I was twenty-five years old, almost to a day, when Judge Haskins
pronounced the words which were to make me for the next five years or
less--the period to be determined upon my good behavior--an inmate of the
State penitentiary. Lacking the needful good behavior, five long years
would be taken out of the best part of life for me, and what was worse (I
realized this even in the tumultuous storm of first-moment impressions
and emotions), my entire point of view was certain to be hopelessly
twisted and distorted for all the years that I might live beyond my
release.
Surely little blame can attach to the confession that out of the tumult
came a hot-hearted and vindictive determination to live for a single
purpose; to work and strive and endure so that I might be the sooner free
to square my account with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers. I need make no
secret now of the depth of this hatred. At times, when the obsession was
strongest upon me, the fear that one or both of them might die before my
chance should come was almost maddening. They were both old men, and in
the nature of things there was always a possibility that death might
forestall me.
So it was this motive at first that made me jealous of my good-conduct
marks; made me study the prison regulations and live up to them with a
rigidity that knew no lapses. I am not defending the motive; I
cheerfully admit that it was unworthy. None the less, I owe it
something: it sustained me and kept me sane and cool-headed at a time
when, without some such stimulus, I might have lost my reason.
Of the three succeeding years and what they brought or failed to bring
the least said will be, perhaps, the soonest mended. I am glad to be
able to write it down that my native State had, and still has, a fairly
enlightened prison system; or at least it is less brutalizing than many
others. During my period of incarceration the warden-in-office was an
upright and impartial man, just to his charges and even kindly and
fatherly when the circumstances would warrant. After my steady
determination to earn an early release became apparent, I was made a
"trusty," and for two of the three years I was the prison bookkeeper.
Study as I might, I could never determine how the prison life affected my
associates; but for me it held few real hardships beyond the confinement,
the disgrace, and the fear that before I could outlive it I should become
a criminal in fact. Fight the idea as we may, environment, association,
and suggestion have a great deal to say to the human atom. I was treated
as a criminal, was believed to be a criminal, and mingled daily with
criminals. Put yourself in my place and try to imagine what it would
make of you in three changes of the calendar.
During the three years I received but one letter from home, and wrote but
one. Almost as soon as my sentence period began I had a heart-broken
letter from my sister. She and my mother had returned from Canada, only
to find me dead and buried to the world. I answered the letter, begging
her not to write again, or to expect me to write. It seemed a refinement
of humiliation to have the home letters come addressed to me in a prison;
and besides, I was like the sick man who turns his face to the wall,
wishing neither to see nor to hear until the paroxysm has passed. I may
say here that both of these good women respected my wishes and my foolish
scruples. They wrote no more; and, what was still harder for my mother,
I think, they made no journeys half across the State on the prison
visiting days.
It will be seen that I have cut the time down from the five-year limit
imposed by my sentence; and so it was cut down in reality. After I had
been promoted to the work in the prison offices my life settled into a
monotonous routine, with nothing eventful or disturbing to mark the
passing weeks and months; and by living strictly within the prison
requirements, working faithfully, and never once earning even a reprimand
from the kindly warden or his deputy, I was given the full benefit of my
"good time," and at the end of the third year, with a prison-provided
suit on my back and five dollars of the State's money in my pocket, I was
paroled.
Though I have been its beneficiary and victim, and have been made to
suffer cruelly under its restrictions, I make here no arraignment of the
law which provides in some States--my own among the number--for the
indeterminate prison sentence. The reform was doubtless conceived in
mercy and a true spirit of sociological lenity toward the offender. But
in practice it may be so surrounded with safeguards and limitations, so
wrapped up in provisos and conditions, as to completely defeat its own
end and reverse its intent.
Under the law as it stood--and still stands, I believe--in my own
commonwealth, I was required to remain in the State; to report, at least
once a month, by letter to the prison authorities, and in person to the
chief of police in any city in which I might be living; to retain my own
name; and to bind myself to tell a straightforward story of my conviction
and imprisonment at any time and to any one who should require it. The
omission to comply with any of these restrictions and requirements would
automatically cancel my parole and subject me to arrest and
re-imprisonment for the unexpired period of the original sentence.
Again I ask you to put yourself in the place of a man paroled under such
conditions. With such handicaps, what possible chance can a released man
have to secure honest employment? Fortunately for me, I was still only
twenty-eight--young and hopeful; and I started out to do my best, saying
only that nothing should tempt me to go back to Glendale where, I was
told, my mother and sister were still living in retirement and under the
shadow of the family disgrace.
Knowing that the released convict usually heads for the largest city he
can reach, thus obeying the common-sense instinct which prompts him to
lose himself quickly in a crowd, I planned to do the opposite thing. I
told myself that I was not a criminal, and therefore would not follow the
criminal's example. I would board an interurban trolley and expend a
portion of my five dollars in reaching some obscure town in a distant
part of the State, where I would begin the new life honestly and openly
in any employment that might offer.
There was nobody to meet me as I forthfared from the prison gates, but I
was not expecting any one and so was not disappointed. None the less, on
my way to the central trolley station I had a half-confirmed conviction
that I was followed; that the follower had been behind me all the way
from the prison street.
After making several fruitless attempts I finally succeeded in fixing
upon the particular person in the scattering sidewalk procession who made
all the turns that I made, keeping always a few paces in the rear. He
was a man of about my own age, round-faced and rather fleshy. In my
Glendale days I should have set him down at once as a traveling salesman.
He looked the part and dressed it.
Farther along, upon reaching the interurban station, I was able to
breathe freer and to smile at the qualms of my new-liberty nervousness.
Just as I was parting with two of my five dollars for a ticket to the
chosen destination my man came up to the ticket window, followed by a
hotel porter carrying a grip and a sample case. I saw then how facilely
easy it was going to be to take fright at shadows. Evidently the young
man was a salesman, and his apparent pursuit of me had been merely a
coincidence in corner turnings. And in the recoil from the apprehensive
extreme I refused to attach any significance to the fact that he was
purchasing a ticket to the same distant town to which I had but now paid
my own passage.
During the leisurely five-hour run across the State the object of my
suspicions--my foolish suspicions, I was now calling them--paid no
attention to me, so far as I could determine. Save for the few minutes
at noon when the interurban car stopped to permit its passengers to
snatch a hasty luncheon at a farm-town restaurant, he did not once leave
his place, which was two seats behind mine and on the opposite side of
the car. On the contrary, like a seasoned traveler, he made himself
comfortable behind the barricade of hand-baggage and wore out the entire
time with sundry newspapers and magazines. Moreover, at our common
destination he did not follow me to the one old-fashioned hotel; instead,
he led the way to it, and was buying a cigar at the little counter
show-case when I came up to bargain, with another of my precious dollars,
for the supper, lodging and breakfast which were to launch me upon the
new career.
After this, I saw the fat-faced traveling man but twice, and both times
casually. At supper he had a small table to himself in one corner of the
room; and the following morning, when I went out to lay siege to my new
world, he was smoking in the hotel office and again buried in a
newspaper. Two hours later I had found employment driving a grocer's
delivery wagon, and in the triumph of having so soon found even this
humblest of footholds in a workaday world, I had completely forgotten him.
Having thus made my cast for fortune and secured the foothold, it took me
less than a week to learn that I had made a capital mistake in choosing a
small town. Under that condition of my parole which required me to
report in my true character to the town marshal I assured myself that I
might as well have published my story in the county newspaper. Before
the end of the week half of my customers on the delivery route were
beginning to look askance at me, and when the Saturday night came I was
discharged. I knew perfectly well what was coming when the boss, a
big-bodied, good-natured man who had made his money as a farmer and was
now losing it as the town grocer, called me into his little box of an
office at the back of the shop.
"Say, Weyburn; when I asked you where you had been working before you
came here, you didn't tell me the truth," was the way he began on me.
"I told you I had worked in a bank in Glendale," I protested; "which was
and is the truth."
"I know; but you didn't tell me that you'd put in the last three years in
the pen, and were out on parole."
"No, I didn't tell you that. But I would have told you if you had asked
me."
"I can't stand for it," he grumbled, chewing at the unlighted cigar which
was his Saturday night indulgence. "And if I could, the customers
wouldn't. I suppose as many as a dozen women have been to me in the last
few days. They say they can't afford to be watchin' the back door every
time you come 'round with the groceries. You see how it is."