Al Jennings - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"Don't die, daddy! Why didn't you tell me? See, I'm your girl, Mary. Just look at me! Oh, why didn't I know? If you only knew how many times I longed for a father—any one, any kind. Why didn't you tell me?"

Maralatt looked at her in dim, feverish gladness. He took the delicate hands in his gigantic palm and turned to her.

"I looked all over for you, Mary," he said. "I'm so glad you came."

With a smile of wondrous peace on his lips, the prison demon sank back on the pillows. The old hero had won his palm at last.

The shadows of a thousand Dick Prices and Ira Maralatts skulked like unhappy ghosts through the cell corridors of the Ohio penitentiary. The memory of a thousand tragedies seemed to abide in the very air of the ranges. Men who allowed themselves to come under the persistent gloom of these haunting presences went mad.

The rest of us sought an outlet in gayety—in a hundred trivial little incidents that would bring a laugh out of all proportion to their funniness. In self-defense, the convict becomes hardened to the brutal suffering of the life about him.

If any one had heard Billy Raidler, Bill Porter and I, as we talked and guffawed in the prison post- office, he would have rated us an unthinking trio of irresponsible scamps.

We never aired our melancholy, but we would wrangle and jest by the hour over the probable course a fly batting itself against the post-office window might take if we let it out—over the origin of the black race and the finish of the Caucasian family.

Or we would imagine that the prison was suddenly crushed to pieces in an earthquake, and we would begin to speculate on the menace of our presence to a terror-stricken society. No subject was too ridiculous to beguile an hour away.

Porter was not supposed to visit the post-office while he was on duty at the hospital. As he never violated any of the prison rules, he always made it a point to come on business. Billy Raidler was a semi-invalid, and offered an unfailing excuse. Billy's amber hair was falling out. He hounded Porter to bring him a remedy.

"Look here, Bill," the ex-train robber would say, "if you could get the arsenic out of that rock-ribbed old Coffin why can't you rouse the hair that ought to be on my scalp?"

Warden Coffin, by some mistake, had been given an overdose of arsenic. Antidotes failed. Porter was called in. He saved the life of Coffin. This incident happened before my arrival at the "pen," but Raidler never gave Porter any peace about it. Porter always maintained that the warden was dying of fright, not of the arsenic. He said his antidote was "simplicity."

"Simplicity or duplicity," Raidler countered, "you interfered with the ways of Divine Providence, Bill, when you saved Coffin's life. Now come through and give the archduke a helping hand. Put a little fertilizer on this unirrigated thatch of mine."

So Porter came over one day, looking very important and complacent. One short, fat hand was stuck in his vest and in the other he carried a glove. Porter was an unmitigated dandy, even in the prison. He liked rich, well-fitting clothes. He abhorred noisy styles or colors. I never saw him when he was not well groomed and neat in his appearance.

"Adonis Raidler," Porter ceremoniously laid the glove on the desk and drew forth a bulky, odorous package, "behold the peerless hair-regenerator compounded after tireless, scientific research by one unredeemed Bill Porter."

Raidler grabbed the bottle and pulled out the cork. The heavy pungence of wintergreen filled the office.

"The scent is in harmony with your esthetic soul, Billy," Porter said. "Elusive fragrance might not reach that olfactory nerve of yours."

Billy doused some of the liquid on his head and beban to rub it viciously in. He had the most child-like faith in Porter's genius as a chemist. Every night after that I went to sleep fairly drugged by the cloud of wintergreen under which Billy submerged himself.

Every morning he would bring over the comb to show me that fewer hairs had come out than the day before. Whatever Billy wanted his hair for, none of us could understand. The hair-restorer was nothing but bum bay rum outraged by an overdose of winter-green fragrance. Either Porter's patent, Billy's massaging or his faith stopped the emigration of his hair.

"Now that your locks, thanks to my scientific skill, promise to grow as long as a musician's," Porter boasted, "why not get a fife, Billy, and learn to play it? The colonel here will teach you. And then the three of us will set forth from this fortress of mighty stone and like troubadours of old we will go a-minstreling from village to village."

Porter had a guitar and he picked it with graceful touch. I played the tuba. If Billy could only play the fife, what a joyous troupe we would make!

The idea tickled Porter. He was really in earnest about it. I think his ideal of existence was just such a free vagabondage. Many and many a time in the post-office he had brought up the subject.

"Will you get that fife, Billy?" he said one night. "I have a plan. We will go over and serenade Miles Ogle. If he likes the tufted tinkle of our mellow madness, why forth let us stride to woo the belle demoiselles of all Beautydom!"

Miles Ogle was the greatest counterfeiter in the United States. He was serving a long sentence at the Ohio "pen."

"Would it not be kind to trill forth a gladsome melody to Miles ?" Porter's low, whispering voice lent an air of mystery to his lightest comment. I always felt like a conspirator when his hushed tones kept us captive. "Miles, you know, has a wholesome appreciation of the golden note!"

Porter often spoke to me in these later prison days of his serenading in Austin. He said that he belonged to a troupe of singers. "We went about playing and serenading at the windows of all the fair maids in Austin!" Playing, singing, writing a sonnet, sketching a cartoon—what a lovable ne'er-do-well he would have been if this very breezy negligence had not caught him in a net of unfortunate circumstances at the bank.

"I can think of nothing more delightful," he said, "than to strap a harp to my back and saunter from castle to castle living in the gracious beauty of poetry and music.

"We have the dungeon here, but we lack both the drawbridge and the castle. How sweet it would be to sit in the silver moonlight, to summon the fairies from their leafy pavilions with the strains of our warblings! And then to lie back on the grass and weave fantastic dreams to lighten the drab heart of the world!"

Porter was feeling very gay this night. A hope he had silently cherished. As always he came over to share his happiness. He had won an honor craved by every convict in the "stir."

There was a light tap at the post-office door. Billy opened it and took something from the prisoner standing there and softly closed the door. He handed a card to me. In his own handwriting was Bill Porter's name and underneath a drawing of the steward's office.

"Who brought the card?" I asked.

"Bill; he's out there. Shall I let him in?" Raidler was in a whimsical mood. The light tap was repeated. I answered it.

"Gentlemen, why be so exclusive?" Porter walked in with a very pompous air, his shoulders thrown back in an exaggerated swagger. "Permit me to inform you that I have changed my residence. The card will enlighten you as to my present domicile. I moved to-day."

There was a new enthusiasm in his bantering voice. Porter had been appointed secretary to the steward. The position, with the single exception of the secretaryship to the warden, was the best in the pen. It took him beyond the walls. The steward's office was directly across the street from the pen, the edge of the building skirting the river.