HEADQUARTERS
Just a whisper, but it was enough. He had the drop on them. He not
only had the drop on them, but the guards, anything but intellectual
giants in other respects, were pretty good judges of certain men in
certain circumstances. They knew that this man meant what he said.
“Lift your hands,” said Craig. “Steady!” He himself was as steady as
concrete, but his nerves and his brain were nimble. He could see in
all directions at once--or felt as if he could. “Now,” said he, “get
up slow and easy--that’s right--and face the wall.”
They obeyed. They were not cowards precisely. It was just Mr. Death
pointing his finger at them, that was all. Not all of them were
brave men, either--one in particular. This was Copton, the guard
responsible for the break that had sent Craig to the dark cells,
_after_ a session in the hospital. Copton had gone flabby and white.
He shook. To look at Copton was to see that he believed all this to
be a measure of vengeance aimed solely against himself. Copton was
sure of this when Craig spoke commandingly to him.
“Copton,” said Craig, “step backward to the table and put your gun on
it, then your billy, then turn your pockets wrong side out--quick!”
Copton jumped. He did as he was ordered, as quickly as his flabby
nerves would permit him to, expecting a shot in the liver from one
moment to the next. But he picked up a bit of courage when Craig
spoke to him next. And it was just as well that he did, too. For,
even now, there wasn’t a second to be lost--no telling at what moment
some other guard might come drifting in, or the principal keeper
himself, thus spoiling everything.
“And now, Copton,” said Craig, “disarm the others. Holsters off with
the guns! Billies and handcuffs with them.”
He had picked on Copton because the man was so deadly frightened that
there was no danger of his disobeying. Just then, Copton would have
murdered his own grandmother, if so ordered. He was that kind. And
plus this fear of his, was his gratitude for being permitted to live
yet a little longer. He had mistreated Craig. Now Craig had him in
his power. Copton was sick with fright.
There was a guard named Tweed--a big, young man, without much sense,
with something of the blind courage of a young buffalo. Craig saw,
just in time, a premonitory flexing of Tweed’s arms.
“Steady, there, Tweed,” he said.
He made Copton handcuff Tweed right there, with his hands still up.
But there were signs of wavering elsewhere. So Craig made Copton take
a gun from the pile and drill it on his comrades, and the guards were
more afraid of this frightened renegade with a gun, one would have
said, than they were of Craig himself.
As a matter of fact, as measured by the ticking of a watch, all
that had transpired since Craig’s first appearance here in the room
upstairs, must have been at breathless speed, leisurely but fast,
as is the way of big events, like the piling into each other of two
racing locomotives, or the fall of a big redwood tree. And the danger
was all over by the time that “Eddie, the Yegg” came crawling up from
the subcellar.
Eddie quietly took one of the piled-up guns.
“I counted the hundred you told me to, sir,” he said in his prison
whisper. Craig had ordered Eddie to wait that long.
“Good,” said Craig. “Now, take the gun from Copton. And”--he raised
his voice slightly--“I’ll remind you gentlemen that no one will be
hurt if you obey orders. One false move, and we’ll bag the lot of
you.”
The six guards were marched with Eddie, sidewise, at their head and
Craig at the rear down into the subcellar. There, Copton aiding,
these keepers also were stripped--five of them, not including Copton.
For Craig had other work he wanted Copton to do--work in which
Copton would need his uniform. And Copton was willing. His gratitude
at being spared was now greater than his fear that he wouldn’t be
spared, and he would have murdered all five, and the one already in
the cell, had Craig but spoken the word.
But now Craig turned out the feverish Bangor, and put two of the
guards in that small box which had been Bangor’s sick room for upward
of a week. Then he delivered an oath to George Washington, and George
swore, while the other convicts, those still in the cells, uttered
oaths of another sort and made obscene jests at the keepers’ expense,
until Craig spoke to them.
Even in this short time Craig had grown in power other than the power
of a gun and a commanding position. He told them to shut up for their
own good, and they obeyed him. After having seen what they had seen,
who wouldn’t have been ready to believe anything?
In George Washington’s cell, Craig also put two of the stripped and
humiliated keepers, being careful to assure them, most politely,
that, in a short time, he would see that every one got more
comfortable quarters. But as to what all this was about, not a word,
except such words as he had already spoken to Eddie, and Eddie to him.
Then the remaining keeper he had brought down from upstairs, always
excepting Copton, he placed in the cell with the first night guard
taken. Thus, while the night was still young, were six guards
disarmed, disuniformed, locked up in cells where no amount of
shouting would do them any good, and yet one other guard cowed, till
no more dangerous than a rabbit in the presence of a rattlesnake.
“What are you going to do with him now?” asked Eddie, with his weak
and tragic face reflecting a species of horror as he looked at the
stricken Copton.
“I am going to ask him,” said Craig, “to go fetch us the P. K.!”
“Oh, Tommy!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, think a moment, Mr. Masters!”
This from the cells where the remaining prisoners still were. And why
not? They had reason to dread Mr. Stievers, the principal keeper.
Almost every prisoner who had ever gone through San Pedro did.
“It’s merely to put him into safe-keeping, too,” Craig announced.
“Cheer up,” he added. “It’s to be a square deal for everybody--you
keepers, included.”
There was a groan and a curse, and a general muttering from the
cells. But old Eddie, the Yegg, had his say. Said he:
“’Tis a thought that’ll bring you luck.”
And these words sounded sweet in the echo of Craig’s brain as he
once more made his way up the stone steps and, this time, on through
the guardhouse and out into the sparkling pure night of the San
Pedro Prison yard. So long it had been since he had seen the open
night--smelled it and tasted it, as he was doing now--that he could
have fallen over backward for sheer agony of joy.
This he had had taken away from him! The sky was clear. The stars
were out. Well down in the southwest rode the crescent of a brand-new
moon. And the air was of that crystalline blue purity of wild places
far from cities.
It was in the midst of an unpeopled region that San Pedro stood. It
wasn’t much of a prison, as modern penal institutions go. It had been
under a curse from the first, so one would have said who knew its
history.
First of all, there was its location--as unlovely a place as ever
was, except on a night like this, such as would have glorified any
place. But ordinarily a region that was sterile, as bleak as Baffin
Land in winter, as dusty hot as Death Valley in summer--a freak of
nature--the bed of some long dead and dried-up sea, so the professors
said. And it pushed up in the midst of other hills, north, south,
east, and west, which were verdant, heavily timbered.
It was the worthlessness of this dead region that had made it the
chosen site of San Pedro away back in the early history of the State.
For the politicians had bought it in for a song, and then resold it
to the State, in the good, old-fashioned way.
Not even the railroad had been built past San Pedro at that time.
The railroad came only when the State began to grow and prosper so
fast that a newer and greater prison was built elsewhere, and the
railroad’s advent was all that kept San Pedro in existence at all.
For, even then, San Pedro was a place of evil repute. The initial
scandal of how and where and by whom it had been built--this had been
like a mother hen for the breeding of other scandals--generations of
them.
But, finally, the old prison had seemed to settle down. It became a
secondary prison--a sort of disciplinary prison to which the scum
of the other jails and penitentiaries were sent, or those prisoners
who had shown themselves contumacious in court--as had one, Thomas
Masters, who had refused any facts about himself even to the lawyer
appointed to his defense, when said Masters was tried for shooting a
man, with intent to kill, and so forth, in a labor camp.
So San Pedro each year had sunk a little lower in public esteem,
become a little more a place for honest citizens, as well as
lawbreakers to shudder at whenever its name was mentioned.
But San Pedro--a mere parallelogram of shimmering brick on a milky
plain--was a thing of beauty on a night like this. It was, even, to
others than to Craig--he who had looked at it a while back with the
fervent eyes of the liberated, whose eyes would have seen beauty in a
construction camp. For, so others had looked at it, too.
Ordinarily, train No. 93 didn’t stop at San Pedro at all. It was a
fast express, westbound, composed mostly of sleepers, and scheduled
to pass the prison at thirteen minutes past midnight. But, this
night, No. 93 stopped, as it was bound to do on signal. San Pedro was
an institution of the State, and for the time being, at least, the
State, not the railroad, was supreme.
The engineer looked down with surprise from the lofty cab as his
great Mogul rode by. He wasn’t used to seeing a crowd like that at
San Pedro, not at this time of night. Generally, when he made this
run, San Pedro lay as still and as dark and as apparently deserted as
the desert around it.
The Mogul panted to a stop; and, looking back, the engineer made out
that most of this crowd had been passengers. He caught a word here or
there:
“Governor’s orders---- Home for the holiday---- Good behavior----
Good-by---- Good-by----”
“Poor devils,” said the engineer, without anger.
And he began a mental calculation where best he could pick up the
time he had lost. It was a problem; but, at that, he felt better all
along the run, at the idea of snaking them away--farther--farther
yet!--those poor devils from the hell they had this night put behind
them.
It was the conductor of No. 93, though, who had had the real
surprise. What did the warden of San Pedro mean by dumping a load of
ex-cons like this on a first-class train at midnight? Twenty-four of
them--all in their new prison clothes--most of them smoking “State,”
as the tobacco of the prisons and poorhouses was called, and smoking
this in raw, new pipes!
“Quick, men! Into the smoker!”
But their passes were in perfect order--passes that would later
be turned in as vouchers to the State for payment--each pass duly
stamped and signed by “_Copton, acting_.”
“Isn’t Copton that pie-faced little guard that used to deadhead out
with us and get us to slow down so’s he could jump off?”
The conductor looked at his brakeman and the brakeman looked at the
conductor.
“Sure,” said the brakeman, who was slow of speech. “That’s him.”
“Well, how in the devil,” pursued the conductor, “did they ever come
to make a hit like that----”
The conductor paused again, as if he might have had some ill-defined
doubt or other in the back of his brain.
“He’s merely acting,” said the brakeman. The brakeman also took time
for thought. “I remember now,” he continued slowly. “I understand
that there’s some sort of a shake-up coming off in San Pedro--that
the governor’s going to appoint one of these swell reform guys, or
something.”
“We should worry,” droned the conductor, “even if they are going to
the end of the division. Only--better make out a report--to get that
car another sort of fumigation at the end of the run. Did you notice?
Looked like the majority of those fellows had been sick.”
The thought of all these convicts going free was in the brakeman’s
mind as he finally made his way to the rear platform of No. 93.
He wasn’t much of a poet, but--going home to celebrate the day of
the Great Liberator! And the thought, with something of its poetic
significance, lingered as he looked out through the starlight at the
receding prison in the distance.
Then the brakeman strained his eyes, while another sort of thought
took vague form in his mind. Just now it seemed to him that he had
seen something else putting the prison behind it. He wasn’t sure. The
starlight was dim. But it appeared to be one of the San Pedro auto
trucks ghosting off to the south. No, it couldn’t be. What would a
prison auto truck be doing out at this time of the night?
The starlight swallowed up the thing he had seen--or thought that
he had seen. And presently the starlight swallowed up dim San Pedro
itself. But all the time the brakeman was there by himself on the
rear platform of No. 93--trimming his lights, recoiling the end of
his bell rope--he was run through by a vague uneasiness, a hint of
something impending. Or, was all this but an afterthought?
He turned.
A man was crouching there in the doorway of the car. Over the lower
part of the man’s face a bandanna handkerchief had been tied. He
held an automatic pistol, as if he loved it, close to his breast,
but pointed at the brakeman. All this the brakeman noticed in the
first dazed sweep of his eyes; then something else. The stranger was
dressed in a stiff new suit of clothes, such as San Pedro furnished
to those it set free.