Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

Iron hands swooped the agent from the floor, wrenching the neck as though it were but a chicken's. Back and forth until the skin on the scarlet cheeks was like to burst, Maralatt knocked that grasping head. It took three officers to break those hands loose from the dead man's throat.

A foaming maniac, Maralatt was knocked insensible, thrown into the patrol wagon, and taken off to the station house.

His mind was gone. He was sent up for life to the Ohio penitentiary. No defense had been made for him.

This was the story Ira told the warden after the operation at the prison hospital had restored his memory. The giant Hercules was no longer a gorilla man. Clean, quiet, spent, he sat like a kind old patriarch and told the aching tale.

Darby made him caretaker in the condemned row. Ira cleaned out the cells, swept the room where the electric chair was kept and took the food to these convicts. Doomed men, counting the days between them and the chair, played checkers with the prison demon now. In the ghastly fear of the nightmare days before execution many a lost unfortunate found comfort in the benediction of Maralatt's sympathetic presence.

I used to visit Ira in the condemned row. He was happy and serene. Some one had given him a pair of canary birds. The warden allowed him to raise them in his cell. First he had four, then ten, before long the dull, clamorous silence of the doomed men was filled with the joyous, thrilling song of many canary birds.

It was a touching thing to see the white-haired giant sitting in his cell—the sunlight coming in in golden radiance through the window in the inner wall, and these yellow fluttering, singing things perched on his shoulders and resting in the palms of his great hands.

Dark faces pressed against the bars of the condemned cells. "Ira, bring me a bird, let me hold it a moment!" one would call. "Ira, have Melba sing the "Toreador," another would grimly jest. In the near approach of their death, Ira and his birds and his gentle ministrations were like a prophecy of living hope.

One day Warden Darby hurried into the office. He had been up to Cleveland. His voice was brusque. "I have discovered something," he said. "Send for Ira Maralatt, at once."

"Sit down, Ira, and be calm." The warden could scarcely suppress the emotion of his own voice. "I've been up to Cleveland. Ran into the strangest thing. Guess you told a straight story, all right!"

"Yes, sir," Ira answered, a frightened light in his eye. "Yes, sir it was the truth. Leastways, I'm pretty sure it was. Surely, I couldn't have dreamed it, could I?"

"Now, that's all right. But listen to me. You had a wife, you say? Dora, that was her name, wasn't it? Well, she died—died right after they put her but of the cottage. The baby lived. She's alive today. I met her. She's pretty. She was adopted by wealthy people here in Columbus. They're friends of the governor. I just happened to talk about you. The girl's foster mother is a relative of your wife's. She thought you were a maniac. I told her the truth.

"Ira, go over to the State shop, get a suit and shoes. You're pardoned. I took it up with the Governor. You go out tomorrow.

With a shock of bewildered emotion that sent a quiver of sobbing happiness into his voice, Ira Maralatt put out his hands to the warden.

"Does the girl know?"

"Now, no, they haven't told her. It would be too sudden a strain."

The next morning Ira, in his cheap suit, the squeaky prison shoes and a light straw hat, came to the warden's office. His gigantic frame was stooped and his face shot through with nervous excitement.

"You did all this, Mr. Al," he said, the tears crowding into his eyes. "Just think what you did when you rolled that apple to me." He hesitated a moment.

"Mr. Al, she won't ever recognize me, will she? I don't think I'd like her to know her father was the Prison Demon."

When Darby handed him the pardon and the five dollars his hands shook. "I don't know how to thank you, warden!"

"You don't have to—God knows you've paid for itl"

Ira took two of his little canaries with him. "I'll give them to the girl for a present. I want to see her. I have to see her." He shook hands with Darby and me.

A week passed. We heard no word from him. The warden became alarmed. "I wonder if anything could have happened to the old man?" Maralatt was but 46. His terrible suffering during 18 years in prison had broken even his magnificent strength. He seemed about 60. "I wonder if he went to see his daughter? Funny, I didn't hear."

It worried Darby so much he inquired. He sent for the girl's foster mother. He told her of Ira and the canaries. Back came the frantic answer from the daughter herself. In an hour she was at the warden's office.

"An old man with canaries?" Yes, an old man had come with them. She had the birds now. "What about it? That man, my father!"

"Why didn't some one tell me? How dare they keep it from me. That's what he meant when he left. That's why he called me little Dora. Oh, what shall we do now?"

In broken sentences she told of the mysterious visit of the old bird-peddler. Ira had gone up the steps of the palatial home where the girl lived. He had brought the little cage with the birds. Perhaps he had intended to tell Mary he was her father. The sight of her beauty, her culture, her happiness had chilled his ardor. The grand old fellow could not bear to spoil her glad youth with the tragedy of his bleak life. He had left with his claim unspoken.

The girl was coming down the stairs as the old man rang the bell. The butler had denied him entrance. And the girl had run forward and ordered the old man to come in.

"I thought, Miss, perhaps you would buy these birds. I'm poor and they are wonderful singers. I raised them myself."

And just out of sympathy for the pathetic old stranger, the girl had bought the canaries. He would only take a dollar from her. She had not understood. He had looked at her and the tears had streamed down his cheeks.

"Good-by, little Dora," he said as he left. He stood at the door as though he were about to say something further and then he looked at her with a queer, sad light on his face and went down the steps.

They thought he was a harmless, unbalanced old oddity.

"Where can I find him? Where shall I look for him? Why didn't some one tell me?" the girl was torn with grief. "Hurry, let us look now."

Outside it was snowing. There had been a wind storm for a week. Maralatt's daughter and the warden searched in every street and alley for the old man.

He was nowhere to be found.

One night there was a knock at the guard-room door and a faint voice called out, "Let me come in, please." The captain of the guard opened the door. Ira Maralatt, his thin prison suit drenched and hanging in a limp rag about him, was kneeling in the snow at the prison door.

"Let me in, please, I have nowhere to go."

"No, no, go away, you're pardoned. I can't let you in, it's against the law," the captain answered.

The warden was informed.

"Who was it?" he asked.

"Maralatt," they answered.

He came rushing to the gate and ordered it opened. Maralatt was not there.

Darby swore at them.

"Don't you know we've been looking everywhere for him for weeks?"

Beyond the walls, flinging himself along, the warden went on the search. He came back fifteen minutes later, the half -frozen Maralatt limping along at his side. He found him down in the snow near the river. Ira was burning up with fever. His face was already stricken with death.

Everywhere he went asking for work, he said, they had refused him. They said he was too old. Finally he gave up trying.

The warden sent for Maralatt's daughter.

The young girl, graceful and white as an angel, flung herself into the old man's arms.