Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"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.

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.