To hold his copper and to keep to himself—the sheriff knew what he was saying when he had coupled these admonitions. 9009 learned this through several months of silent observation.
He learned, during that time, many things about guards and convicts. First, he found that there were two classes of convicts—the ordinary convict and the trusty. He wondered much at the trusties. He saw them all over the prison. A trusty had supervision of the cells in his tier. A trusty superintended the waiters of the dining-hall. The druggist to whom one morning 9009 went for quinine was striped. Convicts kept the prison records. Convicts kept the keys of the cell houses. A murderer serving life sentence had in his charge nearly all the keys inside the wall.
