Through the Shadows with O'Henry

CHAPTER XIV. In the Ohio Penitentiary; horrors of prison life; in and out of Banker's Row; a visit from O. Henry, fellow convict; promise of help.

In prison men live unnatural lives. Brutal associations are forced upon them. They are fed at a hog trough, locked into stifling cells and denied all wholesome communication with right-living people. The devices employed to crush out the better instincts are monstrous beyond the conception of healthy-minded men and women.

The confinement cramps and yellows even the city man. The outlaw, used to the big freedom of the plains and the mountains, is a doomed man once he steps inside the gray stone walls.

As soon as I felt the heavy breath of the prison the breath laden with evil smells, charged with bitter curses, pulsing with hushed resentment the beast reared within me.

My arrival had been heralded by every newspaper in the State. Every man in the prison knew it. Two train-robbers, former friends of mine on the outside, wanted to renew old acquaintance. By some crook, they managed to pass me in the corridor.

They were as ghosts. For a moment I could not recall them. Like white shadows, long and bent, they glided past. One year in the penitentiary had evaporated the life from their bodies. They came in husky giants. They went out wasted wrecks.

And then there was my first meal. The odor of slumgullion, of putrid meat, of millions of flies, surged in an overpowering wave upon me as the door of the dining-room opened. I sat on a stool between two sweaty negroes, who were more like gorillas than men.

There was the clatter of tin, the shuffle of uneasy feet, the waving of upraised hands signaling the guards for bread. No sound of the human voice, but that God-forsaken, weighty, brutal dumbness imposed upon convicts in the penitentiary.

At each place there was a tin of stew. Maggots floated in the gravy. A hunk of bread and a saucer of molasses and flies filled out the menu. I had been used to coarse fare. This stinking filth sickened me.

A burly, red-faced fellow opposite leaned over, his face almost in his plate, and shoveled in the noisome stew. He raised two fingers. A trusty came down, a great dishpan hung from his neck. With one swipe he ladled out a scoop of the foul mess and splattered it on the red fellow's plate.

Every time; the guards helped a prisoner they whacked the food down so that bits of the meat or fluid spattered. Some of the gravy splashed across the narrow board and slopped in my face. In an instant I was on my feet. The negro at my side pulled me down.

"Doan want yoah 'lasses?" he asked. I pushed it over to him.

He put in his thumb, jabbed out the flies, smudged them on the table, and ate.

Shoved into the cell for the night, I felt that I was forgotten by all the world. The cell was in reality a stone vault, four by eight feet. It had no window. The only ventilation came from the barred door that opened on the closed corridor. There were two straw ticks on wooden shelves. These were the bunks. Another man shared the fetid hole with me.

The cells were entirely without sanitary equipment. On Saturday night the men were locked up and kept in this stifling confinement until Monday morning. Two men sleeping, breathing, tramping about in a walled space four by eight for 36 hours turned that closet into a hell. It was no longer air that filled the place, but a reeking stench.

When the first Monday morning came I decided to move. I had been placed in the transfer office. Few prisoners are qualified to act as clerks. I was given this office position the day after my arrival. It was my business to keep a check on all the men, to tabulate all transfers from one cell to another and to check up on all releases. Not an official nor a clerk could leave the prison until every convict was accounted for.

There was one cell block called the "Bankers' Row." It was fitted up for the privileged convicts. These high financiers were gentlemen. They had not held up trains and, at the risk of life and limb, robbed the State of $20,000 or $40,000.

They had sat in well-furnished offices and lolled in easy chairs while they did their thieving. They were polite about it when they filched the funds entrusted to them by laborers, small investors, working girls.

They ground hundreds of struggling families under heel, but they were careful to conceal the blood stains. They had pilfered in millions.

They were entitled to consideration. They got it.

Cells in Bankers' Row were neat parlors compared to the vaults in the I. N. K. block, where I was settled. They had mirrors, a curtain on the door and a carpet on the floor. One of the exclusive convicts was discharged. I transferred myself into his cell.

When I appeared in the select promenade in the morning my hickory shirt called for comment. The bankers were all prison clerks. They were permitted to wear white shirts. An elegant, pursy-faced, corpulent bundle of Southern gentility accosted me. His bank had "failed" for $2,000,000.

"Good morning, sah. You are a banker, I presume?"

"Yes," I answered.

"National?" He was merely interested in a colleague.

"Not particularly. I robbed any and all of them. You are an embezzler?"

The magnate from New Orleans spluttered out his surprised disgust. His neat face was crimson with resentment.

"I am heah."

"Yes, sah; so am I," I answered.

"I think there must be a mistake." He walked off haughtily.

"So do I. I am going back with the horse-thieves, where I'll be among gentlemen."

My departure was more precipitous than I had planned. A jealous convict "snitched." The deputy warden sent for me.

"Who transferred you?" he asked.

"The transfer clerk," I answered. Lucky for me the deputy was in a good humor.

"What for?"

"A good bed, a carpet, some clean air."

"Those rooms are for bankers," he informed me.

"I'm a banker."

"Not their sort. They didn't terrify with a gun. You go back to your own range. They might steal what you've got."

So I went back to my hole. I had grown used to prison bread. I learned how to skim the worms out of the stew. I could do without molasses. But I could not endure the Sundays. They left me weak, stifled, murderous. The fourth one since my arrival dawned.

Every Sunday in the Ohio penitentiary an attendant from the hospital visited the cells dispensing pills and quinine. The allotment was always given to the prisoners whether they needed them or not.

The hospital attendant was standing at my door. I felt his glance, but I did not meet it. And then a voice, hushed and measured, that to me seemed like sunlight breaking through a cloud, sounded in my ear.

The low rich tones rippled through the black prison curtain. The waving prairies and the soft hills of the Texas ranch; the squat bungalow at Honduras, the tropical valley of Mexico; the magnificent scene in the ballroom was before me.

"Colonel, we meet again."

In all my life there has never been a tenser moment than when Bill Porter spoke that simple greeting. It caught me like a stab in the heart. I felt like crying. I could not bear to look him in the face.

I did not want to see Bill Porter in convict stripes. For months we shared the same purse, the same bread, the same glass. We had traveled through South America and Mexico together. Not a word had he said of his past. And here it was torn open for me to see and the secret he had kept so quietly shouted out in his gray, prison suit with the black band running down the trousers. The proudest man I have ever known was standing outside a barred door, dispensing quinine and pills to jailbirds.

"Colonel, we have the same tailor, but he does not provide us with the same cut of clothes," the old droll, whimsical voice drawled without a chuckle. I looked into the face that would have scorned to show its emotion. It was still touched with grave, impressive hauteur, but the clear eyes, in that moment, seemed filmed and hurt.

I think it was about the only time in my life I did not feel like talking. Bill was looking at my ill-fitting hand-me-downs. I had received the castoff clothes of some other prisoner. They hung on me like the flapping rags on a scarecrow. The sleeves were rolled up and the trousers tucked back. My shoes were four sizes too large. When I walked, it sounded like the clatter of a horse brigade.

"But you'll soon be promoted to the first rank," Porter said. He haddeliberately sought the task of dispensing the pills in order to get me a word of advice.

"Colonel— " He spoke quickly. Conservation was forbidden. The guard might come into the range at any moment. "Be careful of the friends you choose. On the outside it may be safe to pick up acquaintances at every siding. I'm glad you were sociably inclined at Honduras. The O. P. is a different country. Have no confidants."

It was valuable advice. I would have escaped six months of torture in solitary confinement had I heeded it.

"And when you graduate into the first grade, I'll see what 'pull' can do for you. There may be a chance to have you transferred to the hospital."

That was all. The stealthy footfall of the guard brushed along the corridor. We looked at each other a moment. Porter flipped a few pills into my hand and carelessly walked off.

As he left, the utter isolation of the prison was intensified. The cell walls seemed heaving together, closing me into a black pit. I felt that I would never see Bill Porter again.

He had said nothing of himself. I knew that he was convicted on a charge of embezzlement. I never asked him about it. One day in New York, years later, he alluded to it. He was shaving in his room in the Caledonia Hotel. We were talking of old times in the Ohio penitentiary. He wanted me to tell him of a bank-robbery we had pulled in the outlaw days.

"Bill, what did you fall for?" I asked. He turned upon me a look of quizzical humor, rubbed the lather into his chin, and waited a moment before he answered.

"Colonel, I have been expecting that question, lo, these many years. I borrowed four from the bank on a tip that cotton would go up. It went down, and I got five."

It was but another of his quips. Porter, I believe, and all of his friends share the confidence, was innocent of the charge laid against him. He was accused of misappropriating about $1,100 from the First National Bank of Austin. He had been railroaded to prison. I believe it.

It was not his guilt that I thought of as he stood at my door that Sunday morning, but his buoyant friendship and the odd, delightful gravity of his quiet speech. He held me as he had the first day I met him in the Honduras cantina.

But as he left, a thought full of a stinging irritation wedged itself into these happier memories. I had been in prison nearly four weeks. Bill Porter knew it. Every one in the penitentiary knew it. He had taken his time about visiting me. Had it been me, I would have rushed to see him at the first opportunity.

I tried to make out a brief for him. Porter was a valuable man in prison. He had been a pharmacist in Greensboro before entering the bank at Austin. This experience won him the envied position of drug clerk in the prison hospital. Many privileges softened the bitterness of convict life. He had a good bed, decent food and comparative freedom. Why had he failed to visit me?

He was busy, I know. And he would have gone to almost any extremity to avoid asking a favor from the guard. It would have cut him to the quick to win a refusal from these men who were his inferiors. Was he merely waiting his easy opportunity to see me?

I didn't understand Bill Porter then as I learned to know him later. I know now the reason for that long delay. I can appreciate the goading humiliation O.Henry suffered when he stood before my cell acknowledging himself a criminal even as myself. Porter knew my high esteem for him. Always reticent, it was an aching blow to his pride to meet me now, no longer the gentleman, but the fellow convict.