Through the Shadows with O'Henry

CHAPTER XXII. Defiance of Foley the Goat; honesty hounded; O. Henry's scorn; disruption of the Recluse Club.

Sally was right. There was no place for her in the outside world. The ex-convict is thrown against a social and economic boycott that no courage or persistence can effectively break.

We talked about it often—Bill Porter and I. It was the topic of eternal interest just as the discussion of dress is with women. And yet, for Porter, this talk about the future was an unalloyed torment. It agitated and distressed him. He would come into the post-office of an evening and we would gossip with fluent merriment. Without prelude, one of us would mention a con who had been sent back on another jolt. All the whimsical light that usually played about his large, handsome face would give place to a shadow of heavy gloom. The quick, facile tongue would halt its whispering banter.

Bill Porter, the wag, became Bill Porter, the cynic. Fear of the future was like a poisonous serpent that had coiled into his heart and lodged there, its fangs striking into the core of his happiness.

"The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain," he said many a time. "If the world once sees it, you are doomed. It shall not see it on me. I will not become an outcast.

"The man who tries to hurl himself against the tide of humanity is sure to be sucked down in the undertow. I am going to swim with the current."

Porter had less than a year more to serve. He was already planning on his re-entrance to the free world. For me the question did not then exist. My sentence was life. But I felt that Porter's position was false. I knew that it would mean an unsheathed sword perpetually hanging over his head. The fear of exposure saddened and almost tragically hounded his life.

"When I get out, I will bury the name of Bill Porter in the depths of oblivion. No one shall know that the Ohio penitentiary ever furnished me with board and bread.

"I will not and I could not endure the slanting, doubtful scrutiny of ignorant human dogs!"

Porter was an enigma to me in those days. There was no accounting for his moods. He was the kindest and most tolerant of men and yet he would sometimes launch into invective against humanity that seemed to come from a heart charged with contemptuous anger for his fellows. I learned to understand him later. He liked men ; he loathed their shams.

The freemasonry of honest worth was the only carte blanche to his friendship. Porter would pick his companions from the slums as readily as from the drawing-rooms. He was an aristocrat in his culture and his temperament, but it was an aristocracy that paid no tribute to the material credentials of society.

Money, fine clothes, pose—they could not hoodwink him. He could not abide snobbery or insincerity. He wanted to meet men and to make friends with them—not with their clothes and their bank accounts. He knew an equal even when hidden in rags—and he could scent an inferior underneath a wealth of purple and fine linen.

Porter dealt with the fundamentals in his human relations. He went down under the skin. And so he scoffed at conventional standards of appraising men and women. He belittled the paltry claims whereon the shallow minded based their supposed prestige.

"Colonel," he would mock, "I have a proud ancestry. It runs back thousands and thousands of years. Do you know, I can trace it clear back to Adam!

"The man I would like to meet is the one whose family tree does not take its root in the Garden of Eden. What an oddity he would have to be a sort of spontaneous creation.

"And, colonel, if the first families only looked far enough back, they would find their poor, miserable progenitors blindly swallowing about in the slime of the sea!"

That any of these descendants of slime should dare to look down upon him even in thought was intolerable. He knew himself to be the equal of all men. His fierce, honest independence would brook patronage from none.

"I won't be under an obligation to any one. When I get out from here I'll strike free and bold. No one shall hold the club of ex-convict over me."

"Other men have said the same." I felt that Forter's attitude lacked courage. "And there is always some one to hunt them down. You can't get away with it."

"You can't beat the game if any one ever finds out you once were a number," Porter flung back, riled and indignant that he was forced to defend himself.

"The only way to win is to conceal."

Every day incidents happened to bear out Porter's argument.

Men would be sent out and in a few months they were back. The past was their scourge. They could not escape its lash. And just a few weeks after we had talked about the thing—a few weeks after I had told him of Sally—Foley the Goat and the sinister tragedy that followed him threw us all into a hot fury of resentment and rage.

Foley's misfortune made a tremendous impression on Porter. The incident was directly responsible for the breakup of the Recluse Club.

After Porter was transferred to the steward's office, three weeks passed and he had not come to one of our Sunday dinners. His absense was as depressing as a cold rain on a May Day fete. The club was lifeless without him. Even Billy Raidler's bubbling raillery simmered down.

Old man Carnot grew more querrulous when his napkin was carelessly folded and Louisa could not argue the beginning and the end of Creation. When he started in to divide Infinity there was no one to oppose him.

I took Bill's absence as a personal insult. I felt that a friend had forgotten me.

We were sitting at the table on the fourth Sunday. We had a wretched meal. No one had been able to bring in the bacon.

I usually procured the roast. I would take over about two dollars in stamps to the guard at the commissary and this State official would open the door and allow me to take all that I could carry.

A new guard had come in. I was afraid to try the old tactics on him. Louisa had been equally unfortunate. We had nothing but some leftover potatoes, some canned string beans and stale doughnuts for the weekly feast.

"Where is Mr. Bill?" old Carnot complained. "Has the man's promotion inflated his self-esteem? By Jove, does he not realize that the name Carnot is one of the proudest in New Orleans!" He was sputtering and fuming.

"Mr. Carnot, a name may be your pass-key to the domains of the elite," I tried to taunt him. "But Bill Porter has an inner circle of his own. He doesn't care what your credentials are!"

I went over to the window and looked across the prison campus, hoping that Bill might be coming along. I was about to give up when I saw his portly figure swinging hurriedly but with calm dignity down the alley.

"Fellow comrades—the prodigal returns and he brings the fatted calf with him," Porter's full gray eyes gleamed, and he began to empty his pockets. A small dray could not have carried much more. There were French sardines, deviled ham, green peas, canned chicken, jellies and all manner of delicacies.

We looked on as Lazarus might have when an extra fat crumb fell from Dives' table.

It was a joyous reunion. It was the last meeting of the Recluse Club. A bitter feud grew up between its members. The case of Foley the Goat and Porter's indignant sympathy brought to its end the one pleasant feature of our prison life.

There are some men who are conquered only by death. They will not yield even though life is the penalty for rebellion. Men of this type can no more survive in prison than a free-thinking private can in the army.

They do not fit in with the crushing discipline of penitentiary life. They are marked for a quick finish the moment their heads are shaved and their chests hung with a number. The man who will not bend is broken. It is the inevitable law of prison life.

The prison guard will not endure defiance. It whips the beast in him to a frenzy. In the Ohio pen they had a way of eliminating the unruly. The trip- hammer at bolt contract was their neat manner of execution.

Foley the Goat was one of these incorrigibles. He was more hateful to the guards than leprosy. They sent him to the trip-hammer. The man consigned to that labor is doomed. There is no reprieve for him. He cannot endure the terrific grind more than three or four months—then he is carted to the hospital to rack out a few breaths before going to the trough.

Death was a 'mighty-severe sentence for Foley.

His capital sin was his fearless independence. He would fling back an angry retort to a guard even though he knew that the flesh would be stripped from his back in payment. He was consistent in his defiance. No one ever heard the Goat send up a yell from the basement. It gave him an odd reputation in the pen. To the other prisoners he seemed a man protected by a sort of witchcraft.

"He is possessed of the devil," they would whisper in awed admiration. "It ain't in flesh and blood to stand it. He's thrown a spell about himself. He don't feel!"

"Sure, he's in cohoots with the Old Fellow," another would volunteer. "He had ghosts rifling the purses of Columbus for him after he cleaned out all the pockets in Cincinnati."

The superstitious believed it, and if ever there was a man about whom the mantle of mystery draped itself with a natural grace it was Foley the Goat. He was almost unbelievably lean- and hollow-looking and his eye was the most compelling and fiery thing I had ever looked upon.

I never will forget the quivering throb of interest that caught me the first time I saw that smoldering red-brown eye flaming out its defi' at the prison guard.

I had stopped to give an order from the warden. A tall, angular, unsubstantial fellow came with nervous swiftness toward us. He moved with such rapidity he seemed to be winging across the grass. The breath of an instant that hurried figure paused in its ardent walk and the man lashed upon the guard the burning light of his scornful eye. It was uncanny. It went over the guard like a malignant curse.

"Damn' Beanpole!" The guard set his teeth. "He'll get his—damn his bewitched eye!"

"Who is it?"

"Who? Devil take him the Goat, of course. He murders men with his looks. Who else would dare do it? He's got about three months more to live, damn him !"

Foley was the master pickpocket of Ohio. His nimble fingers, with their ghostly lightness, had gathered a fortune. A mean and paltry profession it seemed to me until I talked about it to Foley. He had as much pride in his "gift" as a musician, or a poet, or a train-robber has in his. But Foley's art was not in the accepted curriculum. He was sent up for two years.

They had been two years of relentless punishment for Foley. He was early initiated into the horrors of the basement. The man was neither desperate nor vicious but he did not know how to cringe when a guard demanded groveling obedience. Foley was an indomitable, angry sort. He could not be subdued and so he was all but murdered. He came into the pen weighing 200 pounds. When I saw him he carried but 142 pounds on his six-foot frame.

He had been two months at the trip-hammer when his term expired. In the bolt contracts this massive instrument was operated by man power. It was a cruel and driving job. For 60 days his arms and legs had been in almost perpetual motion. The big hammers were pedaled by the feet, small ones by the hand. Sixty days had finished the wreck of Foley's constitution.

The end of his term saved him from death.

He was but a shadow when he came into the warden's office for his discharge. "I'm finished with the game," there was no surrender in his intrepid red-brown eyes, though his voice was but a hoarse, shocking whisper and his hands were transparent.

"I'm done in," he said without a trace of self-pity or regret. "I'm going to wind it up peacefully on the hill where I was born. I've got a few thousand. That'll pay for a funeral. I've had 28 years on this planet—that's enough. I'm satisfied—my last breath will be a free one!"

Foley reckoned without Cal Grim. He reckoned without the boycott. He forgot that he was ligitimate prey to be hunted down as soon as his release became known.

And so he went about his home city as though he were in truth a free man. At the corner of Fifth and Vine streets he discovered his mistake.

Foley stood there one night, aimless enough to be sure. It was but a week or so after his discharge. The ex-con was waiting for a little old lady. He was going to take her to a vaudeville show.

The little old creature was his aunt. She had raised him. When he came out from the pen she took him back to the little house where he was born. Tonight they were going on a glorious lark. She would be coming along in a few moments. So Foley waited.

A man saw him standing there. He watched and after a while he slouched up from behind and caught Foley by the arm.

"Hello, Goat, when did you get back?" Cal Crim, a big rough-neck bull in the Cincinnati department, leered at Foley.

"Hello, Cal," Foley was not suspicious. He had kept his resolution. He had neither the wish nor the need to steal. "I got back last week."

"Been to headquarters yet?" Crim tightened his clutch on Foley's skeleton arm.

"Not much. I'm through. I've given up the old game."

"Don't rib me, you damn' thief. I am a wise guy, I am. Get along, you sntak," he had Foley by the neck and was pushing him forward. "I'll take you to headquarters?"

The Goat knew what that meant. He wouldn't have a chance at that last free breath. Once at headquarters and conviction was certain.

"Let go, you skunk, Crim, or I'll kill you!" Foley wrenched himself free and turned on the cop. "Don't bully me, Crim. You got nothin' on me. Drop your damn' hands or I'll finish you." Crim was a hulking giant. He swept out his club.

"Walk along, you thief, or I'll bring this down on your lying head!"

Foley squirmed. There was a crack, a thud and a livid welt with the blood bursting through stood out on Foley's cheek. Crim yanked him to his feet, Foley's terrible eyes glared at him. His lightning fingers went to his pockets. An old .44 bulldog pistol went against the bull's stomach. Five shots and the fellow crumpled into a nerveless heap at Foley's feet.

There was no vaudeville that night for Foley the Goat and his little old aunt. He was nailed. They rustled him off to jail and booked him with "Assault with attempt to kill."

I don't know where the five shots went, but Cal Crim didn't die. I've hated a bulldog pistol ever since. At the hospital he came to and began screaming in a horrible frenzy —There's Foley"---that shadow—catch it—out with your club, quick—the damn* skeleton, he's so thin there's nothing left to beat."

No need to nail Foley. He was finished. He had gone out from the pen shrunken to bones—nothing but a hoarse choking cough. The cowardly blow that came smashing down on his face, knocking his rickety body to the ground, took out his last ounce of fight. The longest term the court could give Foley would be a light sentence.

When the news hit the pen that Foley was up for another jolt, hot suppressed anger, a thousand times more resentful because it had no outlet—the futile champing fury of chained beasts—went in a muttering bitterness from shop to shop.

Each convict saw in Foley an image of himself. His fate represented their future. They looked upon this fighting, unruly fellow as the devoted venerate, a martyr.

Men, who longed to "sass" the guards but lacked the nerve felt that Foley's reckless temerity redeemed their independence. He did what they dared only to imagine. Sometimes I would hear the men repeating one-sided insults from the guards.

"Damn' scoundrels—just wait till I get out of here The bloodhounds, they'll whimper to my lash!"

Such dreams of vengeance as they cherished. How they would get even for all the raw indignities they had suffered! Like dogs they had fawned under the scourge. Some day they would be free I Foley's doom chilled the hope in every heart.

We took up a collection for the Goat. Not many of us had any spending money. Billy Raidler and I contributed 50 cents each in stamps. This was a small fortune in the prison. Except for men whose families kept them supplied, like Old Carnot and Louisa, very few of the prisoners had more than a few bits at a time.

Some gave a nickel, others a dime and some a penny. Every cent meant a sacrifice. Men went without pie or coffee at night to get their names down on Foley's subscription list.

Billy and I brought the paper over to Old Man Carnot. We expected a handsome donation from him a dollar perhaps.

"My word, Billy, what nonsense is this!" The fringe of hair stuck out like a double row of red pins around his fat face and his pursy lips sputtered a shower at us. "Why, Foley is a common pickpocket! He should be in jail. It is most arrant foolishness to send a donation to the poor- white trash !"

"You white-livered old reprobate, if I had five fingers I'd tear the guts out of you!"

It was the first time I had ever seen Billy angry.

His long, slender body trembled; his face seemed suddenly blotched with rage and he leaned against me heavily.

"Damn you, Carnot, you better thank heaven I can't spring at you. If I could stand alone, you'd hit the hay and never wake up!"

"Is he serious, Mr. Jennings?" The old fool moved back in shocked astonishment. "Does he really wish the release of this villainous pickpocket?"

"Carnot, you're a lying hypocrite. We've got your number, all of us. You're a rotten embezzler and you stole $2,000,000. You're a blackguard and every cent you own is filthy with the tears and blood of white trash. You're a damn' skunk and we wouldn't let you give a cent to a real man!"

If Foley could have seen Carnot's distorted face he would have been compensated for the loss of the dollar. We went to Louisa. He was busy writing out specifications in the contract shop.

"I'm too busy—it doesn't interest me!"

That ended it. We didn't give Louisa another chance. Neither of us was in the mood for explanations.

"Put me down for a dollar! I'll raise my subscription. I've struck it rich."

We were in the post-office that evening. Billy's income had suddenly jumped. It was an unstable account. He kept the nail on his index finger long and sharp. He would whiffle it under the edge of uncancelled stamps that came on the mail to the post-office. Sometimes the revenue went to $5 or $6 a month.

The officials knew of all these practices of ours. They knew of the existence of the club, they knew of the little thefts whereby men gained enough to buy tobacco or candy. But they made no effort to remedy conditions. It would have been futile.

The evils were inherent in a system that compelled men to live starved and abnormal lives. There were so many graver crimes committed even by the officials themselves in order that the prison system be maintained I Billy had neatly folded off seven stamps one of them was worth 10 cents.

"Did you ever see such an ugly red sinner as old Carnot? I'd rather be lackey to a nigger than God to such a sputtering lobster. I'd be glad to roast in hell for the pleasure of seeing his fat self-satisfied hide on the grid."

"Hot satisfaction, indeed!" The door was shoved gently open and Porter's understanding eyes went in amusement over Billy's excited face.

"Who's damned now?" Profanity was not one of Porter's weaknesses. "It is a good vent for the ignorant. It is but a cheap outlet," he would rail at me wEen Billy and I would volley out a hot shot of "damns" and "by Gods."

"What joint is now out of socket in this Paradise of the Lost?"

We told him about the subscription for Foley the Goat and the refusal of Carnot and Louisa to subscribe.

"Pusillanimous, penurious pickpockets that they ar—dastardly defaulters, who would expect largesse from them? It but increases my respect for bankers of your type, colonel."

Porter gave a dollar to the fund. He had sold some story—I do not remember the name, but I think it was "Christmas by Injunction."

"I would have expected better of Louisa." Porter had a deep affection for the clever, brilliant thinker. "I do not wish to see either of them again. This refusal to help Foley is too shoddy."

Money never meant anything to Porter—when he had it he spent it freely. He placed no value on it except the power it gave him to gratify the thousand odd impulses that were the very life of him.

When Louisa heard of Porter's indignation, he sent him a detailed explanation. There were at least 15 typewritten pages.

"I have another newspaper from Lizzie." He showed us the bulky manuscript. Louisa and Porter were given to correspondenc. The ex-banker's letters were masterpieces. He discussed philosophy, science and art in a way that filled Porter with delight.

"I haven't had time to read it all, but he says he did not think. He did not give the matter of Foley a second thought. That's the trouble with the world—it doesn't think. But the fellow who is starving or trampled on is compelled to think. If men would investigate the claims of others and their justice, the human heart would beat with a kinder throb."

We did not go over to the club that Sunday. Louisa was broken-hearted. Old man Carnot raged and fumed. None of us ever bothered with him again. The happy association was ended. With its break, a deeper friendship between Porter and myself was cemented.

We got up $25 for Foley. I wrote a letter of appreciation extolling his valorous deed in attacking the cop. Porter leaned over my shoulder. "Be not so exuberant in your praise, colonel. They may come in here and get us and hold us 'particeps criminis after the act.' I should not like to be branded as a murderer and compelled to remain longer even in the company of such choice spirits as Billy and yourself."

"You're not exactly in your element here, are you, Bill?"

"As much at home and as comfortable as a fly in a spider's embrace."

"Do you think that society is any better off because a few thousand men are put behind bars?"

"If we could select the right 'few thousand,' society would benefit. If we could put in the real scoundrels, I would favor prisons. But we don't. The men who kill in legions and who steal in seven figures are too magnificent in their criminality to come under the paltry observance of law and order. But fellows like you—well, you deserved it all right."

Porter turned the argument off with a laugh. He was a good bit of a standpatter even after two years and three-quarters in the pen. He did not like to discuss prison affairs. His apathy nettled me so much that I could never overlook an opportunity to goad him.

"Money and lives are wasted. Just consider the energies that go to the devil in here. Under a better plan, prisoners could be punished without being damned."

"Colonel, you're fantastic. What sort of a fourth dimension jail would you suggest?"

"I would not throw men in a hog pen and expect them to come out cleaner than they went in. No state is rich enough to maintain a breeding place for crime and degeneracy. That's what a modern prison is.

"Men are cut off from their families; they are thrown into shameful and degrading cells, where the sanitary conditions would disgust a self-respecting pig; they are compelled to fawn to bullying guards—no wonder they come out more like animals than men. They are cut off from every decency and refinement of life and are expected to come back reformed."

"The world is very illogical," Porter tilted back on the high stool in the post-office, reached up to the desk for a magazine and started to read.

"When you get out you can bring the matter before the public. With your gift, you can do wonders to break down the system."

"I shall do nothing of the kind."

It was Bill's touchy spot. He snapped forward on the stool, dropping the magazine on the table.

"I shall never mention the name of prison. I shall never speak of crime and punishments. I tell you I will not attempt to bring a remedy to the diseased soul of society. I will forget that I ever breathed behind these walls."

I could not understand Porter on this score. I knew that he was neither cold nor selfish, yet he seemed almost stoically unconcerned about the horrors that went on in prison. He could never bear to hear an allusion to Ira Maralatt. He did not want to meet Sally and he refused almost with violence to come into the chapel to hear her sing. Yet when the persecution of Foley ended in a sordid tragedy, he was swept into a scornful fury for the whole infamous system responsible for the rank outrage. It was a mystery to me.