in the tone of an injured proprietor whose property has been trespassed upon, he said next, eying the warden wrathfully, “It’s robbery, that’s what it is! I’m askin’ fer a new suit o’ clothes. Tramplin’ on a citizen an’ a peaceable man, an’ I shouldn’t be made to suffer!” The suit was given him, and he departed, strutting with selfconscious pomposity. Damn fine o’ those prison fellers. The old bones felt rejuvenated underneath such a good-looking suit as the warden himself might have! But the warden, the principal keeper, Captain Hilbert, and most of all Keeper John Briggs would have been shocked into an apoplectic fit had they been able to spy on the old man a half-hour later. The door of the hut was closed and barred, and Adam him-

self hunched up in a knot by the window, his stiff, bony fingers caressing a number of crisp greenbacks. “A hun’erd dollars an’ a bran’-new suit 0’ clothes,” he chortled

gleefully. “Them prisoners ain’t a bad bunch!” But chance moves in queer ironies, changing luck into frustration. When Old Adam entered the town’s undertaker’s parlor

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a week later, for the purpose of equipping himself for death with the purchase of a coffin, he floundered into hideous disillusionment. The undertaker said, giving back his new bills, “Too bad, Adam.

You been spoofed. These are not real—they’re counterfeits!” “You mean they won’t buy me a coffin?” The purveyor of mortuary finery smiled. “Looks to me like some of the stuff I been seeing around. Seems like I ought to report it.”

“You wouldn’t do that, mister?” The old man’s dismay was transformed into terrified entreaty. He gazed at the man out of stricken eyes, into which comprehension.

crept

a maddened

glare of cracked

“I swear to God, I didn’t know nothing! Oh, you wouldn’t do nothing like that to a old feller like me!” The undertaker turned upon him a sharp scrutiny. “Well, get the hell out o’ here,” he said roughly. “And you better lose those phony shinplasters. Before the folks up on the hill get to know about ’em!” 38

Stephen Yerkes was nearing his objective. Hiding by day, stealing on furtively at night. Realizing the necessity for a change of apparel,—Old Adam’s clothes were a scant fit,—he broke into a village haberdashery and helped himself to a complete outfit and a few dollars from the till. He emerged, feeling more confident. It was fourteen years since he had left the world. Things were different. The trains he dared not board dashed on at greatly increased speed. Strange, how the constant stream of humanity flowed southward toward New York. Innumerable telegraph poles sustaining long lines of copper wire. And the Hudson, churned by countless paddle wheels. A world of perpetual motion. People, too, moved faster. But their faces and eyes and gestures were the same as those he had known. Bright-eyed youngsters, eager adolescents, careworn middle-aged people, brooding elders . . . old characters in a new setting. New York had spread northward across the Harlem. Fifth

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Avenue, broad and stately, was lined with mansions behind whose cold exteriors his imagination pictured the inner warmth of luxury

and complacence. An orphanage! He stood on the sidewalk peering into the faces of frolicking children. A group of boys came out of a large gray-stone building, schoolbooks under their arms, their faces animated and their young bodies vibrant with life. Perhaps one of them . . . But he saw none who bore the slightest resemblance to himself. Or to Marguerite. Though he could not be sure, in her case. He hardly remembered. Was she like that woman? Tall and beautiful, with soft drooping eyes wavering before his scrutiny? Certainly not so elegant. A seamstress, Vanderbilt had written. Probably living in squalor, somewhere on the East Side . . . alone. She ought never to have permitted the boy to be placed in an orphanage. A mother should not forget her responsibility! An instinctive urge led Stephen in the direction of Wall Street. That old building. . . . It seemed as if time had forgotten

it . . . still crouching between its sturdier neighbors. Number 62. Thaddeus Pitney’s office. It was vacant. Perhaps Pitney’s spirit reigned there in undisturbed occupancy.

Hesitating, furtively, he entered the Stock Exchange. His hungry ears caught the familiar sounds, but he did not recognize a single face. Shouts, yells, orders, warnings, pandemonium. Noth-

ing had changed but the faces. Even the eyes were the same. As hard and cold and desperate and frightened as in the years gone by. But the faces, somehow, were different.

The memory of the last day with Keene rose before him in all its vivid desperation. Who were the gladiators today? New Keenes and Goulds! The landlady of a furnished room in the midtown section regarded him with suspicion. No, he had no baggage and would

stay but a night or two. Yes, he would be glad to pay in advance. A bed for the first time in fourteen years. It felt soft and comfort-

able, and he had had a long hard week. It was strange, this consciousness of fleeting time after the long sweep of years. You could never know, in this human welter, when a look might betray. He had known it would be like this.

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Fearful of every eye, suspicious of every echoing footstep. At any moment a hand might reach forth to haul him back to Sing Sing. He felt the pistol in his pocket; he hoped it would not be necessary to use it. New York, with all its millions, seemed more cramped than

Sing Sing. His brain throbbed with plans to cast off into the world, far from memories of Sing Sing. But the boy . . . Well, it would be fine to travel together, find a new home. He had not thought about the hundred orphanages in New York. Now he realized, as he walked through the darkened streets,

how difficult it was going to be to find the one that harbored his son. And then there was the name. Not Yerkes, of course. There

was only one man who would know what he ought to do, and that was Howard Ayres. It would be a dangerous business, calling on

Ayres to assist him. A telephone call would bring the police. Still, it was his only chance. He looked up Ayres in the telephone book. Office, Wall Street. Residence, West Fifty-sixth Street. Perhaps ring him? No, it was better to chance it at the home.

It was a brownstone building, dark and somber. No light showed through the windows. He passed it without stopping, feeling a pounding inside him, like hammer blows against the walls of his chest. He the door would street. It would The house

retraced his steps, passed the house again. Perhaps open and Howard Ayres would come out into the be safer. remained dark. Few pedestrians were passing. And

it was already late. He heard the bell somewhere inside. He waited. Another ring. He heard it plainly. The door opened suddenly. A thin ray of light streamed out, intensifying the darkness in which he stood. “Do you wish anything?” He seemed to have lost the power of speech. At the sound of the woman’s voice his body went rigid. His eyes were cast downward, his hat pulled over his eyes. “Can I do anything?” A long black dress, stretching up, a slender, graceful figure.

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His eyes climbed slowly, and he looked into the face of Marguerite, his wife. The woman retreated in alarm before the quick thrusting eyes of the stranger. He was in the hall, with the door closed behind him. A moment they stared at each other, and he watched her eyes filling with horror and apprehension. Then slowly his hand lifted and removed his hat. “It’s you!”

Her cry was answered by a voice from the floor above. A man plunged down the stairs. Then Howard Ayres was in the room. Ole His glance shot hatred and malice that stung like a whip. Ayres’ tone, when he spoke again, was insulting in its coolness. “Is your time up?” Stephen ignored the question. He was thrown completely off his balance by the shock of seeing Marguerite; her sudden, unexpected appearance in Ayres’ house, as though she were there not as a visitor but on some familiar and intimate footing. Marguerite living permanently under that roof! What could it mean? He noticed Ayres had aged in the interval that passed. He was quite gray, it rather improved him, adding dignity, softening his face and relieving a little the familiar sharpness and tightness of his thin features. Otherwise he was quite the same, his arrogance and inner lack of warmth unchanged. But Stephen’s thoughts were not with Ayres. He gave him only a perfunctory attention, regarding him as some offensive and inescapable object in the room; his glance was riveted on Marguerite, who stood with her back turned, her head bent in

grief. Her posture of suffering, the stricken hands covering her face, was infinitely tragic to him—she looked so defenseless, she who had been so proud! All the misery of ruined pride and misunderstanding welled up in a wave of emotion, and he made an

impulsive movement toward her, in an anguish of longing to take her in his arms and beg her forgiveness, to wrap his strength about her in protection and give her the tenderness that he felt.

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But he saw that she did not return, not even gladness. No ing her eyes from the sight realization was so great that like into fierce resentment.

SING

look at him. She had no joy for his forgiveness. She turned away, coverof him. And the bitterness of that his deep emotion changed lightning-

A snarl twisted his mouth, he would

demand an explanation of her presence like this in Ayres’ house. But Ayres anticipated him. He went over and putting his hand on her bowed shoulders, spoke to Marguerite, in a low, softened voice, in the tone of one used to asserting authority. “Go upstairs. Pll settle with him.” Stephen jerked around, rage overcoming him at the effrontery of the man. “You damned skunk! Who do you think you are, anyway? Telling my wife to get out when I want to talk to her!” He moved forward to prevent her from leaving. A few inches from her he stopped, an inexplicable instinct restraining him. She hesitated an instant, as if affected suddenly by his physical nearness. She paused just long enough for him to notice it, and a shock of elation lightened his heart in the thought that perhaps she was turning back to him. Then Ayres spoke again, his tone more insistent this time as he pronounced just her name, “Marguerite!”

Stephen knew

then that it was

too late. Something

had

happened, something of which he was yet in ignorance; an end had been made of their relation, of everything that had ever been between them. She was not to be won back. What it was he could only imagine. He knew it was not his crime, but something else, more recent, something in which he had not counted at all in her memory except as an object of hatred. And yet it seemed by her hesitation that there was still one imperceptibly small area of her heart into which hatred had not penetrated, one tear that still could be shed for him. To know this made the bitterness of that other unknown fatality more acute, more oppressive upon him. Was she to go completely out of his life like this, without a word, without so much as a look, a meeting of the eyes in kindness by which he might remember her and her former love? At the sound of Ayres’ voice speaking her name she uttered a cry, a deep-drawn sob that came from the innermost depths of

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her grief. And pressing constricted fingers more tightly over her face, she fled.

Hearing her sobs as she mounted the stairs, a groan burst from Stephen. “Tell me,” he said, turning around to Ayres, “tell me—what

have you done?” The smoothness and inscrutability of Ayres’ face were like a glove.

“When the child was born she worked as a seamstress. She couldn’t make enough to live. She put him in an orphanage. I offered her a home. Then she divorced you.” He added, with superfluous emphasis, “She’s my wife now.”

“So that’s it!” Then with the inclination of his mind for neat explanation and a thorough job, Ayres continued. “The intimate nature of your connection with the Mandel-

baum woman—though, of course, not the same thing exactly— was perfectly good grounds. There was plenty of proof.” “You dirty devil! I suppose you convinced her that the rest of it was true, too?”

“You’d better not take that tone.” He could not take it in, the news so benumbed him. At the

moment

he felt nothing—neither

loss nor indignation, only a

kind of fatalistic despair. The one thing uppermost in his mind

was that he ought to have known it would turn out like this, a mess. Any thought of ever again possessing Marguerite as his wife was the blind expectation of a fool. If her bitter feelings against him had not doomed such a wild fancy, he might have known something else would come along and smash everything, some other damnable thing he could not have foreseen. Then as he recovered somewhat from the stark incredibility of the thing, his mind commenced to function more shrewdly, he began to be suspicious.

“Look here,”’ he said after a pause, getting Ayres’ eye with a direct stare, “how was it I never knew about this?”

Ayres remained cool, his reply coming in a low-voiced and

peculiarly distinct enunciation. “I wrote

you she had entered suit. The papers were

sent

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to you. If they were not delivered, that is not up to me. You better ask the warden’s office.” “I don’t believe they ever were sent. I think you’re lying! It would be just like you and your crookedness—” ‘Just a minute!” Ayres cut in, becoming angry. “Before you

call me a liar! The court records show that there was a divorce. And she has legally remarried. You can’t furnish proof to the contrary. You, an ex-convict! Your word isn’t worth anything. There’s nothing you can do about it. Except clear out of here. And you’d better do that now. Get out!” Maddened by the thought of the abominable trickery and his utter helplessness in the situation, Stephen began to shout. “You forged the papers then, that’s what you did. You crook!” He rushed down the room, his hands clenched over his face.

Thundering in his mind, the sudden recollection of the pistol in his pocket was too much for his self-control. And then he heard Ayres’ voice—unemotional, bland, deliberate, stating a fact with-

out noise or vindictiveness. “You pure white lily!” All his rage collapsed in an instant, quenched in the of his despair. He remembered his son, and the original of his visit. “All right,” he said, sighing. “All right, Ayres, you clear out now. Only one favor I want to ask you, before means a lot to me. Let me see my son!”

slow sea purpose

win. I’ll I go—it

Ayres looked uncomfortable, the first sign of nervousness he had shown. An expression of dubious reluctance creased his face. “What good would it do? I’m sorry. I’ll have to refuse your | request.” “Oh, no, you won’t. Where is he? Is he in this house?”

He pulled out the pistol and toyed with it, adopting a swagger

and bluster he did not feel. He was determined not to be balked in this last thing. He walked forward, still holding the pistol in full view, and spoke in a threatening tone. “Look here, Ayres. I'll be on the level. I just want a look at him and then I'll go. I promise you I won’t make any trouble. But if you don’t listen to me, I'll hunt through this house. I tell you, Til make all the racket I can!”

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Ayres was a man of courage. He was not in the least upset by the pistol waved a few inches in front of his nose. But a row could do a lot of harm. Deciding that it would be more prudent to yield, he walked over and pulled a bell cord hanging under the portiéres. Footsteps creaked in the hall, presently. And Stephen, with a queer kind of shock, recognized Hennessy—a little more grizzled and battered, but the same old Hennessy. “Mr. Stephen!” she exclaimed at sight of him. Stephen’s mumbled greeting was lost in the question Ayres put to Hennessy.

“Where is Mr. Ted?” “T couldn’t say for sure, sir,” came Hennessy’s response in familiar tones. “Last thing, he was studyin’ his lessons in his room.”

“Tell him to come down here. And say nothing about who’s here. He isn’t to know.” “Very good, sir.” Hennessy withdrew, one of her shoes squeaking in a fashion most unsuitable to the mansion and the master to whom she now ministered. Stephen turned with a question. “Ted. Is that his name?” Ayres seated himself to wait, as he made answer. “Tt’s the name he goes by. His mother wanted him called Thaddeus.” j “What’s he like?” Stephen persisted, continuing to walk about restlessly and hardly listening to the answers Ayres gave him. ‘““He’s a nice chap. Nice feelings! Of course, you can’t tell much about a youngster, how he'll turn out. I’ve given him my name.” They heard him coming downstairs, slamming his feet carelessly and making a lot of noise as if he were walking stiff-kneed. Stephen saw a tall slender boy, who came into the room and went over to Ayres, seated on the other side, inquiring to know what

was wanted of him. He had Marguerite’s coloring. Fair skin and blond hair. And

the clear, dark, deep-shining

brown

eyes that

made her oddly tapering, narrow face beautiful. And the pointed chin, ah! That was hers, too.

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His son!

On catching sight of him, Stephen had started back, involuntarily retreating to the dimly illumined end of the room. “Ted, this is Mr. Grant,” Ayres was saying perfunctorily. “An old friend of mine. He has but a few minutes, he has to make a

train. But he wanted to be introduced.” When the boy came forward to offer his hand, Stephen felt as if the marks of his crime and his criminal past were stamped all over him, plainly visible, smeared like mud upon his exterior. He said in a dull, dry voice, moving out into the light, “Hello, Ted. Glad to meet you.”

That was all. The boy made a polite little speech and started out of the room. His manners were irreproachable, with an unassuming and easy graciousness, but he appeared bored, not in the least interested in the visitor. “Get back to your lessons,” Ayres said. “Have you got much more to do tonight? It’s time you were in bed.” ‘Not much,” he answered from the door.

Stephen watched him go. The most appealing element of the boy’s physical personality, not excepting his looks, was his grace, the ease and relaxed suppleness of his young body as disclosed in his unconscious movements. He never made an awkward gesture. His body took with perfect naturalness the lovely curves of beauty

and human dignity. He bore himself out of the room with princely majesty, in a confidence .as yet untouched by any of the harsh elements of reality, the world beyond this threshold. His mind full of these things, Stephen remembered he was a fugitive and must be on his way, even though he had nowhere to go. And no one to go to. He picked up his hat, and thanked Ayres for his decency in letting him see the boy. He walked out into the hall. “Have you taken French leave?” He heard Ayres’ low voice in cautious inquiry at his back. “Your time isn’t up!” ““What’s that to you?” he shot back. “I told you, I’ll be on the level. I won’t be where I could make it hot for you.” In the hall, surprisingly, was Hennessy. She pushed into his hands a large flat rectangular object, done up in a brown paper

parcel. “I been keepin’ ’em for you,” she explained in a breathless,

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choked voice, her manner full of pleased eagerness. “It’s them pictures of your pa. An’ your other folks. I thought you might like to have ’em an’ I took ’em out of the frames!” Hennessy opened the door for him. He went down the steps and at the bottom, stood still a moment, the parcel clutched under his arm, looking up at the sky full of stars. Sighing, he walked on. Not a dollar to his name, no belongings, nothing in the world but these old portraits of his ancestors.

oi The next day he was back in Sing Sing. “Have you gone mad?” growled Captain Hilbert, his eyes bulging ominously. “After the fine record you made for yourself?” Stephen did not answer. His face remained calm. “What made you do it, seein’ you came back of your own accord?” “T don’t know. I guess maybe something inside me.” “What you got there?” _ He pointed to the parcel under Stephen’s arm. He unwrapped it and exhibited to the captain’s astonished gaze the three oil paintings.

“Still hankerin’ fer the past?” Captain Hilbert asked, in a softer tone. The past and the future, he wanted to say. He only smiled. Captain Hilbert sighed. “Seems like I c’n never learn enough.” His hand reached for the bell on his desk. A keeper stalked in. “Send word out that Yerkes is back,” he directed. “An’ take

him back to his cell. Comin’ back by himself’ll save him from

goin’ to the cooler.” Stephen did not immediately respond to the keeper’s nudge. “Anything else?” the captatin asked. “May I keep these in my cell?” “Guess there’s no harm in it, if havin’ ’em’ll keep you here.” Stephen Yerkes did not go to the cooler, but the administration could not overlook the fact of his escape. “Too bad,” the warden said to him, a week after his return,

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“but you’ve forfeited your good time, those five years you might have saved yourself. You will have to serve your full term, twenty-five years. That is, unless your conduct in the meantime is so exemplary as to merit consideration.”

Five years for a single glance at the boy! But he did not resent the price for that breath of life. “Of course, you know about Old Adam,” the warden added

with a shrewd glance at his startled face. “He tried to pass those counterfeit bills. With the undertaker. He intended buying a coffin.” Stephen’s eyes were sullen. The warden continued. “Of course, we can’t pin a charge against you. But your con-

science ought to be stirring you somewhat. If you and your conscience are still on speaking terms.”

The years would pass . . . ultimately. He would speed them. He smiled to himself in the dark, midnight hours. Let Howard Ayres shower the boy with every luxury. Ayres was getting on in years, he wouldn’t live forever. And Ted would inherit his wealth. Let Marguerite grow mellower, too. The years would add to her charms. Howard Ayres, thinking himself a master! He saw through it all. Everything Ayres was hanging on to would go to Ted. But when his time was up, he would get hold of some of Howard Ayres’ money. Ted could not deny him. Nor could Marguerite. He was not impatient.

To the prisoners of Sing Sing, Stephen Yerkes was an enigma. Old-timers still recalled his standing and power in the world of their youth. Younger men thought maybe he had a screw loose, a

strong man gone soft . . . returned of his own will after a suc- | cessful getaway. Probably streaked with yellow. A fellow it would be well to avoid. As in his earlier years, it was difficult to find a suitable assignment for him, although the labor problem had become less acute. The Legislature at Albany had been swayed by the emergency and had appropriated funds, though sparingly. Shops were reopening. Shoes, clothing, metal containers, hats, furniture were going to be manufactured, but not for sale in the open market. They were intended exclusively for state institutions,

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and state institutions were not expected to be supplied with highgrade merchandise. Therefore, shops were inadequately provisioned; machinery was antiquated; civilian foremen untrained; and the merchandise produced was of inferior quality. But the prisoners were occupied, that was the vital consideration. Officials congratulated themselves, and were wary of any insidious influences that might threaten the new peace. They worried about finding a proper niche for Yerkes. The principal keeper argued for his transfer to another prison. The warden was inclined to agree. But Captain Hilbert won out, for keeping him. ““He came back of his own accord, didn’t he? It cost him five

years. Ain’t that enough punishment? Why bury the man alive in that northern jungle?” Stephen remained. In cell 202. And in the course of several months he was assigned to the prison school. “You’re to teach the men to read an’ write,” the captain admonished him. “‘An’ not teach ’em any tricks. Unless you want to be woke one fine morning—shackled—and sent upstate to that Bastille. So you’d better dot all your i’s and cross you t’s. Watch yourself.” Three years he continued as one of the inmate teachers in the prison school. It became an interesting job, helping illiterate minds to discover the mysteries of words and signs. He watched them develop from shy novices into assured students, eager to learn more of the intricacies of language and figures. From mere submissive clods they flowered into reasoning minds, capable of analyzing their own emotions. Chaplain Weills’ Sunday harangues they accepted with a degree of forbearance not unmixed with pique. Hellfire and brimstone weighed little with men concerned with the realities of life. They reacted more eagerly to Stephen’s worldly discourses that were not preachments. He made no effort to stir conscience or arouse remorse. ‘““My job is to teach you to read and write,” he told his classes.

“No matter what you do when you go out, it will help you.” “But I ain’t goin’ out,” sighed Lefty Paul, “except in a box!”

Lefty Paul was a lifer, whose term had been commuted from a death sentence. ‘What of it??? commented Monk, with a sly wink. “When

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you git to de golden chair an’ dey shows you your record you'll be able to read it an’ give ’em de lie if it ain’t right.” Monk was Monk Eastman, notorious crook and gang leader who had never yielded to Stephen Yerkes’ invitation in the old days. He, too, had had ambitions. Ma Mandelbaum’s departure across the border and Stephen’s subsequent conviction had left him an open field. He had made the most of his opportunities and became, in the course of years, a legendary figure in the criminal world. A fellow of considerable self-esteem whose bullet-shaped head, broken nose and cauliflower ears were the bane of police and the terror of law-abiding citizens. But, like Stephen, Monk had killed his man. And now he was in Sing Sing. Monk strongly resented imprisonment. He had trouble in adjusting himself to the prison routine. Especially irksome to him was the lockstep; he felt humbled as a unit in those shuffling ranks. Monk had joined the school in a moment of enthusiasm. He was ambitious to be a gentleman, to learn to read and write. But he could not see Stephen Yerkes as a teacher. “One convict’s no better’n another,” he whispered to several of his neighbors. ““An’ if der’s any teachin’ hereabouts, der’s men fer de job as gets paid fer it.” That was during Stephen’s early days in the school. Monk’s attitude threatened the morale of his pupils. Stephen spoke of it to Captain Hilbert. One morning soon after the captain slouched into the schoolroom and motioned the keeper to leave. “ll be standin’ by for a while,” he said. ““You c’n go down and do yard duty. A breath of air won’t do you any hurt.” Monk was no respecter of rank. The captain meant no more to him than an ordinary keeper. His usual grumblings were soon audible. Stephen went over to his desk. “Say it louder, Monk,” he said, smiling.

“You heard me.” Stephen reached out, and hauled the surprised Monk to his feet. “Now say it again!”

They squared off in full view of the entire class. In a minute Monk was floundering blindly before an avalanche of blows from

Stephen’s fists. Another minute, and he was down on his knees.

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“Seems like he’s had enough,” the captain said, grinning. “Now you c’n go back to your teachin’ the boys to use their heads, as well as their hands.” Of course, the prison grapevine buzzed. Stephen regained something of his lost stature in the yard and in the shops. His classroom, too, rose in popularity. Sing Sing’s school caught public attention. Here at last was something new in penology. Perhaps punishment alone was not the real answer. It has not seemed to work. Let’s do something with these men. Give them understanding. Clean their minds. Teach them. But the new idea did not meet with universal approval. The police were unimpressed. “Those fellows’ll be smarter’n we cops,” they complained. “An educated criminal is slicker than an ignorant one,” said the District Attorney. “Tt will ease the sting of imprisonment,” warned the conservative legislators. So it happened that one of them, a young man, serious-minded, energetic, keen-eyed and curious, no less a personage than a State Senator

and a member

of the Committee

on Penal Institutions,

came to Sing Sing to find out for himself. Naturally, the warden did the honors as the Senator’s personal guide. In the course of the

day, the Senator entered the classroom. He watched intently Stephen’s manner with his pupils. He

was shocked when in answer to his inquiry he learned that the teacher was no less desperate a character than Stephen Yerkes, recently escaped from Sing Sing and voluntarily returned ... a notorious criminal serving time for murder. The Senator waited until the class was dismissed. Then he

approached Stephen. “Like the work you’re doing?” Stephen assured him that he liked nothing better. “Think education will help them go straight?” Stephen looked steadily at his inquisitor. “J’m not interested in helping them go straight.” The Senator frowned. “But I am. We all are. And if this won’t help . . .”

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“This will help them to think. Whether they think straight, that’s another matter.” The Senator’s face softened again. “You seem like an educated man. Above the average. It didn’t help you much.” Stephen smiled. “Maybe it’s because I saw things too clearly.” “A clear-thinking man never commits murder,” the Senator

said severely. “J am not trying to justify my act, sir.” “There’s no question of justification, Yerkes,” the Senator observed impatiently. “I am only trying to dig into this mess. A lot of people claim that educating prisoners will help them to be better citizens. And here I see educated men, no better than the

worst of them.” “Educating men will only help them respond more easily to improved conditions.” “Then you think education is only a step forward?” Stephen nodded. “Things to be done inside Sing Sing?” “And

outside, sir.”

“T think I see what you mean. It’s more than I can hope to accomplish, this change on the outside. But we'll try something inside.” And so, in subsequent years, through the Senator’s insistent urging, Sing Sing began to change. The lockstep was abolished and was replaced by a military march. Prisoners welcomed the change. They swung through the yard with more life in their gait. The old shuffle was forgotten. Lines no longer interlocked, each man was a unit marching erect. Men ceased to grumble about food. They seemed more contented. And Sing Sing was at peace. During that time, administrations in Sing Sing changed with customary frequency, depending upon the prevailing political power in Albany. But the principal keeper stayed on, as did Captain Hilbert. Thus, though wardens came and went, the warfare of

principle between the old and the new persisted in the views of the two subordinates.

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“Next thing they’ll be dressing them up like gentlemen,” muttered the principal keeper.

The captain only smiled. The Senator’s work went on. No more stripes! That was a gala day for Sing Sing. Prisoners strutted instead of marching. Self-conscious in their new attire. Gray coat and pants with a single row of brass buttons. The change did not meet with the approval of even all the prisoners. ““What’s the use o’ removing the stripes inside if they’re gonna

put ’em on when we get outside? A jailbird’s marked for life, says I,” Second-story Charley complained. His sentiments were echoed by many of the older prisoners. Still, the uniforms felt good. First, because they were new. Second, because to the men it marked the beginning of a change in prison routine.

Red-letter days in Sing Sing followed each other with unusual frequency. Each marked an innovation heralded as another advance in penology. The walls of the old cell block were pierced for large windows. Light and air were going to drive out the dampness and brighten corners which had never before felt the touch of sun. Prisoners were encouraged to make their cells more intimately comfortable. Stephen was among the first to take advantage of the new order. Visitors were amazed at the transformation. It is interesting to read the reactions of one of them, preserved in one of the numerous reports of that era:

A man can get alot of comfort in the old cell block at Sing Sing if he has a little money to spare and spends it judiciously. No one will dispute that the cells are as bad as they can be. They are so small and unsanitary that the Legislature ordered them abandoned and the building destroyed. But men have got to sleep in them until a new prison on the bill is erected. It may take years. There are ways of making the most of even bad conditions. A man came into Sing Sing. His first night was one of sleepless horror. He set about the next day trying to improve what must be endured. He measured his cell and found it was an inch short of seven feet long, that it was three feet, four inches wide. The

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only ventilation was through small openings of the latticed upper half of the cell door, but he was lucky enough to have been assigned to a cell that was opposite a large window, and he found that when this window was open, enough fresh air entered his cell to fill his lungs. There was a hard narrow bunk made fast to the wall. It was the only furnishing, except that on the bunk was a tick filled with musty excelsior and a pair of blankets, mostly of cotton. The floor, walls and ceiling were rough sandstone, every crevice alive with bugs. The attempt to sleep was torment. The next day he obtained permission to scrub his cell with hot soapsuds and to spray it with a chemical that would kill the pests that had kept him awake. To complete the job he smoked them out with a smudge and he found some cement to stop up the crevices that had been used for breeding purposes.

He had a talk with the Principal Keeper and found that the new regulations would permit him to do the very things he most wished to do for his comfort. With the funds he had deposited to his credit when he entered the prison, by denying himself cigarettes and some similar luxuries, he was able to purchase from a shop in the village a small enameled cot, with woven wire springs, a com-

fortable mattress, good quality blankets, pillows and two changes of bed linen. For his floor he obtained from the same shop a rag rug of attractive colors. The entire outlay was nominal. Another prisoner, about to be discharged, presented him with a small cabinet with lock and key to keep his belongings in and a prison made writing table that folded against the wall when not in use. Some scraps of wire were bent into shape for hooks and inserted into the stone walls to hang things on. An inmate carpenter fashioned boards to make three shelves, and another inmate decorated them with drawnwork covers. The prisoner found some pieces of broken glass that had gone into scrap and a prisoner cut them into shape. With strips of colored paper they became frames for photographs and pictures clipped from magazines. Pegs were inserted into the walls to hang them on. In less than a week, the dingy stone hole that so closely resembled a newly dug grave, was converted into what appears to be, and really is, a comparatively comfortable sleeping nest. Many

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a man aboard a yacht has slept in a cabin as small and more stuffy, and imagined he was having the time of his life. It all depends on the state of mind... . Stephen Yerkes’ cell soon became one of the show places of the cell block, much admired by the constant flow of visitors. Especially noticeable were the three oil paintings hanging on his walls. But visitors could not see the granite block on which Stephen was toiling in the long hours between lockup and bedtime, and during the interminable period from Saturday noon to Monday morning, when prisoners were confined in their cells, emerging only for the three mess calls. Stephen had not immediately resumed his cutting on his return. The message in stone had somehow lost its significance. He had never before felt so contented, pleased with his own plans. His life was marked out definitely. Though he labored diligently with his pupils, it was not really their improvement that concerned him most. The work was pleasant, and his own mind was being sharpened. Keen wits would stand him well on the final day of reckoning—with Howard Ayres. He had begun to feel a closer sense of kinship to the three solemn figures in oil hanging on his cell wall. Particularly with the strong face of his great-grandfather, who had served at Valley Forge. To have turned adversity into a broad foundation for power. Great-grandfather Yerkes had helped accomplish it. He, Stephen Yerkes, fourth in line of descent, would also achieve that. What

the old fellow had done for his country, he would do for himself.

Howard Ayres’ wealth and position would be handed down to Ted. And Stephen Yerkes still was master of his own fortunes. All he needed was patience. Time would do the trick. The rule of silence was still the order of the day. And still it was honored only in the breach. Even the principal keeper was less adamant about it. A call or a shout in any of the shops he visited or

in the prison yard no longer evoked his earlier temper. The man seemed more benevolent. And for good reason. His twenty-five years of service were drawing to a close. He was looking forward to his approaching retirement, though not without misgivings.

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“I’m too young to sit around with nothing to do,” he complained to Captain Hilbert. “All these years in Sing Sing have sort of yanked me out of life.” “What you got to say of a man who’s done time, as long as yours, only in stripes instead of a uniform?” “Bad business,” the principal keeper agreed. But it did not ease his own worry. Stephen, alone among all the prisoners of Sing Sing, did not respond impulsively to the innovations. It mattered little to him whether he marched in lockstep or wore a striped suit. They had not humbled him. Nor was he elated over the new regulations. He

regarded with not a little inward amusement the flushed faces and sparkling eyes of the men strutting about in their dark gray uniforms. A salve, he muttered to himself, for wounds that would never heal. Puppets, thinking they could walk alone. Forgetting

that every breath of life was measured and checked by the very powers that conceded them these modest indulgences. The new day in Sing Sing was heralded throughout the world as an evidence of America’s advancing civilization, as had been the electric chair, man’s quickest death-dealing instrument. Prisoners should be made more comfortable. If one searched deeply for the underlying motive for this liberalized practice, one detected it in that universal emotion—pity. Perhaps the most sensitive would have admitted, under pressure, that it was not pity for the men in prison, those striped figures shuffling along in their traditional lockstep, but self-pity, perhaps from the knowledge that they themselves had a part in producing them. At least sweeten the air by perfuming the dung heap. What went on inside—well,

perhaps later something could be done about it. But there were those who were moved by a spiritual urge to dig deeper. They were

not satisfied with outward

appearances.

These men, such individuals contended, were human beings, fash-

ioned in the image of God. They had souls. They should be saved, in the language of Chaplain Weills, “for eternal happiness.” They came in droves, men and women, to plead with the errant ones. And the prisoners listened amiably. Especially if the speaker was a woman and not bad to look at. Monk Eastman, the scar-faced gentleman who had _ never

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crossed the threshold of a church, to the amazement, if not con-

sternation of his fellow worshipers in the chapel, was among the first to come forward at one of the lady preacher’s urgent talks. “Ah,” he exclaimed to several of his pals as they marched from the chapel, “when I seed dose pretty black eyes an’ de golden hair, by Jeez, sez I to meself, ‘Monk ain’t gonna let you down, miss.’ ”? He turned belligerently to his snickering neighbors. ‘An’ if I had my way, der wouldn’ta been one man in dat chapel as wouldn’ta stood up.” And so Sing Sing swayed along the new road toward what seemed to promise a better day. Governor Benjamin B. Odell was a firm adherent to the principles of law and order. Men who disturbed the peace of the community had to be punished. “Further than that his mind runneth not.” The whys and wherefores of miscreants did not concern him. But he was a good Christian, with an instinct for mercy as a footstool upon which he might stand and peep beyond his earthly pale. He came to Sing Sing to witness for himself the transformation. He beheld long lines of quiet men marching to mess, young and old, all without the hated stripes, and responded to the eager eyes that looked upon him as they passed him by. For it had been rumored that if the Governor were pleased he might feel inspired to grant a few pardons. But the Governor stared at them impassively. He toured the galleries in the cell block, remarked upon its cleanliness, peeped into the cells, commented on the pictures on the walls and the cabinets. Perhaps it was chance—or had Captain Hilbert maneuvered it so?—that caused him to step into cell 202. The Governor was

a large man. His bulk almost filled the narrow space. He sat down, somewhat nervously, on the wooden bunk, and let his eyes rove over the walls. Whatever thoughts were filtering through his placid mind were checked suddenly when he found himself staring at three paintings in oil—excellent artistry—three men in military uniforms.

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40 The grapevine stormed the news. Yerkes had been summoned to the warden’s office. Lucky guy! ... “Those oil paintings in your cell,” the Governor was saying, his pouched eyes fixed benevolently on the gray-coated prisoner, “how did you come by them?” “My family, sir,” Stephen replied. The Governor smiled quizzically. “The soldier in Continental uniform?” “My great-grandfather.” “And the other, the one in officer’s uniform, is your grandfather, I take it?”

Stephen nodded.

“The Civil War soldier is your father?” “YY es, 0Sit.

The Governor lapsed into silence.

“It’s a proud lineage, Yerkes.’ His Excellency’s eyes clouded. “And if it hadn’t been for . . . this”—indicating the prison —‘you might have had your portrait painted in the uniform of a Spanish War veteran!” Stephen smiled faintly. “Perhaps if my father, or grandfather, had been a prisoner, I would have been the soldier.” The Governor frowned. “They fought for the flag.” Yes, Stephen wanted to tell the Governor, and neglected to

fight for themselves. But he remained silent, shifting uneasily be-: fore the Governor’s searching stare. Finally the Governor looked down, examining the card he was fingering.

“Your record here shows an act of heroism during a fire, saved two lives at the risk of your own.” Stephen did not reply. “But there is also the incident of that escape . . . and your voluntary return.” Stephen waited for him to continue.

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“Tt cost you five years . . . a steep price to pay for a whim.” The Governor’s eyes bored into Stephen’s. “You are a man of courage ... and of whims. If I were

sure you could subordinate the latter to the former, I would be inclined to consider you as an object for clemency.” Stephen’s body swayed, his eyes opening wide. “You mean a pardon, sir!” he said in a hoarse whisper. The Governor nodded. ““A man descended from a line of soldiers, as you are, is deserving of consideration.” Stephen gulped. The pallor in his face became chalk white. “J am grateful, sir,” he stammered, “but . . .”

The anxious.

Governor

eyed him

in surprise. The

warden

looked

“Yes?” the Governor said. “T would rather serve out my term, sir.” The Governor’s face lost its composure, acquiring an angry expression. He glanced again at the card before him. “You have a wife and child, a son.”

Stephen shook his head. “T’ve lost track of them, sir.”

The Governor turned to the warden. “Ts there any way to communicate with them?” “We could find them, if Your Excellency wishes.” Stephen stepped forward, leaning over the desk, “I’m not asking it, sir.” For a while, interminable, it seemed, the Governor sat lost in

thought. “Very interesting, Yerkes. A man who served almost twenty years, and five years more to go, with a wife and child—a son— prefers to serve out his time. Sounds like a story one reads in books. Impossible!” Stephen remained mute, and the Governor rose, addressing the warden. “It’s something I must look into, warden. Please send this man’s papers and record to Albany. Yes, I shall give it my personal attention.” He waved his hand with an air of dismissal. Stephen returned to his schoolroom.

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The grapevine buzzed. Steve Yerkes refused a pardon! The fellow was insane. But Stephen showed no evidence of derange-

ment. Most of the time there was a pleased expression on his face. He was planning. To have left Sing Sing now would have meant inevitably a disruption of his scheme. It was too soon. The boy was too young. And Howard Ayres was still alive. Too soon. Stephen never knew whether or not the Governor investigated the matter further. He heard no more about it.

AI “There’s no man so powerful he can shape his own destiny.” It was Victor Hugo, the octoroon, talking. “I’m thinking of writing a book about it while I’m completing my sentence. Something monumental.” “Seems to me,” smiled Steve Yerkes, “the name Hugo is already familiar.” “Bah!” sneered Victor. “That fellow was a sentimentalist. You know the French. Down with the King! Long live the Emperor!” Poor Victor. Since his escape, fifteen years ago, he had roamed the earth, a vagabond scribbler, seeking elusive inspiration. “Everywhere I went the shadow of Sing Sing darkened my footsteps.” Visionary, of course. But it had brought him back to New York where in a moment of weakness he had used his talents carelessly. A bank cashier had detected the forgery. And Jackson,

Sing Sing’s hawk-eyed detective, had recognized him in the police line-up as an escaped prisoner. | “Brains mean nothing,” Victor sighed, as they sat in the schoolroom, waiting for the class to march in; he had been assigned

as Stephen’s assistant. ““You and I are no better than the meanest of them here. All puppets. Marionettes, dancing to the strings of their own weaving.” It was then that Stephen resumed his etching in stone. Only a few years more. The days and weeks and months, even years, were passing swiftly. The world outside was climbing over the horizon. The gates of Sing Sing were swinging open.

A marionette! That was the old Stephen Yerkes, the one who

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had entered Sing Sing, a victim of his own imperfect planning and building. He saw it now clearly. The master must be a man of iron. Strong. Unyielding even to his intimate impulses. He must have no fear. It was weakness that had made him a murderer. He should never have killed George Leslie. Murder is the result of weakness. Yes. The old Yerkes was a marionette. . . . Instead of the word MASTER, he began to scratch secretly, diligently the message he would leave behind. STEPHEN YERKES . . . MARIONETTE. Then the date of his release . . . 1911. It would not be earlier. The furtively engaged Stephen was the one visitors in Sing Sing did not see. They peeped into his cell, puzzled by the portraits hanging on the wall. They shook their heads sadly when the guide told them of the prisoner’s long term, twenty-five years, and wondered that he still held fast to memory. Strange, indeed. What

would the world seem like to him when he came out? “That’s him.” Guides pointed him out to the visitors as they entered the prison schoolroom. A tall lean man, gray-haired, his face deeply lined, a moody look in his eyes. Pretty good ... after twenty-five years! So they judged Stephen Yerkes. But one year or twenty-five, had they been keen and discerning, they would have known that years are weighed by significance rather than by numbers. One man may pass over a long span safely while another succumbs to a comparatively short one. It is the pressure behind the years that is important, a pressure no liberalization of prisons can possibly ease. Abolish the rule of silence, do away with the lockstep and the stripes, pierce the massive stone walls of the old cell block, introduce baseball, entertainment, open

every shop, and what do you have? Prisoners, after all. Boys and men who had become impatient with values and standards of life and morals, and who have dared to fashion others in keeping with their own vision and mentality. It was Stephen’s last day in Sing Sing. His work was done. There it was, Marionette. An indelible mark. And there were the

others. Rebel . . . Cynic . . . Skeptic. He stopped to read them. “Guess we were all right,” he muttered, as he reached for the

three portraits on the wall.

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He was smiling when the gates swung open. A new Stephen was emerging into an old world. “Go straight,” the warden cautioned him, as he shook his hand. “You did better’n I thought,” Captain Hilbert grunted. And Stephen Yerkes, straight and solemn, clutching his only possessions, walked out, head up. The gates swung to behind him.

42 He was not in need. Three hundred dollars, his prison earnings,

would go a long way. A modest room in the midtown district, a change of clothes,

a visit to the barber, and Stephen felt ready to survey the scenes of his old world. The next day found him at the Stock Exchange. It was newly housed and newly tenanted. Everything new except the noise and excitement. Trading was even more furious than in the old days. He imagined himself in the thick of it. Why not? He was only fifty. He wandered down Wall Street, thinking, planning. Was his son somewhere in one of these buildings? Had he developed an instinct for finance?—his father’s instinct, not Howard Ayres’! It would be the Yerkes blood in the boy, driving him. Stephen imagined himself meeting him. He would stare into those dark eyes, slowly. The boy would be puzzled. “Have I seen you before?” And Stephen would smile. “My name is Grant. Do you remember?” That would be his moment. He would stand up straight and proud. “Not Mr. Grant, Ted, but your own father.” And he would

watch the eyes that were Marguerite’s widen with curiosity and wonder. Time passed slowly. The days were longer than they had been in Sing Sing; the nights more restless. And his funds were running low.

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Curiosity led him to wander one night into Hester Street. There was the house, a frame shack, Ma Mandelbaum’s. Impossible that within its four walls so much could have happened. New tenements all around it. No haberdashery now, but a small lunchroom. Men slouching at the counter, munching sandwiches. A few tables. Sandwiches . . . 5 cents. Cheap, and Stephen felt hungry. The man behind the counter was a round-headed fellow, with

a gray beard. “Mister, a sandwich, rye bread or white?”

But Stephen was staring mutely at the purveyor of sand-

wiches. A familiar voice. And the eyes... a Nistetase, 4

The knife dropped from the man’s hand, clattering noisily on the counter. “White,” said Stephen. The man stooped for the knife. He bent his head over the counter, slicing the meat, and then the bread.

“Mustard or pickle?” The man was staring. eustard On). 1.8 But Stephen was not listening. He leaned over the counter. “Ah, you like our sandwiches, mister. I seen you here before. Shechan’s sandwiches can’t be beat for price and quality in the whole town.” Sheeny Mike . . . Mr. Sheehan! ‘An Irish name I got. The loafers call me Sheeny, so I make it Sheehan.

Clever, no?”

A half-hour later Stephen was seated in Mr. Sheehan’s apartment over the restaurant. Not as richly furnished as in Ma Mandelbaum’s days. But comfortable. He listened to Sheeny Mike’s prattle. “’m trustin’ you, Steve. There ain’t no one here knows. Not even the coppers. My lawyer bought the shack from Ma Mandelbaum. A smart one, that lawyer.” Sheeny Mike stopped suddenly. “Maybe you remember him. Mr. Ayres. It cost me plenty.” Sheeny Mike had returned from Canada, after a lapse of years. The old neighborhood had changed.

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‘Here are only loafers. The real fellows are uptown.” Sheeny Mike’s eyes stared at him sympathetically.

“All those years wasted, Steve. The things we could have pulled.” He sighed. “With your brains . . .” He stroked his beard thoughtfully. “And your missus?” he asked. “Died some years ago, Mike.” “Ah, God rest her soul. Such a good woman.” Mike’s eyes searched Stephen’s. “And the boy, I heard .. .”

Stephen rose. Mike stretched a detaining arm toward him. “So soon, Steve? An’ we ain’t spoken yet. Wait. I will bring up sandwiches, with white bread, an’ beer. No, you drink only

wine. Well, maybe we open an’ old bottle, one of a dozen I found in the cellar, Ma Mandelbaum’s stock. I say to myself, I will keep them for something special. Two I opened when Molly an’ I hitched. Molly is a fine woman. You will meet her. Her mind is sharp like the razor. Ya, you will like Molly.” He waved his finger playfully. “Only no monkey business. I know something about men being without women twenty-five years.” Stephen stayed on. Listening to Mike’s monologues about himself and Molly, and uptown. It was near midnight when he finally succeeded in breaking away. “Good for nothing!” a voice shrieked at them as they descended the stairs. “Lazy loafer, you think I married your lunch room? Me working all night till my hands are like lead and my head is swimming and you upstairs with your bums!” Molly was indeed a woman of bones. Scrawny, high-cheeked, bright-eyed. “Molly,” Mike protested, “it ain’t no bum, a real gentleman —and rich.” “Rich!” Molly echoed with interest. “Not one of them that makes touches?” ; Mike laughed, and waved his hands. “More money’n he can count, Molly.” ‘So why does he come to you?” she asked suspiciously.

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Mike chuckled. ““Ain’t I told you, me an’ him was friends in Californy, an’

we're going in partnership.” Molly’s eyes opened wide. “You don’t need no partners, Mike.” “Sh, Molly. How would you like to be a lady, an’ live uptown in an elevator house, maybe on the fifteenth floor, with furs and diamonds, an’ your husband wearin’ a white stiff shirt an’ striped pants an’ maybe a big diamond right here’’—pointing to his chest— “sittin’ by a big window on Broadway countin’ the customers come in his big restaurant . . . sandwiches twenty-five cents, and dinner one dollar? Ha, Molly!” Molly’s eyes opened wider. Stephen was frowning. “Tell her, Mr.—Stevens, ain’t that what we was talkin’?”

Stephen

nodded,

smiling.

It wouldn’t

hurt to humor

the

fellow, in the presence of Molly. Mike walked with him to the door, and out into the street,

away from the corner lamppost. “Don’t feel bad about Molly, Steve,” he apologized. Stephen laughed. “Te’s all right, Mike. I understand.” “You ain’t told me where you’re livin’.” Stephen gave him his address. “It’s better maybe you should not come here. Molly asks questions. Tomorrow afternoon I will come to you.”

43 Mike came the next day, and again on the following day. Stephen listened to his garrulous friend. Through the man’s incessant and meaningless chatter he relived the old days with Thaddeus Pitney and Keene and Gould and Ma Mandelbaum. Stephen was puzzled about Mike. His talk seemed pointless, as were his visits. Then one day Mike paused after one of his lengthy

monologues and looked inquisitively at Stephen. “You ain’t thinkin’ about work, maybe business?”

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Stephen regarded him solemnly. Then grinned. “Too bad Keene is gone,”’ he said. “And Ma Mandelbaum,” Mike added, dropping his eyelids. He shook his head. “Things is different now. She was a piker!”” He glanced furtively toward Stephen. “But maybe you got religion or somethin’? Twenty-five years in Sing Sing, listening to all them sermons. An’ the lady preachers.” “Twenty-five years, Mike, is long enough for religion to wear off when you’re in Sing Sing.” “Yes, I hear things is different up there now. They let you talk, an’ give you exercise in the yard, an’ no more stripes.” “You wouldn’t know the place, Mike.” “JT don’t want to know it, Steve,” Mike said quickly. ‘““Not

if every cell was like a hotel room with carpet on the floor and runnin’ water an’ electric lights. Prison is prison even if it was in heaven.” “I guess you'll never see it again,” Stephen laughed, ‘‘with Molly watching over you and your lunchroom going good.” Mike sighed. “It ain’t gettin’ me anywhere, Steve. My Molly ain’t got time even to have a baby!” “Probably a Mike leaned “Your wife, “It’s a lie,”

good thing . . . for the baby.” Stephen smiled. forward, staring hard at Stephen. she had a baby the boys said.” Stephen exclaimed, reddening.

“I didn’t mean

no harm, Steve,’ Mike

apologized

meekly.

“Only you know the outside ain’t Sing Sing. Talkin’s allowed.” For an entire week Mike did not call again. Stephen was not sorry. Mike’s visits had begun to annoy him. He had been par-ticularly irritated by the reference to Ted. That, he felt, was his own intimate problem, not to be shared with anyone. Meanwhile his funds shrank.

The morning papers blazoned the unprecedented rise in the stock market. A group of financiers were said to be pushing values up beyond all expectations. Three important figures. One newspaper carried their photographs. Two were the leading men of the Street. Between them was a younger face, blond, keen-eyed. Stephen knew him at once. The fifth in line of descent from a

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proud Continental soldier, one of the three portraits resting in the bureau of his room. He cut it out and placed it carefully with the others. Not the fifth, but the fourth—his own—was

missing.

He stared long at the youthful, eager face. A growing sense of pride warmed his blood, and with it a corresponding feeling of impotence. Helpless in the maze of circumstance he had wound around himself, desperation bit into his brain. Daily he walked by the bank door where his son sat in unknowing serenity. But a power stronger than his desperation restrained him from entering. If only Howard Ayres were dead! It would be easier. That night found him in Mike’s lunchroom. Molly welcomed him hospitably. Mike noticed his feverish eyes, and with a sympathetic grin invited him upstairs. “Can you get me a gun?” Stephen demanded of the’ startled Mike. The latter stroked his beard thoughtfully. “And what will you do with a gun?” Stephen frowned. “Stop your damned questions, and get me a gun,” he said gruffly. “Tt’s a dangerous business this carryin’ a pistol. I ain’t never seen the use of it, an’ you on the death squad that built the electric chair. “If you can’t do it, why in hell don’t you say so, instead of gibbering like an idiot!” Mike sighed. He shrugged helplessly. “All right, Steve, but if it’s money you want. . “J don’t want your damned money!” “Well . . .” Mike left him a moment and went into an inner room. When he came out, he said, “Here is your gun. It’s loaded, Steve. Only don’t do anything foolish.” That night Stephen slept with the loaded pistol under his pillow. He was up at daybreak, pacing his room. Ten o’clock would be about right. Howard Ayres would surely be in his office. And he would be calm. No use showing his hand. Ayres himself should tell the boy . . . and in his presence. Otherwise . . . Well, two be)

.

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bullets would be enough . . . one for Ayres, the other for himself. Death would be welcome then! At nine o’clock there was a loud banging on his door. He opened it to find Sheeny Mike panting in the hallway. “Thank God, I found you,” Mike managed to say. He stepped into the room, closing the door carefully behind him. Stephen stared at his unexpected caller in amazement. ““Where’s that gun?” Mike demanded. Stephen’s hand crept into his coat pocket. “Don’t use that foolishness, Steve. If you’re thinkin’ to do things, I got the plan that’ll make you more money’n Ma Mandelbaum ever dreamed of. Millions!” “Millions!” “Ya, but come with me. There’s fellows wants to meet you.” Why not? It would be better coming to Ayres as a rich man, independent. Stephen’s heart raced as rapidly as Mike’s tongue. In a few minutes they were in a carriage riding uptown. The door of the brownstone building opened slightly to Mike’s ring. A pair of keen eyes stared out. “It’s me,” Mike whispered. The door swung open. Stephen followed Mike into a richly upholstered foyer. Two men stood facing them. They were young, their slim bodies wrapped in gaudy dressing gowns. Stephen stared at the two sleek-haired men who regarded him curiously. “Well, Mr. Sheehan,”

one of them

said finally, turning to

Mike, ‘‘who’s your friend?” Stephen detected a sneer in the man’s voice. “Ain’t I told you? This is Mr. Yerkes.” The speaker held out his hand. “Call me Pat, Mr. Yerkes,” he said, with a laugh. “And this is

my partner. Call him Jim.” The latter nodded his greeting. “We know all about you, Steve,” the fellow called Pat said, when they were seated in the red paneled parlor. His eyes narrowed, and his voice grew hard. “You done time in Sing Sing— twenty-five years.” Stephen’s face showed surprise. Pat laughed. “It’s our business to know things—before we speak. And you

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are not pleased with the world,” he continued as Stephen stared solemnly at the speaker. “Don’t look scared, Steve, we are giving you a chance.” “You don’t scare me,” Stephen replied, his fingers fumbling the pistol in his pocket. “That’s the spirit. I like a man with nerve. And from what I hear you were quite a fellow in the old days. But you handled a lot of hoodlums. Petty thieves. The world has advanced since your time, Steve. It moves faster. I bet you’ve never even been in an automobile. It costs more to live these days, and picking pockets is small stuff; it’s nothing to talk in seven figures today. Millions bandied around like tenpins!” Pat paused, looking at Stephen as if to measure the effect of his words. “Look at the millions they’re shoveling up in Wall Street. Not one of those big fellows did a stroke of work for their earnings. And we’re no worse than they. They shovel in the shekels, hard-earned savings of poor suckers who don’t know what it’s all about. So, I say, why not we?” The man’s philosophy sounded familiar. Those thoughts had been his own. “What’s your game?” “That’s the stuff,” Pat said, nodding, with a faint smile to

his silent partner. “T take it you’re not too friendly disposed toward a gentleman by the name of Howard Ayres?”

Stephen paled. He made no reply. “Tt wouldn’t grieve you terribly if Mr. Ayres’ body were found deader than a skinned cat some bright morning. Don’t answer. We happen to know things, Steve. Well, Mr. Ayres dead is worthless to us. Mr. Ayres alive is worth thousands, maybe a hundred thousand or more. The man’s got more money than he will ever know what to do with.” Stephen was staring tensely at the speaker. His voice was cool. “What’s your plan?” Pat was not to be hurried. He grinned. “Easy, Steve. Before we go into it there may be a few answers we'd like to hear from your trembling lips.”

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away.”

Pat rubbed narrowed.

his hands, his pale face flushed, but his eyes

“First, are you in?” “That depends on what you intend to do and how we split.” “Tt’s as safe as Gibraltar. And we split ten per cent ‘to old Mike for giving us the idea, the balance three ways.’ Stephen shook his head. “Two ways,” he said in an even voice. Pat hesitated a moment, glanced at his silent partner, nodded.

“All right. Two ways.” “What’s your game?” “Easy, Steve. We’re getting along fine. There’s the second question. How much do you love this Ayres?” For answer Stephen dug his hand in his coat pocket and extracted his gun. “There are two bullets in this pistol—one was for him.” “Great. Mike, you’re a peach. Better be thinking about that big lunchroom on Broadway. It’s on the way.” Stephen waited for the man to continue. “Now, Stephen Yerkes, we’re giving you the chance of your life. Those twenty-five years in Sing Sing were wasted. But you

were a fool. Smart guys don’t go to Sing Sing—not these days. It’s because they don’t play with the police. It’s not safe, splitting with politicians or coppers. You never know when they’re cornered. We play alone—specialists, like those Wall Street fellows. Only we go them one better.” Pat was pacing nervously up and down the room. “And we don’t use guns unless we have to. And we have to’ when we’re double-crossed by our own gang.” He whirled and faced Mike, who cowered under his stare. “And that goes for you, Mr. Sheehan, escaped convict. And you, Stephen Yerkes, once you’re in on this.” Stephen returned the man’s steely stare. “Our game is blackmail, pure and simple blackmail.” “What do you know about Ayres?” Stephen had risen and was facing Pat. Pat grinned.

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“Enough to send him to Sing Sing for fifty years. He’s been mixed up in every shady deal this side of hell. And we’ve got ’em all listed. He'll be glad to pay the hundred thousand, maybe more, for our good will.”

“You don’t know Howard Ayres,” Stephen said. “We know enough to hang him. We’ve been studying him for weeks. Ever since Mike gave us the tip.”

“But I don’t know why you need me for this?” Pat chuckled. “We thought of that, too. You see, we get him here—a little persuasion will bring him, and Jim and I will see to that. If he balks, out comes Mr. Stephen Yerkes through that door. That will convince him we’re in earnest.” “What makes you think so?” “We happen to know he’d prefer you in distant parts.” “How do you know that?” “Well,” grinned Pat, ‘maybe you didn’t know. But there’s a price on your head. And we didn’t put it there.” A hundred thousand, maybe two, of Howard Ayres’ money. Clever fellows. He would have his own little demand for Ayres’ intimate hearing. “When does it come off?” “Tomorrow morning. Be here at ten.” Stephen left them. He went out alone. Mike remained. The day was endless. Stephen wandered downtown, tarried hours in the Stock Exchange. It was a wild day, prices mounting, millions turning over. A hundred thousand would go far in that market. He slept fitfully that night. At last the dawn. A few hours more, and it would be over. Maybe he would see Ted that very afternoon. There was a loud pounding on his door. He opened it quickly. Mike stood in the hall, his hair ruffled, his gray beard awry, his

eyes bleary.

“I had to see you, Steve,” he whispered. “I ain’t slept all night, what with Molly groanin’ and my head hot. Seems I’m near fit fer the insane house!” “What happened? Anything gone wrong?”

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‘Nothin’, Steve. Everything’s all right. Them fellahs’re goin’ through like they said. Only it’s got me worried. An’ I couldn’t sleep, I tell you.” “What got you worried? Those boys seem to know what they’re doing.” Mike sighed. “They know too much.” Mike stepped away from him. Talk!’ Stephen ordered, his fists clenched. Milk gulped hard. “They know young Thaddeus Ayres is your boy,” he said slowly. Stephen was at him, his eyes blazing. His hand shot out, holding Mike’s throat in an iron grip. “Who told them?” he shouted. Mike gasped. His body sank under Stephen’s weight. “Not meanin’ any harm, Steve,” he gurgled. “Are they bringing Ted along with Ayres? Speak up or it’s the last breath you'll ever take.” Mike nodded. Stephen released his hold. He pulled the shaken man to his feet. “Come along,” he said slowly.

44 Pat opened the door. He grinned when he saw them. “Seems like you’re early, Steve. The day’s hardly begun.” He led them into the parlor. “The day of days,” he chuckled. “We'll be counting greenbacks before—”’ He became serious before the look in Stephen’s eyes. “Anything on your mind?” he asked blandly, with a quick glance at the door. “Only this. Are you bringing anyone else with Ayres? Talk

fast.” Pat’s eyes narrowed and turned to glare at Mike. “I think Sing Sing’s calling you, Sheeny Mike,” he muttered. “Talk fast,” Stephen repeated.

“Pm handling this my own way. All you do is take your share.”

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“You’re aiming to get Ted Ayres here, too. And threaten to expose him as the son of a convict? Is that part of your game?” Pat sneered. “That boy’s nothing to you.” “The boy’s out, d’you hear?” The door behind Stephen slid open. “Keep him covered, Jim,” Pat called. “Better tie °em both up,

so they'll stay put till we get back. No use taking chances with that tribe.” He stooped, reaching out for a long leather strap. A shot rang out. ... then another... a third. Mike crumpled to the floor. “They got me, Steve.” Stephen bent over him. “Better make sure about ’em, Steve,” Mike gasped. Stephen examined the two figures on the floor. Both were still. He returned to Mike. “Poor Molly.” He was gasping for breath. ““An’ her tellin’ me last night she’s gonna have a baby.” His eyes drooped. His body quivered slightly, and lay still.

45 The group of idlers at the prison wall were dispersing. “Great thing, that electric chair. They say the man’s dead before he feels the shock.” “A good way to die. Too easy for them kind.” “Shucks! Killers don’t give a hoot about how they’re blasted to hell. There’s some countries still use the ax to chop heads off.” “And they don’t lack customers either, I suppose.”

“Seems like I’ve heard something about abolishing this killing business.” “Maybe they ought to do somethin’ about it. It’s doing no good that I can see, with all the murders we read about.” “Put ’em away for life, I say. It’s worse than death. And juries won’t be so slow convicting them.” Howard Ayres, walking alone toward the Ossining Railroad Station, listened to the casual comments. He smiled as he went.

—

EPILOGUE

Pen lOiG Ory Dear WARDEN: By this time you must have despaired of hearing from us. Today rounds out exactly one month since our meeting in your office. But our delay in writing was not due to indifference. It was simply that we were unable to agree on a unanimous expression of opinion. On two points, however, there was no dissension. First, we

want to thank you for the opportunity of meeting each other. Not that we have resolved into a mutual admiration society, but frequent meetings, some of them not too peaceful or harmonious, have brought us more closely together. We were agreed that we owe you an apology. Our hasty departure, not even accepting your proffered hospitality, might have given you a wrong impression. Your story left us wilted, physically and mentally. Living one life is often an arduous business, but living through four of them, as we did that night, was trying beyond measure. And then when you suggested a tour through the old cell block, proposing to point out the site of cell 202, with the possibility of seeing living prisoners in cells similar to the one which housed our ancestors, we felt

utterly unable to go on. You would have laughed to see us race to the railroad station, friend Wilde on his short fat legs wheezing and puffing from the strain, Captain Brandt trying to maintain a stately military stride at a speed which was almost a rout, and Thaddeus Ayres following at our heels with quick, short, nervous

steps. Not one of us turned to look back at the prison. We joked about it later. It was Abner Wilde who suggested (the man knows his Bible) that all of us were harried by a subconscious fear of the

fate of Lot’s wife when she looked back at the destruction in her wake. But you, no doubt, are anxious to have our reactions to that extraordinary experience. I have waited in vain for some form of 685

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constructive crystallization. Our conferences have been fruitless. We have found no common footing. As a matter of fact, we have adjourned sine die, each of the other three gentlemen having gone his way. Wilde is on the high seas bound for London, where, he announced not without pride, his wife is to be presented at Court. Captain Brandt has been ordered west for seasonal maneuvers. Thaddeus Ayres is in Washington, at this moment deep in the mysteries of national and international finance. And I—well, I am still weighing problems of law and evidence hurled at me by astute counsel. Life today is so demanding, so complex, so all-engrossing that one finds himself resenting the intrusion of what has been lived.

Friend Wilde expounded it clearly when he said, “‘no one is responsible for his ancestors.” An inane sentiment, of course, except as an indication of his, and our, desire to live our own lives as a

single evolutionary process wholly divorced from preceding cycles, cut off from the lives of our four imprisoned ancestors. Having heard of them, Warden, we now want to compose our attitudes toward the memory of them, assimilate the effects your story had on us, and individually be free to go ahead much in the way we did before. What have we to compose? The memory of four men convicted of murder; four prisoners suffering the brutalities of old Sing Sing. These men were not irresponsibles who, generally speaking, were a prey to every emotion. Mentally, they were not above their fellows. But each of them was fully capable of realizing—and I dare say did realize—the enormity of his offense. What could they have expected but to answer to society in the only way society

understood to impress them? More amusing, and perhaps more serious, was the attitude of Captain Brandt. He has been trained to matter-of-fact thinking, and apparently his matter-of-fact opinions lead him to peculiar standards of moral appraisals. ““Grandpop was too thin-skinned,” was the way he put it. He meant it, of course. ““There’s many a high-class Wall Streeter today who did worse and doesn’t find his conscience bothering him.” Which may or may not be true. Nevertheless, justification as regards criminality is a dangerous expedient. There is no justification for crime. Nor do I agree

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with the school of thought that would set crime up as a natural human instinct or with the public prosecutor who, in a despairing moment, exclaimed that America’s high crime rate is due entirely to the fact that we are as a whole criminally-minded. I believe that the criminal represents no one but himself, that he is our individualist par excellence, who feels that the world rotates around the pedestal of his own creation. Arnold Brandt was that kind of man. He might well have called himself a skeptic. He was not purified by fire, nor by the sufferings of his fellow prisoners. He was not remade until his ego crumpled and he realized that his horizons were as wide as his natural capacities. Only then did he

begin to know happiness. It was Thaddeus Ayres, though, who responded most actively. The knowledge that his heritage is so vastly different from the one he has always known and accepted without thought must have come as something of a blow. At first his only articulate comment was, “I should have known about this twenty-five years ago. . . .” Had he known, he apparently meant to say, he might not have become the Thaddeus Ayres we know, the financier whose opinions carry such weight in responsible circles. But then he seemed to rebel. There was little about Stephen Yerkes that was worth perpetuating. Modern newspaper headlines would have branded him a “master mind” among criminals. He personified everything that was vicious. Yet he alone of all the four prisoners who carved their stories on the stone wall of that cell left a truly portentous message. He called himself a marionette—a message more profound than Shakespeare’s. Not the players, but the played! It is certainly true of the criminal. And Howard Ayres was a far greater criminal than Yerkes. Yet Thaddeus Ayres, the meticulously honest mind, is the product of them both. Apparently a wizard’s creation, purity grown out of mire and filth. Nevertheless, the word “‘marionette” sank in. I do not know what intimations Ayres, the determined individualist, received of

the fact that perhaps he, too, is one of the played. Up to this affair, he had been comfortably conscious of his solid worth and of the rewards which naturally came to his individual achievement. The knowledge of his parentage, and even more, that penetrating “marionette” have disturbed his well-ordered system of standards

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and values. Its very foundations have been shaken. It is an extraordinarily deflating concept. “Stephen Yerkes is dead,” he said. “If he derived comfort from ascribing his condition to the machinations of an unsympathetic fate, I certainly don’t grudge it to him. But every man is

responsible for himself, he can’t pass the blame or the credit on to others. Ultimately it is to himself he must answer, he can’t pass the buck to outside forces. That’s too easy. It’s a simple psychological device to maintain the ego,” Ayres insisted. “But Stephen Yerkes had no hand in shaping me. His life can cast no shadow over mine.” His vehemence betrayed him, though. Or so it seemed to me. He felt a desperate need to reject the idea of external forces playing upon him, to reject the fact that he is of the seed of Stephen Yerkes, and that he has been fashioned by the hand and will of Howard Ayres, who builded far better than he knew or intended. He had to assert his individuality; he could not yield gracefully to the concept of an existence without the free will of Thaddeus

Ayres. So he has gone back to Washington, ostensibly dismissing the matter from his mind in favor of more important things. In the rush of his activities in find it possible to reduce his a minimum. And I suppose where unconsciously he will

these troubled times he will probably moments of uncomfortable insight to eventually he will come to the point offer up a little prayer of thanks for

the total extinction of the Yerkes name. Perhaps you, Warden, better than we, can point the moral. And it may be that you can explain better than I the wholly inexplicable circumstance that I, a straight-thinking and practical-minded judge, am seriously considering retiring from the-

bench, though I am still in the prime of life and despite a lifelong ambition to reach the highest possible rung in the judicial world. Is it that I, too, since our meeting with you, have imbibed something of old Edmund Rolphe’s spirit and have become a cynic? Is it because of the unending line of prisoners that passes before me

daily . . . the undeniable manifestation of deficient and ineffectual social standards? It is no mere fancy, that consciousness of old Edmund’s presence hovering over my courtroom making specters of the prisoners standing before me, turning mature men into chil-

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dren who stare at me in bewilderment, and young men into sneering adults. And it is old Edmund Rolphe, I am sure, who walks home with me after my day in court is ended, whispering garrulously about the cynics and skeptics I have created.

It is not the rattling skeletons that fill me with foreboding; it is the continuing process by which those skeletons are fashioned, and the revelation that I am a contributing factor to the machine that produces them. It is this depressing thought that gives me no rest. EDMUND ROLPHE. My pEaR JuDGE ROLPHE:

It may interest you to know that I have destroyed the four stones. They have been crushed, their dust scattered on the roadways over which our prisoners pass in their daily routine. It was not a sudden thought with me. I had pondered it long and carefully and decided, finally, that they had served their purpose. Perhaps our four prisoners were impelled to carve their lines by that subconscious urge which prompts most wrongdoers to excuse their crimes. Perhaps self-pity drove them on. Or did they grope, as we who watched them live groped, for the single force that catapulted them into Sing Sing? Often when I sit in my study at the close of our prison day and peer out at those solid structures which house my wards, I wish for myself the power and eloquence of those great leaders and teachers of men who interpreted life for our inspirational guidance. A bizarre fancy, bordering on the ludicrous, for a prison warden to turn preacher! How those old Sing Sing wardens and keepers would have bristled at the thought! And yet, every prison cell projects a sermon as eloquent and powerful and vivid as ever was proclaimed in the hearing of man.

Not four messages, but a hundred thousand might have been written by as many prisoners during the century of Sing Sing’s existence. Not four descendants, but a million or more, might today stand at the gates of Sing Sing sensing a kinship with its walls which at one time or another sheltered or shadowed the lives of their progenitors. A figurative multitude which would

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doubtless shrug its figurative shoulder, and, in the language of the day, exclaim, “So what!” Were we sure of ourselves and those who are to follow us,

the story of cell 202 would have been purposeless. And the routine of old Sing Sing interesting only as a subject for historical research; the prison itself eventually to become a landmark dedicated to the memory of what was and shall not be again. A seemingly impossible goal. For the Sing Sing of today, as all other prisons, is as real, as necessary and, I confess, as fruitless as ever.

I was deeply moved, Judge, by your reference to the spirit of old Edmund, your great-grandfather, hovering in your courtroom and flooding your mind with penetrating doubts. It is not difficult to appreciate the qualms that disturb you as you pronounce the words which send the convicted criminals to their cells. And yet you are but completing the link of a chain not of your own forging. It is in this respect that our four prisoners, and the messages they carved, loom important. I agree with you that the indifference of our three friends is a studied gesture. Like most of us, they want to feel that they have broken with the past; that each era and each generation carves its own peculiar destiny. It would, indeed, be comforting to be able to cut loose utterly from the influences that shaped the lives of our four prisoners, and dismiss definitely and irrevocably the horror of old Sing Sing as “the evils of a bygone age.” Really, a consoling thought! Such things could not happen in this enlightened day! And I am aware of the sigh that escapes the reader as he turns the last page of this narrative and mutters: “Even Abner Wilde and Arnold Brandt did not succumb to the rigors of old Sing Sing. And Edmund Rolphe. . . . Well, are there not prisoners who find even your model prisons irksome? And Stephen Yerkes. ... A good example of the irredeemable, not unfamiliar to our presentday penology!” Human behavior can never achieve the status of an exact science. Its close association with the metaphysical precludes accurate diagnosis. The best we can hope for is to provide the setting that will inspire a spiritual renaissance. When that is achieved physical torment can assume purifying proportions. That may be the explanation for the survival of Abner Wilde and Arnold

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Brandt. Not that Sing Sing provided that setting. In the very nature of things it could not. Chance and circumstance helped. The prisoners’ predisposition was, of course, an elemental factor. But even though our three friends, secure in the anonymity which was assured them, have run away from this thing, you and I cannot avoid it. You and your colleagues who fill our prisons and J, the warden, cannot be indifferent. To us this business of

crime appears in all its devastating horror. Lives broken beyond mending. Unbelievable suffering. Emotions made callous by constant suppressions.

From time immemorial—ever since the Voice called to Cain in retribution—men have pondered crime, tried to isolate the crime impulse as physicians have done so successfully with death-dealing germs. The fact that crime remains today a hard-hitting, positive force in man’s social swing is indisputable evidence of the futility of our probe. Vaunted advance in every sphere of scientific research, even clarifying spiritual conceptions of man’s destiny and

purpose seem to have made no appreciable dent in the number of criminals or the volume of crime. The security from foreign aggression that we, as a people, so desperately seek by every power and weapon at our command is being undermined by furtive forces within. So it was in the early days of our republic, so it has continued through our periods of national adolescence, so it is today,

despite America’s proud preéminence as a moral force. Shall we admit it is beyond us? That the same sun which nurtures life and provides its sustenance also brings forth dark, unfathomable, track-

less jungles abounding in slime and filth and horrifying death?

Shall we confess there are human hearts which, like the ice-packs at the poles, cannot respond to its warming rays? That there is a definite, irreparable cleavage between good and bad? If that were so, then we might well wreck our churches, scrap our moral codes, tear down our courts of justice and turn back the pages of history a thousand, perhaps a million, years, to the days when instinct rather than reason prevailed, and restraint was imposed by the herd rather than by that inner urge for spiritual self-preservation.

I

do not know how you feel about this, Judge. Your letter gives no indication. That, I believe, was old Sing Sing’s text. It is not mine. I believe that crime is a positive reaction to positive influences

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. . . not necessarily physical . . . they may be purely emotional. Whether it be the notorious gangster whose bloody trail is blazoned in the blackest and biggest type over the front pages of our newspapers, or the derelict whose only offense is a pitiful misdemeanor, a force other than his own will broke him loose from normal ties and associations and developed propensities for the abnormal. Therein lay the crime germ. Its development is a natural consequence. We watched it develop in the lives of the four prisoners of cell 202. Had we but the keenness of perception we might see it gestate in the mind and character of every offender. The permanence of our institutions depends upon the degree of individual responsibility toward public peace and security. No one can or should escape the consequences of his conduct. The criminal must answer for his offenses. Not all of us, however, agree

on the manner of his retribution. But it does not require profound wisdom to understand that the most drastic methods of suppression and punishment, by whatever agency, will not dam the tide of crime so long as we fail to isolate its germ. Surprising though it may seem to you, I believe old Sing Sing to have been logical, more logical than many of our current conceptions of prison administration. Our predecessors made no pretenses. The criminal was a defaulter, who forfeited not only lib-

erty but every right to social relationship. His was a fixed obligation which could be canceled only by a term in prison and subjection to all the rigors of rigid discipline and “hard labor.” We profess to have advanced beyond the stage of mere retribution for offenses and agree that society, in sending a man to prison, assumes a definite obligation toward him. He has a right to expect that he will be analyzed physically and mentally. That he will be provided with props necessary for his regeneration. Yet we stop short of fulfillment. We insist on retaining inhibitions, which made Sing Sing and all nineteenth-century prisons a byword. We resent the continuance of normal human contacts and

the introduction of activities: provocative of clean living and straight thinking. We forbid constructive labor. But we expect the prisoner, on his emergence, to be better than when he was admitted. I can imagine the hundred and fifty thousand men now doing time in the various major prisons throughout the country sur-

EPILOGUE

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rendering to the impulse that prompted our four prisoners of cell 202 to write their messages in stone. Their four words—rebel, cynic, skeptic, marionette—might

have been written by all of them. And they might well be written by each of the vast host of men now serving out their terms in our modern prisons, for basically their status does not differ from that of their predecessors. Our indifference permitted the incubation of the crime germ with which they early were infected; when it assumed ugly proportions and manifested destructive tendencies, we addressed ourselves hysterically to that ugliness unmindful of origins and gestatory influences. So long as that is our attitude toward criminals and prisons there can be no hope for a marked reduction or a lasting cessation of crime. Trigger men alone, state or federal, will not accomplish it. There is, of course, no universal panacea. It is difficult to undo

the things that have become ingrained in our national consciousness, and in short order to make good every deficiency. Simpler legal codes will help. Simpler habits of thought and living. A more even distribution of opportunity to achieve contentment. But above all, our educational, social and economic agencies must be reorganized with the view to strengthening our moral fiber as in-

dividuals and as a nation. That, Judge, is my interpretation of the messages carved by ‘our four prisoners. All of us share in the legacy they bequeathed.

Cordially yours, Lewis E. Lawes.

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