Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

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.