To say I was shocked, stunned, or humiliated on entering the
penitentiary would not be the truth. It would not be true in nine cases
out of any ten. It would be true if a man were picked up on the street
and taken directly to a penitentiary, but that isn’t done. He is first
thrown into a dirty, lousy, foul-smelling cell in some city prison,
sometimes with an awful beating in the bargain, and after two or three
days of that nothing in the world can shock, stun, or humiliate him. He
is actually happy to get removed to a county jail where he can perhaps
get rid of the vermin and wash his body. By the time he is tried,
convicted, and sentenced, he has learned from other prisoners just what
the penitentiary is like and just what to do and what to expect. You
start doing time the minute the handcuffs are on your wrists. The first
day you are locked up is the hardest, and the last day is the easiest.
There comes a feeling of helplessness when the prison gates swallow you
up—cut you off from the sunshine and flowers out in the world—but that
feeling soon wears away if you have guts. Some men despair. I am sure I
did not.
Inside the prison I was brought before a convict clerk who took my name,
age, and nativity. I lied about them all. I couldn’t cheat the scales or
a measuring machine, and they got my correct weight and height. I did
screw my face up a little when I was photographed, and felt good about
it. My clothes were not taken, nor was my hair cut. I had a bath and was
turned loose in the yard where there were about one hundred prisoners,
some, like myself, in outside clothes awaiting trial, and others in
convict stripes doing time. The penitentiary was small then. There was
no work except farming and gardening, which was all done by “cohabs,”
Mormons convicted of unlawful cohabitation, and a very decent lot of men
they were, never complaining of persecution, always ready to help their
fellow prisoners, and freely dividing the food, money, and tobacco with
which they were well supplied by friends and relatives.
The other prisoners played poker all day in the yard on blankets, and
occasionally a game of baseball, when they could get up enough ambition.
The food was fair. There was no discipline. Prisoners were expected to
appear at their cells at evening to be locked in, and to stay in them
till they were let out in the morning. They didn’t always do that. In
prison parlance, the place was a “playhouse.”
The first man to speak to me in the yard was Shorty, the safe expert we
had visited. He came directly up to me and put out his hand. “Kid, that
was tough about Smiler. I wanted to see you both and apologize. I
thought you put me in the hole for some coin, but I found out that the
people lost just what you both said. I couldn’t imagine a gambling house
with a six-hundred-dollar bankroll.”
Shorty was one of the patricians of the prison, a “box man” doing time
for bank burglary. “I’ll put you in with the right people, kid. You’re
folks yourself or you wouldn’t have been with Smiler.”
I had no friends in the place. But the fact that I had been with Smiler,
that I had kept my mouth shut, and that Shorty had come forward to help
me, gave me a certain fixed status in the prison that nothing could
shake but some act of my own. I was naturally pleased to find myself
taken up by the “best people,” as Shorty and his friends called
themselves, and accepted as one of them.
Shorty now took me into the prison where we found the head trusty who
was one of the “best people” himself, a thoroughgoing bum from the road.
The term “bum” is not used here in any cheap or disparaging sense. In
those days it meant any kind of a traveling thief. It has long since
fallen into disuse. The yegg of to-day was the bum of twenty years ago.
“This party,” said Shorty, “is one of the ‘Johnson family.’” (The bums
called themselves “Johnsons” probably because they were so numerous.)
“He’s good people and I want to get him fixed up for a cell with the
right folks.”
“Why don’t you go out and see George and his outfit? There’s an empty
bunk in their cell.”
We hunted up “George and his outfit.” They knew all about me apparently,
for George said, “Sure, put him in with us. If you don’t they’ll only
stick some gay cat in there and we’d have to throw him out in the
middle of the night.”
“What have they got on you, kid?” asked George.
I sat down with them all and went over the whole thing from the shooting
of Smiler to my arrival at the prison.
“And you’ve made no statement yet?”
“No.”
“Not even to the shyster?” George inquired.
“Not even to the shyster,” I replied.
George turned to the others. “He’ll beat that case.”
“Sure, he will,” they all said.
“Judge Powers can beat that case before lunch any day,” said Shorty.
“How’s he going to get the judge to defend him? He hasn’t a dime, and
you’re talking about the best lawyer in the state,” George wanted to
know.
It was Shorty’s time to get superior now. “Where did I get that two
hundred dollars that’s out in the office? Didn’t him and Smiler bring it
up here to me for my end of that chippy gambling house’s bankroll. The
judge will take this case for a hundred; it’s only an hour’s work for
him.”
George smiled. “Shorty, I knew damned well you’d do that,” and to me,
“Kid, that’s what comes of bein’ on the square. If you’d burnt Shorty
for his end of that coin, you’d have been here just the same, and you’d
have got a beatin’ instead of a lawyer and a lot of good advice from
real people.”
My case was disposed of right there. I had an attorney. But the bums had
already tried me and I was found not guilty. All I had to do was wait
for the day to come and I would be free. I was very grateful to them
all, and tried to tell them. “Aw, forget it,” they said.
“You can pay me the money when you get out and are lucky,” said Shorty.
“I’ll send for Judge Powers in the morning.”
At supper time I fell in line with my new friends and ate at the same
table, after which we marched to our cells and were locked in. These
scheming yeggs had managed to get possession of the most desirable cell
in the prison, probably by bribing the trusty prisoner whose duty it was
to look after the cell house. On each side of the cell was a framework
ingeniously made of angle iron that contained two bunks, one above the
other. The mattresses were filled with clean straw, the blankets were
new and clean. George gave me a small feather pillow. In the center of
our cell at the upper end was a table on which stood a fine Rochester
oil lamp that gave plenty of light. Newspapers were produced, and the
“best people” settled themselves for the evening.
George, who by reason of his age and experience was “captain of the
outfit,” explained to me that, being the last man in the cell, it was my
duty to empty the slop bucket in the morning and sweep out.
I must stop to describe briefly my three cellmates, all persistent and
professional criminals, because of their influence on my after life.
A name on a prison register doesn’t usually mean anything. Although I
knew George well later, I never learned from him his family name or
birthplace. To ask about those things in the underworld is to invite
suspicion. All criminals conceal them carefully and resent questions.
George was known on the road and to the police as “Foot-and-a-half
George” because of an injury to one of his feet that cost him a couple
of toes and caused a slight limp. It happened in this way, as he told me
one night when we were waiting to open up the powder house at a rock
quarry and get a supply of fresh dynamite, caps and fuse.
“I always crush into these powder shacks for my ‘puff’ for two reasons;
first, it’s always in good condition; second, if you buy it you’ve got
to leave your mug with the storekeeper. He’s always suspicious of
anybody buying explosives and is apt to remember you and cause trouble
later in case of a pinch.
“I got this bum foot,” he said, sticking it out, pointing to the shoe
with its bent-up toe, “through buying a roll of rotten fuse at an
out-of-the-way general store in Montana. I was goin’ against ‘P.O.’s’
then. I always favored post offices because in the small country ones
the postmaster has to furnish the box himself and gets the cheapest one
he can find. He don’t care because the government stands the loss if
it’s a plain burglary from the outside.
“Besides that, you’re a cinch to get some coin and a bundle of stickers
out of every ‘P.O.’ You can peddle the stamps anywhere at sixty or
eighty per cent and they can’t be identified. Then again, if you do
fall, the government don’t hang a lot of prior convictions on you and
bury you. The limit for a ‘P.O.’ is five years and you never get that if
you use a little judgment. Yes, I’m strong for the government,” mused
the veteran, reflectively.
“This caper I’m tellin’ you about was a third-class ‘P.O.’ outside of
Butte, Montana. It was soft, and good for a few hundred dollars so I
decided to go against it alone. No use takin’ a bunch of thirsty bums
along and stealin’ money for them to slop up in some saloon the next
day. Anyway, I had a hole in the old box an’ a shot in it in half an
hour. I strung the fuse to a window and touched it off from the outside.
It spluttered along the floor and up to the door of the box, but nothing
happened. After a few minutes I went back inside to put on a fresh piece
of fuse. Just as I got in front of the box there was a roar, the door
came off, and knocked me flat. The edge of it caught my foot on the
floor and smashed all the toes.”
“Did you get the coin?”
“You’re damn right, I did.
“After my wind came back I got the coin and stickers, limped outside
where I had an old ‘swift’ tied to a hitching rack. I had no saddle and
it was a tough ride into Silver Bow Junction. But I got there before
daylight and grabbed a rattler into Pocatello where ‘Salt Chunk Mary’
put me away, got a doctor, and got rid of my ‘stickers.’ That’s why I’m
so particular about my fuse,” he concluded.
This grizzled old yegg was a by-product of our Civil War. Apprentice to
a village blacksmith, he was drafted into the army, where he learned the
disruptive force of powder, and many other things useful to him in his
profession of safe breaking. His rough war service, his knowledge of
mechanics and explosives combined to equip him for what he became—one of
the pioneers of safe breaking. From black powder he turned to dynamite
and afterward was one of the first to “thrash out the soup”—a process
used by the bums and yeggs for extracting the explosive oil, nitro
glycerine, from sticks of “dan” or dynamite. He boasted that he had
never done a day’s work outside of prison since he was mustered out of
the army, except one year in a safe factory in the East where he went
deliberately and worked for starvation wages to learn something of the
construction of a very much used make of safe and its lock. Fortified
with this knowledge, he followed that particular make of safe to many
parts of the world, and, as he said, “knocked ’em open like ripe
watermelons.”
George inherited a very ordinary set of features to start with. His war
scars and rough bouts on the road and in prison hadn’t served to add
anything to them in the way of refinement. His head rose to a point from
all four sides. The “Sanctimonious Kid,” one of my cellmates, once said
of George: “If you were to put a dime on the top of George’s head and
start it sliding down the back it would fall inside his shirt collar; if
you started it down his forehead it would wind up in his mouth, his
lower jaw sticks out so far.” His eyes were small and cunning. They
looked as if they had been taken out, fried in oil, and put back. Dead,
pale blue and expressionless, they gave no hint of the cunning,
always-busy brain behind them. His nose wasn’t worth looking at, just a
small knob of soft red flesh, long since collapsed and hanging like a
pendant from between his eyes. He was of medium height, broad, heavy and
rugged. With all his ill-favored appearance and his rolling, limping
walk that seemed to start at his shoulders and work its way down into
his legs, he had a heart of gold and oak, and knowing him one readily
forgave him ungovernable temper and violent outbursts of rage. He was
square. His life was stormy and his death sudden and violent as
“Smiler’s.” But that has another place in this story.
The “Sanctimonious Kid” was, in point of years and experience, second to
George, and naturally second in say in the cell. All matters of
importance were submitted to George first, then to “Sanc” and lastly to
“Soldier Johnnie,” the third man. Nothing was submitted to me. I had no
say about anything. All I had to do was to keep my mouth shut and listen
all I wanted to.
“Sanc” had everything that George lacked. Tall, six feet, slender and
soft stepping, more active than most men half his size, you would not
suspect him of two hundred pounds, solid flesh and bone. Straight
without stiffness, natural, like an Indian. Dark hair, eyes and skin.
Handsome, intelligent. Years after, I saw him in the dock of a crowded
court room in a big city. His head was the finest, his face the
handsomest, and his poise the surest of any there, from the judge down
to the alternate juror. His nose, eyes and forehead might have been
those of a minister or divinity student. But there was a hard look about
his mouth, and something in his jaw that suggested the butcher. He was
educated and a constant reader. Whether it was his appearance or his
careful manner of speech that got him his monoger, “The Sanctimonious
Kid,” I never knew. He was serving a short sentence for house burglary,
at which he was an expert.
We traveled together for several years after he was released, and I
found him one of the squarest and most resourceful thieves I ever knew.
At last, after one of the cleverest prison escapes on record, he went to
Australia where he was hanged for the murder of a police constable.
“Soldier Johnnie,” who had served a term in the army, was the youngest
of the three. He was an industrious and trustworthy yegg who made his
living serving as “target” or outside man, for the yegg mobs that preyed
on country banks. The “target” is the most reliable man in the mob. To
him is given the job of sticking up the town bull if he appears while
the others are inside. He is the first one to get shot at and the last.
It’s his job to carry the heavy artillery and stand off the natives
while the others get the coin, and then to cover the get-away.
He was born lucky. His face and figure were neutral. A hard man to pick
up on his description. Medium size and weight. After one look at him
you couldn’t say whether his hair was brown or black, whether his eyes
were gray or blue. Quiet, unobtrusive, soft-spoken, a copper would
hesitate before halting him on the street.
Such were my companions, guides, friends and philosophers, day and
night, till the day of my trial, which soon came.
Shorty’s letter to Judge Powers brought one of his office men out to see
me the next day, who got the points in my case and went away with one
hundred dollars of Shorty’s money. I felt better after his visit, he was
so fresh, vigorous, confident. “Nothing to it, young man,” he said
breezily, “I’ll be in court when you appear to plead and have a day set
for your trial; that is, if they want to waste their time trying you.”
I went back into the prison yard with his card in my hand and gave it to
Shorty. He passed it to George and then to “Sanc.”
“I know him,” Sanc said. “He is in Powers’ firm. Powers will tell him
what to do. You are all right. True, he is but a second-class man, but
that’s not so bad. These second-class lawyers can skin a first-class
bunko man any day in the week. I see no reason why he cannot skin a
third-class judge in a territorial court.”
I soon saw that these three cellmates of mine practically controlled the
inside of the prison. They had brains and character backed by courage
and the valuable background of a reputation for doing things outside.
I say they had character because, while they did wrong things, they
always tried to do them in the right way and at the right time. The
thief who goes out and steals money to pay back room rent rather than
swindle his poor landlady has character. The one who runs away without
paying her has no character. The thief who holds out a lady’s watch on
his pal to give to his girl has no character.
In the underworld one has good or bad character as in any other layer of
society. The thief who pays off borrowed money, debts, or grudges has a
good character among his fellows; and the thief who does the reverse has
a bad character. Thieves strive for good character and make as great
sacrifices to keep it as men do anywhere else. A burglar can have
friends, but he has to pay his room rent or he will lose them, and they
will despise him.
Because of this quality these three men had money in the prison office,
sent them by friends at liberty.
They had visitors frequently, who kept them well supplied with books and
magazines. The evening mail brought newspapers from many cities. They
kept well informed, particularly about criminal and legal doings. The
papers were carefully read at night, and the next morning “routed”
throughout the prison till, torn and read ragged, they found their way
into the hands of the lowliest “bindle stiff” in the farthest corner of
the yard.
There were fat times when we didn’t go into the dining room for a week.
A half-gallon bucket of milk was left at the cell every evening. Loaves
of fresh, hot bread were smuggled up from the bakeshop, and juicy steaks
from the guards’ quarters. These creature comforts helped to take the
curse off the place, and mitigate the prison pangs. Our light was put
out, not when the nine o’clock bell rang, but when George, or Sanc, or
Johnnie felt like going to sleep. The guards looked the other way when
they went by in their felt-soled shoes, on their night rounds through
the prison.
In the prison yard there was a deep well from which water for bathing
and other uses was pumped to a large tank on the prison roof. The pump
was manned by four prisoners who had to work in one-hour shifts. A gang
of eight men were detailed each week for this work, which was not
hard—nothing more than exercise—and no one ever complained. My name was
called one Saturday evening and I was instructed to report at the pump
the following Monday morning. I thought nothing of it, and would have
pumped cheerfully. But that night “Soldier Johnnie,” who was something
of a jail lawyer and agitator for his and his friends’ rights, remarked
that they were wrong in forcing me to work because I had not been
convicted of any crime and that I ought to refuse to do it. The other
two took the matter up and it was argued pro and con. They were pretty
technical about it, and the weight of opinion was that it would be
establishing a dangerous precedent for an unconvicted man to do any work
of any kind in the prison and a test case should be made of it.
I was willing enough, and, looking back at it now, I believe I was glad
of the chance to do something to raise myself in the estimation of these
distinguished characters.
Monday morning I refused to work, explaining to the officer in charge
that I was not lazy, but felt they had no right to order me to work
before I was convicted. He appeared surprised, and took me to the office
of the prison captain. He heard me out, and turning to the guard, said:
“Throw this fresh kid in the cooler and leave him there till he gets
ready to work.”
I was given an old pair of overalls and a cotton shirt to wear in the
“cooler,” where my outside clothes would have been ruined. The cooler or
dark cell was the same as other cells, except that there was nothing in
it and the door was solid, admitting no light. The floor and walls were
of thin steel and very cold. I slept on the floor without any kind of
bedding or cover. There was but one fixture in the cell, a sheet-metal
bucket smelling strongly of chloride of lime. My sentence carried the
further punishment of bread and water, one thick slice a day and about a
quart of water.
A guard opened the cell in the afternoon the first day and put in a
quart tin cup of water but no bread. As he was closing the cell, he
said, not unkindly: “You’re a damned fool, kid. You’d better weaken and
promise to go on the pump. I’ll tell the captain now, if you want, and
you won’t have to freeze in here to-night.”
“No, I won’t weaken,” I declared.
“All right, but if you change your mind just rap on the door with that
tin cup.”
My teeth were chattering before nine o’clock that night, it was so cold.
I could not sleep on the cold steel floor and walked up and down in my
stocking feet all night. The next morning it became warmer and I slept
in fits till noon when the guard came with my bread and a fresh cup of
water. The bread was about half eaten when something got between my
teeth that made me stop chewing, hungry as I was.
I examined it, lying on my belly at the bottom of the door, where there
was a crack of light. It was a piece of chicken quill about an inch
long. I couldn’t imagine how it got into the bread, and out of curiosity
and having nothing else to do, I broke it apart. There was a tightly
rolled piece of paper inside, on which was written: “Stick. We’ll feed
you to-night.” There was no name, no explanation. I knew it was from my
cellmates, and put in the balance of the day trying to figure how they
would manage to get food into that tight cell in plain view of a guard
all day and night.
The cell above me was part of the prison proper, and was occupied by two
prisoners doing time. That afternoon I heard unusual noises in it, and
they indicated that some one was moving out or in. Immediately after
“lockup” in the evening there was another new noise. Prisoners in
dungeons rely almost entirely on sounds to tell them what is going on
about them. Every sound has its meaning. No sound escapes them, and any
new or unusual sound must be thought out and classified at once.
The sound that attracted my attention was a low, grinding rasping that
seemed to come from the floor of the cell above, which was the roof of
my cell. One person above walked back and forth with his shoes on,
making considerable noise. Something very unusual. The rasping became
more distinct, and after an hour’s thought I concluded that somebody up
above was boring a hole through the thin steel floor and that the
walking was to cover the noise of drilling and to keep watch for the
guard. Before nine o’clock there was an inch hole in the floor, and
strips of tender meat, long pieces of bread, toasted to hold them
together, cigarettes, and matches were being lowered into my cell. After
them came a long, thin piece of rubber hose, from which I sucked about a
quart of strong coffee.
I spent about three weeks in the cooler and never missed my evening
meal. My cellmates bribed the night guard to give me a blanket at night,
which he took away from me before he went off watch in the morning, to
protect himself. All in all, I didn’t fare so badly and was getting
pretty well settled down to life in the dark cell when they took me out
one evening and sent me back to my cell with instructions to be ready in
the morning to go to court. I found my clothes in good shape and a clean
shirt had been procured for me by my cellmates.
They seemed to think they owed me an apology for not being able to get
food into the dark cell until the second night, explaining in great
detail how they had to get two gay cats moved out of the cell above me
and have two members of the “Johnson family” put in it, who would attend
to the matter. I was instructed by them to ask for an immediate trial;
the captain had declared that he would keep me in the cooler till I
either got acquitted or went to work pumping.
The next morning the man from Judge Powers’ office was in court and told
me to plead not guilty. When this formality was done with, he asked for
a trial on the earliest possible date, saying that it would not take
more than two hours to try the case.
“Two hours,” said the judge, looking over his calendar, “how would the
day after to-morrow do?”
There was no objection from either side. The case was set for trial. I
went back to the prison and into the cooler. That evening my rations
came down as usual. The guard gave me my blanket, but I couldn’t sleep.
Everybody was confident I would be acquitted, but I was afraid. I
remembered my experience in Denver when the judge gave me fifteen days
without a hearing, and at Port Costa when Casey gave us ten days. I
imagined the procedure would be about the same in this case and was very
uneasy.
The next evening I was sent back to my cell. I found plenty to eat
waiting me, and after a good supper my case was tried by my cellmate
lawyers. They threshed it out from every conceivable angle, and declared
that if I got convicted I would have to do it myself on the witness
stand. They were so sure I wouldn’t come back that George gave me a
ten-dollar bill.
“Take that, Kid, you’ll need it. You can send it back when you feel
able.”
I promised to write them, and we agreed on a fictitious name for me to
use. They all shook hands, bade me good-bye, and sent me away in high
hopes.
Judge Powers himself was in court the next morning. A fine, tall, gray,
elderly gentleman, he patted me on the back in a fatherly manner.
“Young man, I am going to put you on the witness stand and ask you one
question: ‘Are you guilty or not guilty of this charge?’ You answer
‘No,’ and don’t answer any other questions from anybody unless I tell
you to.”
The jury was drawn in ten minutes. The witnesses that testified at the
police court came on in the same order and gave the same testimony.
Judge Powers asked the veiled woman we were preparing to rob if she had
seen me at her house on the night in question or on any other night. She
answered that she saw but one man, the one she shot. The detectives
confined themselves to the truth. Powers looked at his watch with the
air of a busy man being detained over a trifling matter, and dismissed
them without cross-examination. He waved the landlord off the stand
without questioning him. When the prosecutor said: “That’s our case,
Your Honor,” Powers looked at him, and then to the jury.
“Is that all?” he asked, frowning.
I was put on the witness stand and answered “No” very positively to his
question. The prosecutor hadn’t anything to cross-examine me about. He
started a few questions, but was stopped and gave up. My attorney made
some motion and was overruled. He then offered to let the case go
without argument from either side, but the prosecutor wanted to talk and
the judge told him to go ahead.
He argued about the same as the prosecutor in the police court, waved
the bloody room-rent receipt and harped about the change of clothes and
my absence from the room, and my refusal to make any statement. He
dingdonged away till the judge ordered him to stop.
Judge Powers went over the case in five minutes, the jury was instructed
in five more, and went away to the jury room. I was nervous. I thought
my attorney had not asked enough questions, hadn’t argued enough. The
judge went into his chambers. Judge Powers followed him in for a visit.
A few courtroom hangers got up and went out. Nobody paid any attention
to me. The bailiff who had me in charge strolled about the room,
gossiping. There was no dock in the courtroom. I was sitting outside the
railed-off enclosure at the attorneys’ table. The jury hadn’t been out
fifteen minutes, but I was so nervous I couldn’t sit still, and got up
to stretch my legs. The bailiff was busy talking to a man who came in
from the street. His back was turned to me as I walked a few steps up
the aisle in the direction of the door, and then back.
The next time I walked farther toward the door before turning, and still
he never looked at me. The third time I went to the door and out, and
oozed down the broad, single flight of stairs into the main street.
Dodging between two hacks at the curb I crossed to the opposite side of
the street and looked back up the stairway to the courtroom—no alarm
yet. Directly in front of me was a basement restaurant. I went
downstairs, straight through the dining room to the kitchen, into the
back yard, and then to the alley without being molested. When I got out
of the alley I turned every corner I came to for fifteen minutes and
finished in the railroad yards, instinctively.
The whistles were blowing for twelve o’clock, noon. I saw no signs of
any outgoing trains and decided to plant myself somewhere nearby till
night, when I could get a train or walk out of town in safety. I found
an old deserted barn and hid up in the loft, hungry and thirsty, till
dark.
A passenger train was due out on the Rio Grande at eight. With much
caution I made my way along between lines of box cars till I got near
enough to the depot to get aboard the blind end of a baggage car. I
held the train all night, carefully dodging about at every stop.
At daylight, as the train slowed down for a stop, a man climbed up
beside me. “You’re arrested,” he shouted, tapping a big gun in its
holster.
I was discouraged. After all my hiding and dodging and starving, I must
now go back to Salt Lake. He took me off the train and held my arm as
the train pulled out. I was scared and desperate. I could see the
penitentiary opening up for me again, and the dungeon. As the last coach
was even with us, I gave the constable, that’s who he was, a vicious
push and he fell into a ditch beside the track.
The train was moving fast now, but with a tremendous effort I clutched
one of the handbars and the momentum threw me up on the rear steps. Just
as I landed, one of the trainmen opened the rear door and saw me. He had
his mouth open to say something when he saw the constable crawling out
of the ditch, firing his pistol in the air and making signs to him. He
pulled the bell cord.
As the train slowed down two more trainmen appeared and the three began
kicking me. I jumped off and fell into the hands of the constable, who
came up reënforced by some natives from the depot. They all fell on me
and gave me an unmerciful skull dragging. After they got done scruffing
me around, two of them took me by each arm and the constable fastened
both hands in my coat collar from behind. The ones that couldn’t find a
place to lay hold on me surrounded us, a tribe of small boys appeared
from nowhere, and I was dragged, pushed, and bumped across the fields to
the village and thrown into the jail.
When I was safely locked in, the constable mopped his forehead with his
sleeve, and, shaking his fist at me, said: “Sure as God made little
apples I’ll see that you get ten days.” They all went away then except
the small boys. They lingered around all afternoon peeping in at the
windows.
It was a mail-order jail—two steel cells on a concrete foundation. A
cheap wooden shack had been built around the cells to keep the weather
out. The door of the shack was always open and there was plenty of
light. The cell they put me in was clean, and there was a roll of new
blankets in it. I was the only prisoner.
I unrolled the blankets and, stretching out on the floor, tried to
figure out what had happened. I couldn’t understand the constable’s
threat to get me ten days, and concluded he was so excited that he said
ten days when he meant ten years.
He turned out to be a very decent fellow. He was postmaster, section
boss, and constable. He appeared at the jail in the evening with a big
dishpan full of food—bread, meat, butter, a fruit jar full of fresh
milk, and half a pie. He apologized for having lost his temper and
treating me so roughly, asked me if I wanted tobacco, and made a special
trip back to his house for some old magazines.
I was surprised to learn that I had been arrested for trespass, or
stealing a ride. He explained that the bums had burned a string of box
cars farther up the road and the “company” had sent out orders to arrest
them on sight and give them ten days.
“It’s a wonder somebody along the road didn’t tell you about it,” he
said. “You’re the first one I’ve seen for a month. The bums are all
going over the Union Pacific now instead of the Rio Grande. It’s too
bad, you’ll get ten days sure in the morning. Company’s orders. Good
night.”
I put in most of the night trying to think up a talk for the judge next
morning. After bringing my breakfast the constable went after him, and
about nine o’clock they appeared, a few town loungers following them.
They didn’t even take me out of the cell for my “trial.”
The judge asked my name, read the law from a code he brought along,
listened patiently to my talk, and solemnly sentenced me to ten days in
the jail. I asked him to take my ten-dollar bill and let me go, but he
refused it.
“Sorry, young man. Can’t do it. Company’s orders, ten days.”
One of the loungers threw me a Salt Lake newspaper, another gave me a
sack of tobacco, cigarette papers, and matches. When they had gone I
opened the paper and found the story of my escape from the courtroom.
The reporter treated it humorously, and made fun of everybody connected
with my trial. I didn’t know what he saw about it that was so funny till
I got to the end of it, where he said the jury came in with their
verdict of “not guilty” before I was out of the block.
This took a big load off my mind; nothing to fear now. I could go back
to Salt Lake and wait for my friends to come out of prison. The
Sanctimonious Kid had but two weeks more to do, Soldier Johnnie but a
month. George had almost a year yet to do.
All thought of going home was gone. I owed money to Shorty and George.
That must be paid. All worry was off my mind now and I began planning to
get some money when I got out. My head was full of schemes I had
absorbed during my month in the penitentiary. George’s tales of fat post
offices and country general stores came back to me. Idle all day in my
cell, my eyes and thoughts turned to the big general store directly
across the street from the jail.
The constable often talked to me in the evening while I ate supper. I
learned from him that all the money in the town was in the big safe in
the store, his post office money and stamps included. The store owner,
as was often the case in small towns, did a banking business and had
acquired about all the money in the place.
It was a puzzle to me how to get out of the town when my time was up
without spending my ten dollars for fare. This was not to be thought of.
The constable solved it by volunteering to put me on a freight train
that stopped there in the daytime and fix it with the crew to let me
ride back to Salt Lake, where I could start east over the Union Pacific.
The morning my ten days expired I went over to the store, bought some
tobacco, and waited around till time for the train. I got the make of
the big safe, its location in the store, and any other information I
could, without asking questions, and decided to report the matter to my
friends at Salt Lake. The constable fixed me for a ride, as he promised,
but instead of stopping at Salt Lake I went on to Ogden and wrote a
letter to Sanc, telling him where I would be when he came out. I was
careful with my ten dollars and had half of it when he appeared at
Ogden.
I at once told him of my ten-day sentence and about the fat general
store. He had promised to wait for Soldier Johnnie, who was due in three
weeks, and offered to pay my expenses till then, when something might be
done about my store.
Johnnie was discharged in due time and arrived at Ogden. He was pretty
well supplied with money and there was no rush about doing anything. We
talked over the general store, but Johnnie didn’t like the looks of it.
The night trains didn’t stop at the town, and it was so far from Salt
Lake that horses were out of the question.
“No getaway,” he said. “I can beat the box all right, but we can’t get
out of there if we do get the money.” Sanc agreed.
During my ten-day stay in the town I had turned over in my mind a
hundred plans, but only one of them seemed feasible, and I was almost
afraid to broach that to them. At last, when I saw they were going to
give it up as a bad job, I said to them:
“Can’t you both go over there, get yourselves ten days like I did, make
a key for the cell, and go out at night and get the box? You could plant
the money and lock yourselves up again. Then when your time is up you
can go away and come back for the coin when the thing cools off.”
They looked at me and laughed. An hour later Sanc said to Johnnie:
“Say, there might be something in that, after all. We would have a
perfect alibi.”
The bizarre appealed to Sanc.
After some discussion they decided to “look into it.”