My first few months in the county jail were put in hard enough. About
all I did was hate Irish Annie, and plan ways and means to revenge
myself on her. I kept close track of her through friends and learned
that her punishment began the day she got back to Canada. Her girls
left her establishment when they saw her turn copper; her friends in the
Tenderloin shunned her as if she had the leprosy. Finding herself cast
out by these outcasts, she gathered up what she could and joined the
gold rush to Alaska.
Then, just when my bankroll had melted away under the heavy expense of
two attorneys’ fees and incidentals, and I was beginning to wonder if I
would finish by having to eat the jail fare, a number of mysterious
money orders came to me from Nome and Skagway. I couldn’t but think
this was conscience money from Annie. This took the edge off my hatred
and I began making excuses for her. After I had several hundred dollars,
the money orders stopped coming. No letter or explanation came, and I
remained mystified. At last a prisoner who was brought into the jail en
route to San Quentin from Alaska put an end to my guessing.
Irish Annie was dead. My informant was very discreet and mentioned no
names. “Certain people,” he said, “and good people, too, found out that
she had a bunch of dough. They went into her crib, tied her up, and took
it. When they went out, one of them said to the others: ‘Black is in the
county jail in San Francisco. He ought to have one end of this money.
That woman put him there.’
“They didn’t know she had snitched on you and objected to splitting you
in with the coin. The first party, your friend, went back into the crib,
and croaked her. When he came out he said: ‘I’ve done that for Black.
Now, does he get his end?’
“You got it, didn’t you?”
I acknowledged the money and asked no questions. My attorney learned
later, and told me, that when she was found dead and her body
identified, the police began a search for me, and the only thing that
saved me was my jail alibi, the only alibi that ever convinced anybody.
With Annie off my mind I then began hating the pawnbroker. But before I
went to Folsom he was charged with perjury in another case and went
broke saving himself from a prison sentence, and I put him out of my
mind.
I didn’t worry about the coppers framing me in. I started it. It was
their business to put me away if they could, and if they hadn’t played
my game I would have beaten the case on them. It has always been a
question with me where this framing and jobbing started; whether the
defense originally began it and forced the prosecutor and police to do
it in self-defense, or whether it was the other way around. I never
could find the answer; long ago I gave it up and filed it away with that
other old question about the hen and the egg.
My attorney knew his business. He held me in the county jail till my
last dollar was gone, and I refused to “write for more money” as he
suggested. When I was leaving for Folsom he showed up at the jail and
asked me for my watch, the only thing of value I had left.
“You won’t have any use for it up there,” he said. “Give it to me and
I’ll get you a job in the warden’s where you’ll get something to eat.”
I told him to go plumb to hell.
I went to prison without any plans for the future. With good conduct I
would have to do five years and four months and there was no use trying
to look that far ahead. Two other prisoners arrived the morning I did,
and the three of us were taken out to the office to have our prison
biographies written—name, age, birthplace, occupation, etc. We were then
photographed, measured, and weighed, and turned over to the captain to
be assigned to work.
Richard Murphy (“Dirty Dick” the “cons” called him) was captain at that
time. He had worked his way up from the guard line by cunning and
brutality. He believed in “throwing the fear of God” into a prisoner
the minute he arrived, by browbeating and bullying him, and every man
went out of his office hating him. It’s more than twenty years since I
left Folsom, but I can still see Dirty Dick’s short, squat figure on the
flagstones in front of his filthy office. I can still see his pop-eyes
and pasty face, his frog belly, his knock knees, and his flat feet.
I was the first to be questioned. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“San Francisco,” I replied.
“How long did you do in San Quentin?”
“Never was in San Quentin.”
“What other penitentiary were you in?”
“Never was in any penitentiary,” I lied, and I knew he knew I was lying,
but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking he had bullied me
into telling the truth.
“Hah, you’re a liar, and you know it. You can’t get anything like that
by me. I’ll dig you up, and find out all about you. Use hop?”
“No.” I did use hop, had eaten it all the time in the county jail, and
had a small portion secreted about me then. He again called me a liar
and said to a convict runner: “Here, Shorty, take this fellow to the
stoneyard. Search him, and if you find anything you want, keep it.”
I had already been searched and had nothing but a handkerchief and a
pipe. “No prisoner will keep anything belonging to me,” I said, looking
at Shorty. He didn’t search me.
The captain called up the second man. “Where are you from?”
“Sacramento,” he answered.
“How long do you bring?”
“Ten years.”
“What for?”
“Grand larceny.”
“What kind of grand larceny?”
The little runner, Shorty, stepped up and said: “Pickpocket, captain.”
“Where do you belong?” Murphy continued.
“Chicago.”
“What’s your name?”
“James Brown.”
“You’re from Chicago, eh? And your name is Brown? What do they call you?
What’s your monoger?”
The little runner stepped up again and said: “‘Chi Jimmy,’ captain.”
“Chi Jimmy, eh? Pickpocket, eh? The rock crusher for you,” said the
captain. “Maybe you’ll be ‘Chi’ a few fingers before you get out.”
Which he probably would be. This was Murphy’s idea of a joke.
The third chap got about the same deal, and was waved away. “To the
crusher with him, too.”
At that time prisoners were allowed, for economy, to keep the coats,
vests, and hats they brought in with them, but were made to wear striped
pants and shirts. As the last man turned away, Murphy saw he had a good
hat. Calling him back he took it and threw it to his runner. “Here’s a
hat for you, Shorty. If you can’t wear it give it to somebody else; it’s
too good for the rock crusher.”
He knew all about us before we were brought to his office, and had us
out there only to “throw the fear” into us and get a line on us by the
way we answered his questions. He made three enemies right there. He
received all prisoners that way and if they got insolent under his
badgering he had them thrown into the dungeon for thirty days “to cool
off.”
The dungeon was an empty cell with a solid door to darken it and
contained nothing but a thin blanket, and a bucket strong with chloride
of lime. In cases of this kind the captain signed the punishment order
which included bread and water. Every third day the prisoner got a pan
of beans. Most of them were so hungry they bolted the beans without
stopping to chew them and a few dungeon sentences brought on stomach
troubles that added to their misery.
My eight-year sentence was considered a short one at Folsom. I found
nine hundred prisoners there whose sentences averaged twelve years. They
were all hopeless. The parole law was a dead letter, inoperative. Only
at Christmas or on the Fourth of July did any one get a parole. The
place was a seething volcano of hatred and suspicion. Dirty Dick had in
the twenty years he was there developed a perfect stool-pigeon system. A
visiting warden, surprised because there was no wall around Folsom,
asked Murphy how he managed to keep the “cons” there. “That’s simple,”
he said. “I’ve got one half of them watching the other half.” His system
caused many murders and assaults and at last it climaxed in the
bloodiest prison break in the history of California.
Opium was the medium of exchange in the prison. About three hundred men
used it habitually and a hundred more, occasionally. Incoming prisoners
smuggled money in and we bribed the poorly paid guards to buy hop at
Sacramento. No prisoner was allowed to buy anything through the office.
The trusties stole every movable article they could from the guards’ and
warden’s quarters and peddled them to us in the prison for their rations
of hop. The “cons” were divided roughly into three groups. One group
played the officers’ game, working in the offices or holding down other
soft jobs where they could loaf about the place and spy and snitch on
the others. Murphy rewarded them all. He gave the best snitches the
biggest beefsteaks. Another and larger group openly antagonized the
officers, engineering hop deals, planning the murder of stool pigeons,
and promoting escapes.
Between these two groups was a small bunch of convicts who did not
handle hop or curry favor with the officers. They were the best
conducted prisoners there, yet they were ground to pieces by the two
stronger factions. They got fag ends of food in the convict mess and
wore the patched-up clothes of the others.
I had some thought of getting off the hop when I got to Folsom and of
keeping my nose clean and trying to shorten my time by making a parole.
But I saw quickly all that was impossible for me and that I would be
lucky if I earned my credits. I joined the schemers and soon had my
share of the opium which meant power and influence. We sold the hop to
those who had money and with the money we bought more. Also we paid
guards to smuggle in sugar, butter, and other food.
Conditions at San Quentin were the same. Martin Aguirre became warden
there under Governor Gage. Aguirre introduced the strait-jacket
punishment and I have been told he did it on the suggestion of a
convict. This brutal and inhuman form of torture had been condemned in
English prisons years before as dangerous to life and limb. Yet this man
was permitted to revive it in California and its use was continued until
Hiram Johnson became governor.
Let it be said to this humane and enlightened gentleman’s everlasting
credit that one of his first official acts was to banish the jacket and
other brutalities from California prisons forever. Captain Murphy
welcomed the jacket as something superior to anything he had at Folsom
in the way of punishment. Up to that time the prisoners were “regulated”
by long terms in the dungeons on bread and water, loss of credits, or by
hanging them up by the wrists till they were on tiptoe. When Dirty Dick
saw what could be done with the jacket he came into the stoneyard and
declared himself openly, “I’ve got something now that will make you
tough birds snitch on yourselves.”
The killing and maiming of convicts in the strait-jackets are matters of
record and too well known to call for any notice in this story. At
Folsom I saw the jacket making beasts of the convicts and brutes of
their keepers. I saw Jakey Oppenheimer transformed from a
well-intentioned prisoner into a murder maniac whose wanton killings and
assaults in prison brought him “under the rope” in the end. I saw the
convicts throw their hats in the air and shout for joy when Warden
Charles Aull died.
Thomas Wilkinson followed him as warden.
The tasks were increased, the food rations cut, and even the convict
stripes were made thinner and cheaper. These abuses, coupled with
brutal strait-jacketings for the slightest infraction of rules,
crystallized all the hatred, despair, and hopelessness in the prison.
All the convicts needed was an organizer, a leader. He appeared in the
person of Dick Gordon. With a sentence of forty-five years and a prior
prison experience, Gordon saw no chance of getting out on the square and
began planning to escape. He was young—about twenty-three—modest,
kindly, intelligent. He came to Folsom with a reputation for doing
things on the outside and for being on the square. With great care and
diplomacy he sorted out a dozen men and his plan was laid down for the
getaway. It was simple and direct. Every Monday morning there were at
least a dozen officers and guards at the prison office.
The warden was always there to get everything under way; the captain to
try all prisoners for offenses committed between Saturday evening and
Monday morning; the overseer to plan the week’s work; the commissary to
give out clothing, and the turnkey to listen to requests for changing of
cells. This meant there were always thirty or forty prisoners at the
office.
The plan was for Gordon and his men to mingle with others at the
captain’s office. When the signal was given they were to rush the
officers, who were unarmed, put a knife at the throat of every one, and
march them all out through the guard line, using them as shields against
the gatling-gun fire from guard towers that encircled the prison. For
once Captain Murphy’s carefully built-up system of spying failed him; it
toppled on him, crushed him, and brought about his dismissal from the
prison.
His spies, when things were dull, often fabricated plots and stories to
hold their jobs. Sunday, before the break, they reported to Murphy that
something was brewing in the prison. He ordered fifty suspected men
searched but nothing was found. The knives Gordon and his men were to
use were being carried about by a “harmless” short-time convict, who
kept by himself and was not suspected.
Murphy, finding nothing wrong after the search, put the reports down to
over-zealousness by his stool pigeons and forgot them.
The next morning the knives were distributed and the dozen men dropped
out of the line at the captain’s office as the men went out to work.
Every officer in the prison except the doctor was captured.
The only guard that resisted was killed instantly, cut to pieces. The
only officer that resisted was Cochrane, the turnkey, the man who
personally laced up the strait-jacket victims. He was hated bitterly and
every man that got near enough put a knife into him. He was cut a dozen
times and left for dead. He recovered, and later took his grudge out by
brutalities to prisoners who had never harmed him.
Gordon and his men marched their captives to the prison armory. Under
threat of death the warden ordered the guard in charge to open it.
Taking all the arms and ammunition they could carry they destroyed the
balance and still using the officers as shields marched them off the
prison grounds and into the woods. Here some of the escapes demanded
Dirty Dick’s life for the things he had done to them, but Gordon had his
way. “No murder” was his order and he enforced it. At sundown the
captives were released. The escapes scattered. Gordon went his way alone
and, though hunted for years, was never taken.
Five others of the twelve are still at liberty. The other six were
captured here and there. Three of them were hanged, and the remaining
three sentenced to life imprisonment, paroled after many years, and are
living within the law.
When things cooled down the people of California wanted to know how men
could be driven to such desperation that they captured and cut down
officers and guards, rushed and took a gatling-gun tower with nothing
but crude knives made in the prison blacksmith shop. This bloody affair
called attention to the terrible conditions and proved the beginning of
the end of prison cruelty in California.
After the break Folsom was a hell. The warden and Captain Murphy began
taking revenge on friends of the escapes. We were brought into the
office and questioned. I answered all questions respectfully, disclaimed
any knowledge of the break, and avoided punishment at that time. Warden
Wilkinson was removed and Archibald Yell of Sacramento took his place.
He had no experience and was forced to feel his way slowly. He had to
depend on Murphy. This put him in virtual control of the convicts and
his lust for revenge went unchecked. I was on his list and he soon got
me. I had but three months to serve when I was slated for the
strait-jacket. I knew the captain wanted to get my credits, which
amounted to two years and eight months. Murphy had me brought into his
office, where he said he had information that I was holding opium. If I
had admitted this they could have taken away my entire good time. I
denied it.
“Take him to the doctor,” the captain ordered. That meant I was to be
examined as to my physical condition before they put me in the jacket.
This worried me; I was not sure whether I would snitch on myself and
give up the hop. Some stanch men had weakened in the jacket. I thought I
could stick it out and made up my mind to. I had been flogged and
starved and third-degreed before going to Folsom and had taken them all
with a grin, but I was not sure of myself in the jacket. Many prisoners
claimed they gave up information on themselves and friends while
delirious or semiconscious in the jacket, and that was what alarmed me.
I preferred death to the loss of my credits.
While waiting for the doctor I got word to a friend who was holding my
hop to throw it in the canal at once. In this way I figured I was
protecting my credits even from myself. The doctor OK-ed me and I was
taken into the dungeon, where Cochrane, now recovered from his terrible
wounds, was waiting with the jacket. I saw it was a piece of heavy
canvas about four feet long and wide enough to go around a man’s body.
There were long pockets sewed to the inner side of it into which my arms
were thrust. I was then thrown on the floor face down and the jacket was
laced up the back. The edges of the jacket were fitted with eyeholes and
the thing was tightened up with a soft, stout rope just as a lady’s shoe
is laced. It can be drawn tight enough to stop the circulation of blood,
or the breath.
While Cochrane was tightening the jacket he said: “You fellows tried to
kill me; now it’s my time.” When he had me squeezed tight enough he
turned me over on my back and went to the cell door. “When you’re ready
to snitch on yourself, Blacky, just sing out,” he said as he locked me
in.
I will not harrow the reader with a description of the torture. The
jacket is no longer in use and no purpose would be served by living over
those three days in the “bag.” Every hour Cochrane came in and asked if
I was ready to give up the hop. When I denied having it, he tightened me
up some more and went away. The torture became maddening. Some time
during the second day I rolled over to the wall and beat my forehead
against it trying to knock myself “out.” Cochrane came in, saw what I
was doing, and dragged me back to the middle of the cell. I hadn’t
strength enough left to roll back to the wall, so I stayed there and
suffered. A guard looked in and there was real sympathy in his voice. He
said: “Why don’t you scream, make a noise? They might let you out; they
don’t want to kill anybody any more.” I didn’t want my friends to hear
me screaming; I kept still. It wouldn’t have done any good, anyway.
On the evening of the second day the doctor came and felt the pulse in
my temple. He then ordered me taken out for the night. They took the
thing off and I collapsed in one corner. There was a wooden cup of water
on the cell floor and I took a small mouthful only, because it would
make the jacket so much worse when I was put back in it. My fear of
snitching was gone now. The very ferocity of the punishment had made me
a wild beast.
I crawled around the cell looking for something I could use to open a
vein or artery; I wanted to die. All I found was my shoes. I tried to
dig a nail out of one of the heels, but only broke my finger nails. At
last I loosened one of the small metal eyes where the shoe is laced and
with the heel of my shoe beat it out flat on the cement floor. After
rubbing the metal on the floor for an hour I got an edge on it sharp
enough to open the skin but it would not cut the vein. Every time I
touched the vein it jumped out from under my crude blade. The sensation
was something like touching a live wire, like an electric shock. Finally
I gave it up and lay down to wait for morning.
I had an opium habit, but suffered so from the jacket that I forgot all
about the hop—another proof to me that the habit is mostly mental.
Cochrane came at eight o’clock the next morning. I denied having hop
and out came the jacket. All that day I was only half conscious, dopey.
I don’t think I suffered as much as on the previous day. Some time in
the night they released me, and I lay on the floor in a stupor. I don’t
know how long. Toward morning my mind cleared and I felt that another
day would finish me. I decided I would send for Captain Murphy after
they put me back in the jacket and ask him to take me down to the bank
of the canal where I worked so I could dig up the hop from its plant and
give it to him. I was liked by the “cons” and knew he would go with me
personally, so my friends could see him triumphing over me. At the
canal, instead of giving him hop I intended to throw my arms around him
and drag him to the bottom, where we would both “cease from troubling.”
The fourth morning Cochrane said: “You’re a damn fool; better give up
your hop. You can’t finish out the day.” I waited for him to put me in.
He held up the “bag” in front of me. I was sitting on the floor. “Get
up,” he said. I didn’t; I couldn’t; I was too weak. With a gesture of
disgust he threw the jacket out the door into the corridor. Motioning to
a couple of trusty prisoners, he said: “Take him away.” They helped me
to my cell and into my bunk. I lay there half dead, but victorious. My
cellmate came at noon and slipped me a jolt of hop. I took it and felt
better. He had not even thrown it away as I asked. “I knew you wouldn’t
squawk,” he said, “so I held on to it.”
My three months passed quickly enough and I was released, still feeling
the effects of the jacket. When I got out I held up my hand and swore I
would never make another friend or do another decent thing. I borrowed a
gun and got money. I returned to Folsom by stealth and flooded the place
with hop. I went about the country for months with but one thing in my
mind, a sort of vicious hatred of everybody and everything. As much as
possible I shunned even my own kind—thieves.
Then back to San Francisco again where I fell into a stool-pigeon trap.
Captain “Steve” Bunner, who now chases policemen, was then a very plain,
plain-clothes “dick,” chasing burglars and stick-ups. He arrested me. He
says I tried to shoot him but that he bears me no malice. I say he got
me a twenty-five year sentence, and I bear him no malice; and to-day,
while we are not exactly bosom friends, we certainly are not enemies. I
had no money to take an appeal from this stiff sentence, but an
attorney came and volunteered his services, saying: “I was in the
district attorney’s office when you were sent to Folsom and I know you
got jobbed. I’ll take your case for nothing.”
While waiting on appeal the great earthquake and fire occurred. All the
records in my case were destroyed. I could not be sent to prison, and
the attorney could not get me out, so I became a permanent fixture in
the county jail.
The old Broadway county jail was a stout structure and resisted the
quake, but was fire-swept and abandoned. When the fire threatened, all
prisoners were removed to Alcatraz Island and later to the branch jail
at Ingleside. I was there over six years and the things that happened
there during that time would fill a book.
During the graft prosecution that followed the fire, Ingleside housed
the mayor, the political boss of San Francisco, and many of the
supervisors. A looting banker was there, many strikebreakers indicted
for the murder of union men during the car strike, and soldiers for
wantonly shooting down citizens while the city burned. Jack Johnson,
the colored heavyweight champion, was with us for thirty days for
speeding.
Money was plentiful in the jail. The grocer came every day, and we all
got enough to eat. The political boss bought many books and founded a
library. He also got a big phonograph that was kept going all day and
far into the night. I was “appointed” jail librarian, and at once
catalogued the books and installed them in an empty cell.
The jail was a cross between a political headquarters and an industrial
plant. The political prisoners did politics, and the prisoners whose
records were burned in the fire turned to industry.
We got contracts to address envelopes and sublet the work to others. We
sewed beads on “genuine” Indian moccasins for a concern downtown. Best
of all, we bought cheap jewelry from mail-order houses and sold it at a
profit to visitors, giving them to understand that it was stolen stuff
we had smuggled in with us.
One by one, those whose records were destroyed by the fire made
application to have them restored in order to perfect their appeals. In
the reconstruction of those records they lost their valuable points on
appeal and one by one they were turned down by the higher court. I made
no move, but decided to stay in the jail rather than go back to Folsom,
although conditions there had been greatly improved by Warden Yell, who
soon put Captain Murphy out and won the confidence of the convicts by
treating them on the square.
At last a visiting grand-jury committee reported to the district
attorney that there was a prisoner at Ingleside whose case had been
pending more than six years, and recommended that something be done with
it. He at once put me on the docket for restoration of records.
My attorney had retired, and with money I had saved from work and
speculations in jail I got a new lawyer. I had all the criminal lawyers
in San Francisco doped out like race horses by this time, and my choice
was Sam Newburgh. I had seen him beat some of the toughest cases that
ever went to trial. Not only that, I had seen him go down in his pocket
and give clients money after he got them out. He never weakened, never
lay down, or ran out on a man—money or no money.
Newburgh at once threw down a most formidable barrage of objections and
technicalities. The prosecution got busy and, as usual, the defendant
was lost sight of in the smoke of battle. I had little hope of actually
beating the case; the best I could expect was a new trial and maybe a
sentence I could do instead of one that would do me.
But while my affairs were at this stage a new hope appeared. I had made
a few new outside friends by this time. One of them especially, a fine,
noble woman, who was interested in helping us all, concerned herself to
do what she could for me.
About this time Fremont Older, now editor of *The Call*, had helped the
late Donald Lowrie, whose writings did for American prisons what John
Howard’s did for those of England.
This woman, who was one of Mr. Older’s friends, wrote him and said:
“By way of thanking you for helping Lowrie I am going to give you
another man to assist. He is John Black, at the Ingleside jail. I wish
you would see him.”
He called at the jail soon, but instead of having me out to the office
he came down to my cell, squeezed his bulk through the doorway, and sat
down on the edge of my bunk. Waving the guard away, he produced cigars,
helped me to a light, and asked, in a voice that rang to me like a
twenty-dollar piece, what he could do for me. For once all my mistrust,
suspicion, and hatred vanished.
I said: “Mr. Older, I’m afraid you will waste a lot of valuable time
trying to do anything for me. I have twenty-five years. I’m guilty. I’m
plastered over with prior convictions. The police hate me, the jailers
dislike me because I tried to escape, and the trial judge is sore
because I’ve done everything possible to obstruct the judgment.”
I told him I was a hop fiend, that I had used it for ten years, and was
still using it. I told him I was tired of stealing and tired of living.
I told him there was but one thing I could say for myself. I had never
broken my word either to a thief or a policeman. I told him if he did
help me out I would give him my word to quit stealing. He went away,
saying: “This looks pretty tough, but I will try.”
He at once saw Judge Dunne, who sentenced me, and suggested probation on
the ground of my long confinement and dangerous physical condition.
Mr. Older was the powerful editor of a newspaper and a long-time friend
of the judge. He was stared at as if he had gone mad, and his suggestion
met with a cold, flat, final turndown. He sent word to me that the judge
was adamant and nothing could be done. I saw my case was tough indeed
when he couldn’t help me, and began planning a getaway.
I will not say there is honor among thieves. But I maintain that the
thieves I knew had something that served as a good substitute for honor.
I thought over all my thief friends and at last chose one and sent for
him. He got me saws, and I cut bars in my door.
On a propitious night he cut the window bars. I was too weak to pull
myself up to the window, and he had to reach in, lift me bodily, and
drop me on the ground outside.
Strange as it may sound, the fresh, cool night air had the same effect
on me that the foul air of a sewer would have on a healthy, normal
human. It overcame me. I was not able to walk at first, and my rescuer
had to support me on our way to the car line.
Before daylight and before the escape was discovered I was safely
planted in a room in Oakland, where I stayed and was nursed back to
life, fed and protected by my friend.
After waiting for a couple of weeks for the hue and cry to subside, he
stowed me away in a sleeper one night at Richmond on a northbound train
with a ticket to Vancouver, B.C.
County constables and town whittlers beat up the jungles, searched box
cars and brakebeams; city dicks explored the hop joints and hangouts for
me and the reward offered, but I traveled safely as a first-class
passenger on a first-class train.
No police officer who knows his business would think of looking in a
Pullman sleeper or diner for a fugitive hop fiend yegg with a
twenty-five-year sentence hanging on him.
Arriving safely at Vancouver, I took stock and found myself sick,
weighing one hundred and ten pounds, with a ferocious hop habit, about
ten dollars, and a big pistol—the gatherings of forty years.
Then came a foggy night. Necessity and Opportunity met, and I went away
with a bundle of bank notes and some certified checks. The checks went
into the first mail box as an apology from Necessity to Opportunity.
Then began the toughest battle of my life. Opium, the Judas of drugs,
that kisses and betrays, had a good grip on me, and I prepared to break
it. The last words of my rescuer when he put me in the train rang in my
ears:
“Good-by and good luck, Blacky. And you’d better lay away from that hop
or it’ll make a bum of you.”