Silent Sam and Other Stories of Our Day/Silent Sam
SILENT SAM
SILENT SAM
I
THE deputy sheriff who brought Sam from the county jail to the state penitentiary came always with one prisoner at a time, because he traveled on a railway pass and charged the state with mileage and expenses for each trip. He would have preferred to bring several prisoners together and make fewer trips, but this would have reduced his profits. He had a wife and two daughters to provide for; and though the trips were a weariness, he sacrificed himself for his family.
He was a bald and genial Welshman of the name of Johns, unhealthy looking, flat in the chest and flabbily heavy-waisted, as if the weight of his flesh had settled down toward the seat of the office-chair in which he spent so much of his time. He had a native genius for gossip—interesting human gossip, particularly of little political scandals and partisan intrigues. It was one of the jokes of his circle that he had been "born to wear a Mother Hubbard and gabble over a back-yard fence." He would talk to a prisoner as insistently as to a judge, with all the democracy of garrulousness, on the same terms of common human frailty, in a loud cheerfulness, with a cynical humor, protruding his tongue when he laughed. He was generally regarded as a comic character, but "no such fool as you 'd think."
He had found it impossible to get any reply from his prisoner, or even any attention. Sam sat dumb, staring at the red plush of the seat before him, with his black eyebrows raised and his forehead wrinkled. It was not that he ignored Johns, but, evidently, that he did not hear him.
The deputy decided, first, that Sam was "a sulky tramp."
As a tramp he was typical—collarless, in a dirty linen shirt, with a leather belt supporting trousers spotted with oil stains, his shoes looking as if they had been worn in a lime-pit, his straw hat soiled and stained, his beard rusty. And yet his face, in a painting, would have drawn the eyes of an art gallery. It was full of the record of life, of things seen and suffered, though perhaps not understood. His mild blue eyes were set in a vacancy of thought. The lifted eyebrows of his frown suggested a mute groping.
He had been found guilty of train-wrecking—of causing the deaths of thirty-two passengers on the "D. & C." railway, by loosening a rail on the bridge across the Little Sandy near Golden Gorge. And he had been sentenced to imprisonment for life.
This shocking fact did not affect the deputy at all. Professionally, he had no more interest in the reason for the man's imprisonment than a "funeral director" has in the cause of death; it was enough for him that "the body of Samuel Daneen was in his hands for delivery to its living tomb. He had had sufficient cynical experience of the courts of his state to know that innocence was sometimes convicted and that guilt often went free; but this was a matter that was not on his "beat," as he would say; he could not help the innocent any more than he could impede the guilty.
He was only anxious, at the moment, to know whether or not Sam was a bachelor—for it was one of his theories of life that marriage preserved a man to virtue, whereas bachelorhood led through dissipation to disease, shiftlessness, the poor farm, or a penal institution. His own wife, he held, had made a man of him.
He wished to preach to Sam from some such text, and it piqued him that Sam rejected his friendly overtures of conversation. He bounced himself impatiently on the springs of his seat, or he turned suddenly to look back over his shoulder at the car; and each time he contrived, as if accidentally, to give a twisting wrench to the bare wrist that was chained to his handcuff. At last Sam, without a change of his blank look, uttered a low, moaning groan that came as if it had worked its way up from the very depths of inarticulate distress.
It gave Johns a chill. He said to himself: "He 's bug! He 's crazy!" And, sitting very quiet, he watched his prisoner warily, askance.
Sam showed no further sign of life, having now sunken upon himself in a staring collapse. The deputy could not even see the blinking of an eyelid. "He 's got an eye like a fish." he said to himself, contemptuously. "He 's a dope fiend."
"He 's dotty," he concluded later. "He 's just a half-witted bum."
But though he was reassured, he remained watchful, with a sense of something uncanny beside him—and a nervousness that was not relieved till their train slowed down at the little muddy mountain town that made a railway station for "the Pen."
Sam rose to the pull of the handcuff, like a man drugged, and followed out to the station platform in a shambling daze. Johns turned him up the cement sidewalk of the hillside street, shuffling along beside his prisoner flat-footedly. The deputy's insteps had fallen in his days of police duty. Whenever he was accused of any political obliquity, he would admit, "Well, my feet don't track good"—with a humorous air of conceding the one fault of which he could be justly suspected.
To a man who has been condemned to prison for life, there may be something momentous in his arrival at the gates of doom; but to the little world that receives him, the event is commonplace and routinary. In Sam's case, his coming was only an incident in the arrival of Johns, whose visits were always welcome; and, to the officials who received him, the prisoner remained as inconspicuous as a boy led by the hand to make a call with his parent.
Handcuffed to the deputy, he was drawn up the stone steps of the administration building, in the cheerful sunlight, and led into the coolness of a white-tiled hall that echoed at once with Johns's "Well, boys, how are you? How are you?" There was a note of eager escape from silence in the exuberance of his voice. He turned Sam into a receiving office and held him standing before a wooden railing while he gave a clerk the mittimus from the judge who had passed sentence.
"All right," the clerk said. "I 'll give it to you on your way out"—referring to the receipt for the prisoner. He was busy making up his quarry accounts for the warden's annual report. "How are your feet?" he asked, with his pen across his teeth, grinning.
"Still steppin' heavenward, little one," the deputy replied from the doorway. "Be good."
He took Sam down the tiled hall to its farther end, where a turnkey sat in a cage made of two ceiling-high gratings across the passageway and two grated doors in the sidewalls. Johns greeted him jovially. He nodded in reply, with a slow smile, but he did not speak.
He had a manner of being unwilling that he should be distracted by conversation from his attention to his life-work of opening and closing four grated doors so as to have only one door at a time unlocked. He did not even glance at the new prisoner in reply to Johns's genial, "Brought y' another ol' bachelor, Jake." When they had entered his cage he locked the door behind them, spoke softly into a telephone on the wall, and then unlocked another door, in the side of his cage, to let in an official in a blue uniform whom the loquacious Johns greeted as "Cap'n."
"Here 's the noisiest bum I ever seen," Johns said, as he released Sam from his handcuffs. "He 's about as chatty as a load o' lumber."
Sam stared past them at nothing.
"He 's a terror to think," Johns said. "You can see that."
They looked at him for the first time, and there was something in the sadness of his set eyes that abashed all but Johns. The captain, with the bruskness of a man who had blundered upon the scene of a private emotion, immediately signed to the turnkey, who noiselessly opened the third door. The captain hurried Sam through it, holding him by the upper arm, and led him down the hall to a large arch that opened on the prison courtyard. A guard, sitting in a steel cage above them, with a pump-gun across his knees, looked down watchfully on their backs as they stepped into the graveled court. And Sam was "in the Pen."
Here, between the gray stone ramparts of the outer walls, stood a gray stone quadrangle of cell-houses, work-shops, and barrack-like buildings, guarded by sentries with rifles in watch-towers, or by men at grated doors with loaded canes and concealed revolvers. These men wore blue uniforms. Their sole work in life was to watch over seven hundred other men, in striped yellow-and-black uniforms, so as to prevent them from escaping from the little granite hell to which they had been condemned for transgressing those commandments of society which we call, proudly, "laws."
The sunlight that had shone on Sam as he mounted the entrance steps to the administration building shone on him again as he crossed the quadrangle to the hospital building, where he would be numbered, photographed, bathed and shaved, and photographed a second time in his stripes. But the difference between the sun in the courtyard and the sun on the steps was this: no matter how long Sam, might live to see the sun shining in the courtyard, he would never again see the sun shining on the steps.
II
Johns went at once to "talk politics" in the warden's office, where he was as welcome as a country peddler who brings all the neighborhood news. And he was still there—his hat pushed back from his bald forehead, his hands clasped pudgily across the bulge of his waist—when the day captain returned from entering Sam according to the prescribed formalities, and stood frowning at a paper in his hand till the warden should recognize him.
Warden Zug was merely a political henchman thriving in a political office. It was his business to make easy the fulfilment of prison contracts by faithful partisans, without public scandal—to collect his own graft on supplies and not be too greedy of the larger profits of the contractors—to find places on the prison staff for the lesser parasites of the party and see that in their grafting on the prisoners they stopped short of oppression—in short, to manage the prison (and its annual appropriations) for his political friends, while carefully preserving the appearance of administering it as a penal institution. He was a small, sandy-haired, wrinkled man, who had been known to his home district as "Foxy Zug."
"We 've got a pris'ner here," the day captain said, "that don't answer questions. I think he 's kind o' dotty. I 've filled this out the best I can." He put his paper on the warden's desk and held it with a forefinger pointing. "Sam Daneen 's the name on the mittimus. He looks about thirty-five, now he 's cleaned up. But I can't get his religion—ner whether he 's married."
"Ol' bach'ler," Johns put in, authoritatively. "He 's an ol' bach'ler. They always are."
"What 's the matter?" the warden asked. "Sulky?"
The day captain rubbed his forehead. "No-o. He don't seem to hear you. I don' know but what he 's simple. When you prod him, he jus' looks round at you an' sort o' don't see you. Jim had to strip him—an' do everything else fer him. Mebbe he 's sick. I don' know."
"What 's he in fer?"
Johns interposed: "Say, Warden, don't you remember the wreck on the Little Sandy—down by the Gorge—on the D. & C.? Judge Purvis gave him life fer it."
Warden Zug had begun to dip his pen. He looked up at Johns with a quick craftiness, stirring his pen around in the shallow ink-well. "Judge Purvis?" he said. "A 'D. & C.' case?"
And Johns, without releasing a muscle of his fat impassivity, dropped a solemn, sly wink of guile at him.
Zug scrutinized his pen-nib a moment and then returned to the paper before him. "'Unmarried,'" he said, scribbling it in on a blank line. "Daneen, eh? Huh. 'R. C.' Let it go at that. Where 've you put him?"
"Number one cell-house, Warden—till I find out where he 's goin' to work."
"Uh-huh." The warden thought it over. He said, absent-mindedly: "That 'll be all right, I guess," and held out the paper to the captain.
The man took it with an air of official indifference, but he had noticed the passage of looks between Johns and Zug, and he resented his exclusion from the secret. When the door had closed behind him, Johns hitched his chair up closer to the desk and said under his voice: "I did n't see the trial. Warden. I was off to the convention. But I remember when he was arrested. Gerter found him asleep 'n under a tree near the track, an' run him in on the chance."
"How many was killed?"
"About thirty, mebbe. I forget."
"Huh!" Zug nodded shrewdly. "What was it? Spread rails?"
Johns looked as wise as a joss—to conceal his ignorance. "Warden," he said, "that 'D. & C.' road-bed ain't safe fer a hand-car, half its time." He insinuated: "You know what Purvis is."
He was, in fact, trying to draw out information under the pretense of imparting it. He knew almost nothing of Daneen's case; he had scarcely given it a thought. But Zug's face of suspicion had started the hint of a judicial scandal for him, and he was smoking it out.
"The 'D. & C.' backed Purvis's nomination with twenty thousand," Zug said. "Gave it to us flat, fer the campaign in our distric', the night we put him on the ticket. He 's been doin' their dirty work ever since. There ain't been a cent o' damages collected from 'em in his court since he went on the bench."
"Well," Johns hazarded, "they 'd 've had some damages to pay on that Little Sandy wreck if they had n't hung it on this poor hobo. Him wreck a train!" He lay back and laughed shrilly—venting the pleasure he felt in having caught his scandal. "Why, the poor mutt ain't got spunk enough to derail a jack rabbit."
Zug said suddenly: "I want to see him."
Johns rose with ingratiating alacrity. "He 's in number one."
The warden merely growled: "Tell 'em to bring him in here."
As a politician, he knew, of course, that he could not meddle with any decree of injustice that had been inspired by the great "D. & C." It made the governors; it picked the legislatures; it nominated the supreme court of his state. But in forcing Judge Purvis on the district bench it had crowded aside Zug's favorite son-in-law, in Zug's own district, and humiliated him in the home of his friends. By their subsequent reward of that humiliation the "D. & C. people" had only served to justify his resentment in his own eyes, though he had come to feel less bitterness toward the "D. & C." than toward Purvis. He wished—humanly enough—to despise Purvis, to look down on him, to find him guilty of some act that should make him contemptible; for Zug was not so small in mind that he could be satisfied with a mere resentment.
He waited, frowning darkly.
He was disappointed in Daneen's appearance when the guard led him in to the office. The convict was no longer a possibly innocent man; he had been made into a criminal. His head had become the sinister cropped skull of dishonor. Stripped of his beard, his face below the eyes had a wrinkled, unwholesome, repellent pallor. His ill-fitting prison stripes disfigured him as much as they degraded. He stumbled in his clumsy convict shoes. He looked ridiculous, odious, evil. There remained only the dignity of pathos in his mute eyes.
Zug, without rising, dismissed the guard with a jerk of the head toward the door, and said to Sam, in a kindly gruffness: "Come over here."
Sam did not move. He stood with his arms hanging, his head drooped. Johns took him by the sleeve and drew him up beside the warden's table-desk. His prison cap lay on the carpet where he had been standing.
"He 's dotty, Warden," Johns apologized. "He 's doped."
Zng replied, in an undertone, impatiently: "Leave him alone." He was absorbed in his scrutiny of the heavy, slanted sag of the mouth, the perplexed corrugation of the forehead, the sightless, wrinkled stare of the blue eyes. "Look at me," he said. "Here." He rose and put his hand to Sam's chin, and turned the face toward him.
For a moment the eyes did not even see him. They looked through him, beyond him. When at last the pupils focused on him, it was with the empty dullness of the gaze of a sick animal.
"What 've they been doin' to you?" Zug asked.
If he had been holding a cowed collie dog by the muzzle to speak to it, it might have watched him so—not looking at his lips when they moved, as even an intelligent child would, but at his whole face in a large, meaningless, dumb regard.
"You never wrecked that train, did you?"
It seemed as if he were about to answer. His eyebrows twitched and contracted. The muscles trembled in his lips with a fluttering that accompanied a clicking of his teeth. His eyes wavered irresolutely, but with a light of intelligence. And then suddenly the eyebrows went up in their plaintive frown again. His gaze set on the distance. His lips sagged back into their loose droop. And Zug felt that he had been heard and, after some sort of despairing consideration, ignored.
He sat down and drummed thoughtfully on his blotter-pad. "I suppose," he said. "I suppose."
He summed it up to Johns: "He 's got his, an' I guess he knows it." There was contempt in his pity—the natural contempt of such a man as he for the victim of those conditions of society over which he himself had triumphed. "Tell them to take him back," he ordered. "Tell them to ask the steward to give him work in the kitchen."
Johns had been watching and listening in an eager silence. He took Sam by the elbow, now, with the air of an old woman who has shared in a scene of family scandal and who conceals, in an expression of decent deprecation, her relish of the gossip in which she is to delight. He even stopped sympathetically to pick up Sam's prison cap as they passed it; and he gave the warden's instructions to the guard in the corridor, confidentially, in the manner of a loyal friend of the family who could be depended on to be discreet. ("I wonder what the hell 's up?" the guard asked the turnkey, and they both stared at the mysterious Sam.)
"Well, Warden," Johns said, after an awkward pause of lingering, "I guess I 'll toddle along."
Zug grunted indifferently; and the deputy sheriff hurried away as fast as he could shuffle, to pursue the truth about Sam where he knew he could find it—in the sheriff's office.
III
It was a week later that he returned to the penitentiary (with, a young burglar who whistled rag-time sibilantly through his teeth all the time, to show his courage). And in the meantime Daneen had become "Silent Sam" to the whole prison. He had been put among the dish-washers in the kitchen, and no one had been able to get a word out of him. For two days he had held back the line by the fumbling slowness of his movements, which seemed blindly automatic rather than guided by any attentive intelligence; and because dish-washing is a rushed and hasty affair, particularly in the evening when the kitchen squad are the last to reach their beds, the men harried him with muttered imprecations, tried to jostle him into greater activity, and complained of him to the "trusty" who was their foreman.
On the morning of the third day, Sam dropped his arms into the dish-water without even rolling up his sleeves. When the trusty came to remonstrate, he seemed unable to control his hands, staring at them like an idiot when the tin dishes slipped through his fingers and clattered on the stone flagging of the floor. The steward finally took him away and put him with the men who sat all day peeling the potatoes that were boiled for the prisoners by the barrel.
Here he did better for a time, hunched on a stool, scraping away mechanically at the big Western tubers with a dull knife, in fits of industry that alternated with intervals of a frowning and motionless vacuity from which he had to be wakened with a shake. Then he began to have trouble with his eyes—an inflammation, apparently. It kept them always blurred with a moisture that overflowed on his cheeks, as if he were peeling onions instead of potatoes. He seemed no longer able to see what he was doing, and he cut ruinous slices from the vegetables instead of merely peeling them.
The prison doctor found him suffering from a nervous affection of the tear ducts; they had so contracted that they were unable to drain the eyes. For want of a better place, he was given a cell in the hospital annex, where the feeble-minded were confined. They had the freedom of the corridor of their cell-house during certain hours of the day, and Sam walked there incessantly, with his head down, or rested, squatting on his heels in a corner, blinking his wet eyes.
When Deputy-Sheriff Johns had turned over his young burglar to the prison, he found the doctor in the warden's office reporting on Sam's condition. And the doctor was saying: "There 's nothing to prevent him from talking if he wants to. I thought he 'd been hurt in the head, perhaps—a brain lesion. No such thing. It is n't that he won't talk because he 's insane, but he 's probably going insane because he won't talk. We can't do anything for him, except keep him quiet and give him a chance."
Johns contained himself in silence—as a sort of proof to himself that he could be silent, for he had been talking to a newspaper reporter about Sam, and he knew that he had been indiscreet. Not until the door had closed on the doctor's departure did he draw his chair up beside the warden's desk and whisper eagerly: "I found out all about him, Warden. He was jobbed—Daneen. One o' the boys down 'n our office was onto the whole game, an' he 's tellin' about it. He talks too much, that boy. He 'll get himself into trouble. But he was jobbed—Daneen. He was jobbed."
The warden nodded, sat back from Johns's excited whisper, lit a cigar, and said indifferently: "Sure. That 's what I told you."
"He was jobbed. Gerter found him asleep 'n under a tree, when he went down to look over the wreck, an' he woke him up, an' he said he had n't heard nothin', an' they gathered him in on suspicion. Then some fellow named Gahn, that nobody never seen round here before, got into the case an' swore he 'd seen Sam foolin' round the bridge an' kickin' the rails, an' they had the damnedest jury you ever seen—a reg'lar lot o' court-house bums, with that crook Dietz fer foreman—an' them an' Purvis soaked him. Gahn's lit out since." He dropped his voice still lower. "The track-walker told one o' the boys—he was up fer a witness—an' he told him Gahn was a railroad detective he 'd knowed back East. He 'd made out he was a ranch-hand—Gahn did—walkin' from Sandy City to Big Golden lookin' fer work. He done it to get the reward. An' they soaked Daneen."
"Sure," the warden said dispassionately. "That 's what I told you."
"Daneen 'd got a-hold of a shyster lawyer that took a twenty-dollar bill he 'd carried sewed up in his shirt—an' then let him get it in the neck. He did n't have nothin' to say fer himself, till Purvis ast him from the bench, an' then he started a long spiel about his wife havin' consumption an' shippin' her off to California, an' him startin' to walk from Pittsburg after her, doin' odd jobs an' bein' six months on the road—'cause he 'd give her all his money an' sends her half he makes—but Purvis cuts him short an' gives him life—so 's the road would n't have to pay damages."
"Sure. Sure. That 's Purvis." The warden stood up with a sour smile.
"He ain't opened his mouth since," Johns added. "They could n't get a word out o' him in the jail. He did n't even write to his wife about it."
Zug had reached the door. "Lot o' good that 'd 'a' done him," he grumbled. I got to get my report out." He left Johns without any apology.
Johns found himself resentfully pleased that he had talked to the reporter. That reporter recognized a good "story" when he heard it.
Johns was "no such fool as you 'd think." Though he could make a joke at his own expense, he was not a meek man. He had his vanity. And he could be secretly and poisonously malicious in his enmities. He could "tell a thing or two," if he chose, about almost any one who crossed him. He was not above telling what he knew even about the Powers that befriended him—and then denying that he had opened his loyal and protesting mouth. The reporter to whom he had been talking, worked for the independent "labor journal" that was leading the new political revolt against the railway control of the government of the state; he had had more than one scandal "tipped off" to him by Johns.
"I 'm right in the game with the rest o' them," Johns would tell him. "I got to be—to keep my job. But I would n't weep' any salt tears if the whole bunch was blown to blazes. They make me work fer my bread an' butter—an' they get all the cake."
He had concluded his account of the jobbing of Daneen: "An' him a decent married man! A decent married man!" He was sincere on that point. It had touched his sympathy. It might have excused him to himself for "leaking" to the newspaperman, if he had had any scruples about it. As a matter of fact, he had recently persuaded himself that he was a man of independence who did political "dirty work for the higher-ups " because he had to earn his living under them, but who secretly preserved himself clean of any loyalty to them, in their sculduggery, by criticizing them behind their backs to any one who was not of their following.
IV
Silent Sam's story was published to the state under a startling three-column head "Innocent Man Condemned?"—with the saving question-mark as an insurance against libel. Judge Purvis was handled with a sarcastic courtesy that could not be prosecuted for contempt of court. Four "professional jurors," who had sat on the case, were ringingly denounced, but not by name. The witness Gahn was "alleged" to be everything suspicious. The whole article, written to make a charge of criminality against the railway, was ingeniously worded to give the effect of making the charge, without actually making it, so that the sovereign D. & C. might not have the opportunity of defending itself in its own courts, before its own judges, with a jury picked to find it innocent.
Sam's case, in fact, was carried to that almighty court of ultimate appeal in the democracy—the people. And they began to sit on it.
They were assisted by the ironic editorials of the little labor journal and by the dignified exterior of silence preserved by the "kept" newspapers of the ruling powers. The D. & C. refused, of course, to come into any such court. The case began to go against the railway by default. Deputy Johns carried himself with such circumspection that he refused to recognize the reporter when they passed on the street. And Silent Sam, trudging up and down the cement corridor of his cell-house—stared at through the bars by visitors, interrogated in vain by the guards—remained as insensible to his notoriety as he was to the mumbling of the maniac, in a neighboring cell, who thought himself the Czar of Russia and accepted Sam as the sentry at his palace gate.
At the end of the week, a negro tramp was arrested in Portland, Oregon, after he had boasted in a barroom that he had helped Daneen wreck the train on the bridge across the Little Sandy. He was promptly extradited and brought back for trial—before Judge Purvis. He pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life. And the people of the State dismissed from their minds forever the case of Samuel Daneen.
So it came to pass that Deputy-Sheriff Johns had another prisoner to deliver to the Pen—a big, simply smiling negro who called him "boss" and accepted his escort almost protectingly.
"Don't be in such an all-fired hurry," Johns snarled at him on their way from the county jail to the railway station. "This 's no foot-race."
The negro guffawed whole-heartedly. "All raight, boss," he drawled. "Ah 'm sa'sfied. Don' you tiah yusself none. Mah laigs is jus' kind ah oneasy."
"Yeh," Johns grunted. "Well, they 'll get ust to that in the nex' thirty er forty years."
And the negro chuckled delightedly: "Tha 's raight, boss. Tha 's no lie."
He continued interested, pleased, and happy in all they saw, in everything they did; and when their train was well under way, Johns put into words his conclusions on the man's behavior, by saying: "You 're just darn fool enough to believe these people ain't goin' to keep you in, eh?"
The negro, flattered by this attention from a white official, asked, with his head on one side, grinning: "How d' you mean, boss? How d' you mean?"
"You know 'how' I mean. They 're play in' you fer a sucker. Did the detective give y' any money?"
"Ainy money? Fo' God, boss, I don' get nothin'."
"All right," Johns said. "Dream on. Dream on. What 's your name?"
"Mah name 's Joel."
"All right, Joel. Tell me when you find yourself beginnin' to wake up." Johns tipped his hat down on his eyes and leaned back comfortably in his seat. The train was crawling up the rise of alkali flats toward the foothills, in the heat and glare of dusty barrenness. After a long silence, Joel asked: "Does you know this heah Sam Daneen, boss?"
Johns replied placidly that Sam was an old and intimate friend; that every one knew he had not wrecked the D. & C. train; but that the railway detectives had accused him of it so that the road might not have to pay damages on the wreck. Johns made that point very clear. He illustrated it, elucidated it in detail, forced it on the intelligence of the blinking negro.
"They put him in the Pen," he said, "so 's to save all that money. See, sonny? We were fightin' to get him out. We were provin' he 'd never wrecked the train. So they gets you to say you helped him wreck it, an' that settles him, an' keeps the money in the bank. See? An' then they flings you in with him—'cause you said you 'd helped him—an' they keeps you there, so 's they won't have to pay you. See? An' everybody's happy. Eh? Dream on, you damn fool."
Joel studied on it; his smiling confidence had gone as suddenly as a child's. Then he perked up with: "What 's the matteh why Ah cain't tell 'em Ah lied about it, if Ah wants to gait out? Ah can do that. They 's got nuthin' on me but what Ah says so, boss."
"You 'll never get the chanct to open your fool mouth about it, nigger," Johns replied.
His indifference was convincing. After a frowning interval, Joel observed more plaintively: "He's suhely requiahed to play squah with me. Ah suttenly stood by mah promises. Ah suttenly did."
To which Johns sneered: "You suttenly are one big fool nigger-man. You suttenly are."
He rested complacently in the cushioned seat with his eyes closed, and enjoyed hearing the negro shift and mutter to himself. Every mile or so, Joel would break out: "Mebbe Ah nevah wrecked no train, boss." And Johns would reply: "You swore you did, nigger, an' we got to believe you." Or: "Mebbe Ah nevah seen this heah Sam in all mah bo'n days;" and Johns would reply: "Well, I 'll interduce you, bo. You 're goin' to spend the rest o' your 'bo'n days' locked up with him." Or, more desperately: "Cain't Ah do nothin' 'bout it, boss?" And still more cheerfully: "You 've done your doin's, Joel. You 're a gone nigger."
After forty miles of this sort of "third degree," Joel was a worried-looking, mulatto-colored son of slavery betrayed into the power of the dominant race. He began to stammer an almost unintelligible, terrified explanation of what had happened in Portland.
"Keep that fer the warden," Johns stopped him; for Johns was planning a surprise for Zug. "I can't help you any. Keep it fer him."
"The wa-wahden? 'S he the man?"
"He 's the man fer you, sonny. He can do a lot fer you. Come along, now. Here's where you meet the 'wahden.'"
A hope as simple as his terror drew him out to the station platform and cheered him up the fatal hillside to the stone walls of the Pen.
"Don't go too fast," Johns purred. "You 'll get winded. You won't be able to make your little speech. That 's better. You 'll have lots o' time … Fine day, Joel. Sun 's hot, eh? … Well, it 'll be shadier inside … Here we are."
He led him straight to the warden's office. "Here 's a nigger wants to see you," he announced to Zug. "He wants to tell you how they got him to swear he helped on that Little Sandy wreck."
"'Fo' God," Joel broke out wildly, "Ah nevah wrecked no train, boss. Ah—"
Zug rose with his wrinkled smile and patted him on the shoulder. "Just a minute, boy," he said. "You better tell this to a man it 'll do some good to. He 's inside here." He led him to the corridor. "Jake," he said to the turnkey, "tell Geddes to put this man in to take care o' Sam Daneen." He explained, as Johns unlocked the handcuffs in the turnkey's cage: "He ain't much of a talker,—Sam ain't—but he 'll like to listen about that wreck. Tell him about it."
Johns chuckled flatteringly: "He need n't hurry, neither. He can tell 'm as often as he likes, eh? He 'll have lots o' time."
********
"And the funny part of it is," the reporter always says, when he finishes telling his version of the story—"the funny part of it is that this happened in America. They 're down there yet—in the Pen. Daneen 's gone blind, as well as nutty, and the nigger leads him around by the hand. It 's a great sight to look at—on the Fourth of July."