Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"And the next day you will find yourself back in a mean little cell and in a week or so you'll be in solitary on a trumped up charge. And then you'll be torn up like Ira Maralatt. That's just about what your foolhardy honor will bring you."

A shadow went like a dark red scale over Bill's handsome face. He drew in his lips in disgust.

"By God, that would finish me."

He stood up, the panther in him ready to spring, just as it had leaped once before at the throat of the Spanish don. He flung out his hands as though he had suddenly found himself covered with odious welts from a guard's blows. "I'd wring their damn necks dry. Let anyone use me so!"

"You're nobody in particular except to yourself. You might as well look out for that self. Your whole future is absolutely ruined if you protest. The men you would balk are the biggest bugs in the country. They'd grind you right down to the dirt."

Porter sat there as though a sudden chill silence had frozen speech in him forever. The nine o'clock gong sounded. It was the signal for lights out. He started nervously toward the door and then came back, laughing bitterly.

"I thought I would get locked out. But I have a midnight key to the steward's office."

"Locked out? No such luck, Bill, we're just locked in."

He nodded. "Body and soul." He took up the glass of the grafter's wine, held it a moment to the light and with one gulp tossed it off.

It was the end of the struggle. The pulsing, clamorous silence that holds the tongue while thoughts shout from mind to mind was between us. Porter seemed exhausted by the defeat. The joy in his promotion was dissipated. He became more aloof than ever.

"What a terrible isolation there is in the prison life," he said after a pause that weighed like a stone upon us. "We are forgotten by the friends we left in the world and we are used by the friends we claim here."

I knew that Porter had a wife and child. I did not know then that he had reached his home after our separation in Texas to find his wife dying. Nor did I know that the $3,000 had given him a measure of independence in those last sad months before his trial and conviction.

In all our intimacy at prison, Porter never once alluded to his family affairs. Not once did he speak of the child who was ever in his thoughts. Billy and I sent out innumerable letters to little Margaret. Only once did Porter slip a word. It was that time when a story had been refused. He was disappointed, he said, for he had wanted to send a present to a little friend.

"We may not be forgotten by the folks on the outside," I offered.

"Forgotten or despised, what difference does it make? I left many there. They were powerful. They could have won a pardon for me." He looked at me with troubled suspense. "Al, do you think I am guilty?"

"No. Bill, I'd bank on you any day."

"Thanks. I've got one friend anyway. I'm glad they let me alone. I do not wish to be indebted to anyone. I am the master of my own fate. If I bungled my course and got myself here, then all right. When I get out I will be under an obligation to none."

Many of those friends would today hold it their highest honor to have aided O. Henry when he was just Bill Porter the convict. If anyone ever interested himself in Bill, he did not seem to know anything of it.

"I haven't much longer to stay here, colonel—how many contracts do you suppose there'll be to give out?"

"Oh, quite a few. Why?"

"There might be some way of escape for us."

"Yes, your way out is to feather your own nest and keep your trap shut. Take another swig."

After that there were many glasses of wine—many fingers of whiskey—many long conversations after the nine o'clock lights were out. Porter gave in, vanquished, but the surrender nagged at him like an ugly worm biting incessantly at his heart. He tried to keep the bids secret ; he fought to give the contract to the lowest man. He would be asked to show the bids. He was a mere piece of furniture in the office. He had to do as he was told and without question.

"The dirty scoundrels," he would say to me.

"Pay no attention to it," I would advise. "Honesty is not the best policy in prison. Don't let it worry you."

"Of course I will not worry over it. We are nothing but slaves to their roguery."

Even so, Porter and I had tremendous power in letting out the contracts. The wealthy thieves, who profited at the expense of the State and two helpless convicts, sent us cases of the choicest wines. They sent us cigars and canned delicacies, as tokens of their esteem. We kept the contraband in the post- office and many a stolen feast, Billy and Porter and I enjoyed.

I had nothing to do with the letting of the contracts, but the acceptance of the supplies was within the province of the warden's office. I knew the horrible starvation forced on the men in the main diningroom. The memory of my first meal there with the maggots floating in the stew gravy and the flies drowned in the molasses filled me with nausea every time I passed the kitchen.

I made up my mind for one thing ... if towering prices were paid for meat, I would at least insist that the supply brought to the prison be wholesome.

"You can do that," Porter said. "The warden will bear you out on it. We can have that much satisfaction anyway."

When the first consignment came under the new contract, I went down to look at it. Prepared as I was for cheap substitutes, I was not ready for the shocking spectacle before me as the rotten stuff was shouldered out of the wagon.

"Put it back," I yelled. Breathless and fighting mad I reached the warden's office.

"They're unloading a lot of stinking, tainted meat down at the butcher shop. Flies wouldn't crawl in it, it's so rotten. It's an outrage. We've paid for prime roast beef. We've given the highest price ever quoted on the face of the earth for meat and they've brought us in a load of carrion. What shall I do about it?"

The warden turned a white, startled face toward me.

"What's this, what's this?" His voice sounded seared and faint to me. He started pacing the floor.

"It's a shame warden, the men are being starved. The beans are so old and withered and only famished men would besmirch themselves with that meat. We could at least require common wholesomeness."

"That's right, yes, that's right. You say the meat is absolutely tainted? Send it back. Write to them and tell them we demand good fare."

I made the letter strong enough to ring true. I informed the wholesalers that the Ohio penitentiary paid first-class prices. It demanded first-class produce. The meat we got after that was coarse, but it was fresh and clean.

I used this one authorization from the warden again and again to send back stuff. The contractors came to realize that the prison was no longer a garbage can for their spoiled supplies. They found it cheaper to send in a medium grade in the beginning.

"You've come to see there are worse things in the world, Bill, than an ex-convict," I suggested to Porter when I told him about the tainted meat. "When you get out will you brazen out their prejudice or will you keep to your old resolution?"

Porter had about four months more to serve. We kept a calendar and every night we would strike off another day. It is a melancholy thing to feel the separation coming daily nearer a separation that will be as final and uncompromising as death. We talked indifferently, almost flippantly at this time because we were so deeply touched.

"I have not changed. I will keep my word. What would you do, colonel, if you should get out?"