Through the Shadows with O'Henry

CHAPTER XV. Despair; attempt at escape; in the hell-hole; torture in the prison; the diamond-thief's revenge; the flogging; hard labor; a message of hope from O. Henry.

Weeks went by. I didn't see Porter again. The promise of help and a position in the hospital, where food was good and beds clean, had put a flavor even into prison stew. I counted on Porter. Gradually the confidence waned. I grew bitter with resentment and a cold feeling of abandonment. I had been used ragged by every one. It began to eat in on me that Bill was one with all the other ingrates I had helped.

I did not know that he was working for me all the while. I did not realize the obstacles that block promotion in a prison. I decided to help myself. I tried to escape, was caught, sent into solitary for 14 days and then brought down from the hell-hole for trial.

Dick Price, a convict I had befriended and a life termer, tried to save me.While I was sitting on the bench outside the deputy warden's room, Dick went past me.

"You've got a fellow Jennings in solitary for trying to escape. I gave him the saws. He's a new man. Ain't been here long enough to know the ropes. I wised him up to escape. Give me the punishment."

Dick spoke in a loud voice. I knew it was a cue for me. He had not given me the saws. He knew nothing about the escape until a horse-thief peached on me.

I was called before the deputy.

"How did you like your new home?" he asked with a leer. He meant the "hole" in solitary. "I found where you got the saws."

"Dick Price had nothing to do with it."

"I thought so," he said. "Dick's a 'mighty good boy. Been here a 'mighty long time. Come clean on this now and I'll make it easy for you."

"I can't."

"You'll have to."

"I can't."

"By God, I'll make you." I knew what he meant. It made me desperate with fury.

"By God, you won't."

"Here, take this fellow down and give him seventy-five."

Only a man who has been in hell's mouth who has seen the blood spurt as men, stripped and chained, are beaten until their flesh is torn and broken as a derelict, knows the indignity and depravity of a prison beating. I saw myself cowed by this screaming brutality. It made a fiend of me.

"You take me, you damn' coward; you strip me and beat me over that trough—try it, and if I live through it, I'll come back and cut your damn' throat I"

The deputy reared from me, his face ashen with rage. Like a tortured maniac, I sprang at him. The guards rushed forward, made a leap at me, stopped abruptly, livid and simpering, as though suddenly stricken. If any one of them had touched me I could have torn him to pieces.

I was ready to be killed outright sooner than submit to the horrors of that "punishment cell." I had seen too much of it—the prison demon dragged out of solitary and whipped into bleeding insensibility a couple of times a week—other prisoners given the "water" until their faces were one red, gushing stream and the anguished screams filled the air.

The basement where these things were done was directly under the hospital. I passed above it and I could look down on the way to the transfer office. Three weeks before a man had been beaten to death over that trough. The awful debauchery of that murder had seared into my brain.

The man was a friend of mine and one of the most intelligent convicts in the prison. He was a diamond robber—the cleverest crook in the pen, a man of neat speech and cultured manner. He had stolen some of the most priceless gems in the State. All the detectives in the country had not been able to locate the jewels. The jewelers offered thousands in a reward for the recovering of the diamonds. No third degree, no punishment could force from the man the location of his treasure.

In the prison was an editor, sentenced for the murder of a rival newspaper publisher. This fellow would have crucified his own mother to gain an extra crust for himself. He was always worming his way into favor by snitching on convicts. For some strange reason perhaps because of their intellectual equality, he and the diamond robber became friends.

One morning the newspapers carried blazing headlines. The stolen diamonds had been found. The robber's secret was out.

Suspense and a surcharged excitement held the prison in a grip. We knew the episode was not closed. We waited.

The diamond robber said nothing. Restless curiosity sent its questions and suppositions across the "grapevine route" from one cell block to another.

"Who had told?" "What would happen?"

The answer came in a sudden viciousness that revealed the whole betrayal. The robber sneaked one day down the corridor. He had a bottle in his hand. He had calculated his time. He fell into line just as the editor was going to his cell.

There was a frenzied scream, a moment's scuffle, a loud, prolonged, tormented cry. The editor lay on the corridor floor, one eye burned out and his face puffed and flaming with the carbolic acid that was eating into his flesh. When he came out from the hospital he was half blinded and his face, such a seamy mass of ugly scars, hell itself wouldn't own him. He had won the confidence of the diamond-thief and betrayed him.

"Seventy-five" was the punishment ordered for the robber for the assault on a fellow prisoner. He was a tall, slender fellow, graceful and muscular—made like a white marble statue.

Prison is not the place for dark dealings. Every convict knew in less than an hour that the robber was to "get his." I walked out from the transfer office and looked down the stairs into the basement. The robber, strapped across the trough, his ankles drawn under it, his arms across the top, was already a mass of blood.

He uttered not the slightest moan. None but a hell hound—and that's what a guard becomes when he has done a thing like this a hundred times—could have laid those heavy paddles, with their edges sharp as razor blades, across that raw and jagged flesh. The robber was beaten to the bone. Long after he was unconscious, the merciless flaying went on.

The guards stopped. Half an hour passed. The robber came to. The guards propped him up. The deputy warden glowered over him.

"Now say that you are sorry. Say that you'll obey the rules," he thundered.

The mangled, bleeding victim, who couldn't stand, couldn't speak, raised a gray, death-stricken face. And after a long pause, a husky curse came from his lips.

" ----------him, I wish I got his other eye."

They strapped him back to the trough and hacked him to death. Broken bones, ragged flesh, they struck into it until it doubled a limp mass into the trough.

That's what "seventy-five" meant in the Ohio penitentiary in 1899.

They called me a man-killer. I never murdered a man in my life. I shot quick and clean in self-defense. I would have felt myself a degraded beast to have foully killed like that.

If that warden had carried out his sentence, he would have died like a cur. He knew it.

I was reduced to the fourth grade, given a suit of white with black stripes running horizontally across it, put in with the lockstep gang and sent to the bolt contract to work.

The confinement, the isolation, the cruel discipline took the spirit out of me. I heard from no one. No one was allowed to see me. Papers, books, visitors were denied me.

And then I faked sick just to get a word to Porter.

The "croaker" was taking my temperature. Bill came out of the prescription-room; he was not allowed to speak to me. His look was enough. Bitter, sad, troubled. He nodded to me and turned his back. I knew that Bill had tried and failed. He was powerless to help me.

I went back to the bolt works. This is the hardest labor in the prison. Outside contractors pay the State about 30 cents a day for the hire of the men. If a given task is not finished on time the convict is sent to the hole for punishment. Twice in three days "Little Jim," a negro, was given the "water."

A hose with a nozzle, one-quarter of an inch in diameter, sixty pounds pressure behind it, sends a stream of terrific force at the prisoner. His head is held strapped, the stream that is hard as steel is turned full in the man's face, his eyes, his nostrils. The pressure compels him to open his mouth. The swift, battering deluge tears down his throat and rips his stomach in two. No man can stand the "water" twice and live.

Little Jim passed my bench one morning.

"Mr. Al, they done give Lil Jim the water ag'in," he whispered, walked a step, flopped to the ground, a red geyser spouting from his mouth. Before Little Jim reached the hospital he was dead.

After that morning, I was about finished. I lost all hope, all ambition. Bill Porter saved me.

Across the grapevine route he sent his message. From one convict to another the word went until it was stealthily whispered in my ear:

"Don't lose heart. I'm working. There's a new main finger."