CHAPTER XVIII
Discardingmy cinder-burnt clothes for a new outfit the next day, I bought a ticket for Victoria, B.C. On my way to the boat that evening I dropped the fat pocketbook into a mail box, where I knew it would be found, then examined, and returned to the loser.
When I first began stealing I had but a dim realization of its wrong. I accepted it as the thing to do because it was done by the people I was with; besides, it was adventurous and thrilling. Later it became an everyday, cold-blooded business, and while I went about it methodically, accepting the dangers and privations it entailed, I was fully aware of the gravity of my offenses. Every time I stole a dollar I knew I was breaking a law and working a hardship on the loser. Yet for years I kept on doing it. I wonder how many of us quit wronging others for the best reason of all—because it is wrong, and we know it. Any thief that can’t or doesn’t put himself in his victim’s place, in the place of the copper that pinches him, or in the place of the judge who sentences him, is not a complete thief. His narrow-mindedness will prevent him from doing his best work and also shut him off from opportunities to help and protect himself when he is laid by the heels.
Nobody wants to live and die a criminal. They all hope to quit some day, usually when it’s almost too late. I will say right here to any thief who thinks of quitting that if he can put himself in the other fellow’s place he has something substantial to start on; and if he can’t do it, he’ll never get anywhere.
I always figured that when I had a man’s money or valuables he had suffered enough. What sense in destroying his personal papers, or keeping heirlooms of no value except to him, or subjecting him to any loss that would be profitless to me? In the case of this sleeper in his private car, I saw the money and watch meant little to him. The papers meant much. On top of that, his peace of mind was disturbed, and his sense of safety and security shattered. He would probably lock his doors and sleep in a stuffy room the balance of his life, another great hardship. I had his valuables and intended to keep them. I could not restore his peace of mind or his sense of safety and security. I could restore his papers, and, at some small risk, did. Had I been chased or suspected I would have thrown them away, or in the fire without a thought. I took his property coolly, impersonally, as a picker removes the feathers from a fat goose. I returned his papers as the last touch to a workman-like job, as the cabinetmaker softly gives the last nail its last light tap.
To any thief who reads this and criticizes me as being over-thoughtful of the “sucker,” I reply that he is probably one of those guys that beats his victim up after robbing him; who strikes down women and children if they get in his way; who destroys paintings, vases, tapestries, and clothing wantonly, and winds upby letting some housewife chase him under a bed, where she holds him with her broomstick till the coppers arrive. He is not a thief, but a “mental case,” and belongs in a psychopathic ward.
At Victoria I put in a few very pleasant months. I joined the colony of Chinese and opium smugglers who ran their freight across the line in fast, small boats at night into Port Townsend, Anacortes, or Seattle, Washington. The manufacture of smoking opium was then a legalized industry in Canada, and the smugglers were welcomed and harbored because they brought much American gold to the Canadian side. Being in the company of these characters I was accepted by the police as one of them, and went my way unmolested.
One fatal evening, as I stood watching a faro game making mental bets and winning every one, the devilish hunch came to me that I was lucky and ought to make a play. My resistance reached the vanishing point. I made a bet, lost it, got stuck, and feverishly played in my last dollar.
This gambling habit is the curse of a thief’s life. He loses his last dime and is forced to go out in haste for more money. Like a mechanic broke and out of a job, he takes the first one in sight. He has no time to pick and choose, or calculate carefully what he is about; he must eat, and the minute he goes broke he gets hungry. Gambling keeps him broke, forces him to steal small money on short notice and take prohibitive and unnatural chances.
I could have borrowed money enough to expense myself to Vancouver where I had the valuable watch planted, but there had been such a cry in the papersabout the car burglary, the loser was so powerful and influential, and the danger of trying to sell it so great, that I decided to leave it there till later, and take it to the American side.
During my stay in Victoria I had strolled through the residence district and noted several homes that looked prosperous and easy of approach. House burglary was almost unknown there then; there was almost no police protection, none was needed. Householders left windows open and doors unlocked.
One o’clock found me in one of the most pretentious places on my list, but instead of picking up trifles right and left as I expected, I found but one room occupied. Later I learned the family, with the exception of the man of the house, was away for the summer. He was a good sleeper. I took nothing but money, and not much of that—less than fifty dollars in silver and bills—leaving his watch and some small articles of jewelry as not worth the chances I must take in trying to dispose of them in a strange town.
I went straight downtown to the only all-night bar and lunch counter to eat before going to bed. Before I had my meal finished two officers and two civilians came in and spoke to the sleepy bartender. He nodded toward me and they all came over to where I sat eating. One of the civilians looked at me closely and said to the other: “Looks very much like the man; same clothes, same hat, same build, same height.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“This,” spoke up the other. “If I am wrong you have an apology in advance; if I am right you are in for it. I was robbed not an hour ago in my bedroom in my house. This man, my servant, had occasion toget out of bed and, while standing at a window in his room, saw the prowler leaving stealthily by the rear way. Suspicious, he alarmed me, and I discovered my loss. I brought these officers here on a bare chance that the burglar might be here. You are the only one who has entered here, except us, in the last hour. I do not accuse you. I ask you if you will permit the officers to search you. If you are an honest man, you cannot take offense.”
He was the man I had robbed; he was an Attorney; he was a smart man. I was in a bad hole. If I objected to search it would look bad, and they would do it anyway. “Certainly. Go ahead and search me,” I said, making the best of a bad position. When the officers had finished searching me, they counted the money.
“Lock him up,” ordered the lawyer. “He has the exact amount of money I lost. The paper corresponds, and so does the silver.”
They handcuffed me. “You’re arrested in the name of the Crown, and anything you say will be used against you.”
I was taken to the city prison where I gave the booking officer a very brief and misleading biographical sketch. The jail I had fled from with the China boy loomed before me and my only thought was to cover up. I put in the balance of the night going over my case. It looked hopeless. The next morning my cell was not unlocked when the other prisoners were let out to wash. Later a jailer opened it, and a Siwash Indian boy handed me a bucket of water and a towel.
When I reached for them the boy looked at meand I turned cold. He was one of the watchful trusty prisoners at the jail I had escaped from. He knew me. This was the first of a long and bitter series of experiences with stool pigeons, and in all my life I never witnessed a more gratuitous, barefaced, conscienceless exhibition of snitching.
Without waiting to walk out of my sight he grabbed the jailer by the arm and began pattering away in Chinook, pointing at me. He didn’t “spill the beans.” He just kicked the pot over and put out the fire.
“To understand is to forgive,” it is said. I have long since forgiven the numberless, noisy stool pigeons that beset my crooked path because I don’t want any poison in my mind, but as yet I am unable to understand them.
Immediately the jailer came back with another officer and they put a very hefty pair of leg irons on me. At ten o’clock I was taken into the magistrate’s court. The attachés and loungers crowded close and stared at me curiously. The magistrate briefly and coldly remanded my case for three days. A photographer waiting at the jail took a number of pictures of me and I was locked up again. The jailer, a sad-eyed, solemn-faced Scotchman, gazed at me a long time through the barred door and smacked his lips as if enjoying the flavor of some delicious morsel or rare wine.
In a voice that seemed to come out of a sepulcher he said: “You escaped from the provincial jail in the town of ———.”
I already knew I was lost, but his solemn face and melancholy voice conveyed to me, as he probably intended, the full force and effect of my predicament.He made me feel like one buried alive; his measured words sounded to me like cold clods dropping on my coffin. I wasn’t taken out of my cell and “sweated” or third-degreed, or beaten up. That looked bad for me. The more a prisoner is questioned the less they know; the less he is questioned the more they know. If he is not questioned at all they know it all, or enough. My captors asked me no questions; they knew enough.
At the expiration of the three days I was remanded again. Then came another remand, and before it expired the Scotch jailer I escaped from appeared to take me back for trial where there was a cinch case against me and the charge of jail breaking to boot. The lawyer whose house I entered and who so neatly trapped me came to the jail before I was taken away. He was a fine fellow, an Englishman, and to use an English expression in describing him, I’ll say he was “a bit of all right.” He brought me a book from his library, Charles Reade’s “It’s Never Too Late to Mend.” He waived claim to the money found on me when I was arrested; told the jailer to see that I got it and wished me luck with my case. He neither lectured me nor asked any embarrassing questions. Shaking my hand heartily when he was leaving he said: “Do read that book, old man. And, I say, I’m not intimating that you’re an authority on burglary, but I thought you might tell me how I could prevent it in future.” I told him to buy himself a dollar-and-a-half dog, and let him sleep in the house.
He shook my hand again and thanked me. He was so downright decent and charming that an outsider, observing our interview, would have thought he hadcome to ask a favor of me, and was departing under a heavy obligation. I was ashamed of going into his house and would have taken a pledge not to rob any more Englishmen but it didn’t seem necessary. From what I could see, there was a judge waiting in the jurisdiction I escaped who would attend to that.
The Scotchman loaded me with irons, put me on a boat to Vancouver, then on a train, and finally landed me back safely in his jail. He took the Englishman’s book from me on the train and never gave it back. I had no chance to read the story till I got out of his clutches. Later I got it, read it, and was fascinated and read every other book by the author that I could lay hands on.
During my absence a new and securer cell had been built in the jail because of our escape. It adjoined the jailer’s office, and its barred door was directly in front of his desk, not six feet away. He moved a camp cot into his office and slept where he could watch me. Day after day and night after night he drank his whisky, smoked his pipe, and rustled his paper under my nose.
Chew Chee, the Chinese boy, had stolen two thousand dollars cash from his employer. He told me he gambled it away before he got arrested. At any rate, the money was never recovered. My jailer spread the report around that I took the Chinese boy with me so I could get the two thousand, after which I had murdered him and secreted his body. Whether he believed it or only pretended to, I never knew. He never questioned me about Chew Chee, and now when he got drunk instead of calling me just plain “damned Yank,” he chucked in another adjective,“murderous.” To get even with him I began sleeping in the daytime and walking up and down the cell all night, clanking the leg irons to keep him awake. He retaliated by prodding me with a long stick every time he caught me sleeping in the daytime, and I gave it up.
He took my Bible away and when the Salvation Army came on Sunday I reported it to them. Somebody regulated him, and he grudgingly returned it.
I had some thought of taking a jury trial. One never can tell what a small-town jury will do. Sometimes they carry their neighborhood feuds into the jury room and the defendant gets a disagreement. But after my jailer spread his story about my murdering the China boy, I dismissed the jury from my mind and decided to go before the court under the Speedy Trials Act. A defendant electing for a speedy trial dispenses with a jury and saves time and money for the community. A speedy trial is almost equivalent to a plea of guilty, but when the defendant is found guilty the court, in passing sentence, considers the fact that there has been no expensive jury trial and is more lenient.
The Crown counsel called at the jail to ask what I wanted in the way of a trial. I told him, and he had the witnesses subpœnaed for a certain day. I could have got a young lawyer of the town with the money I brought from Victoria, but it looked to me like a willful waste, and I held it.
In due time the judge arrived at the town. My irons were struck off, and I went into court. I got a brief, dignified, orderly trial. The train conductor appeared and identified me and the fatal twenty-dollar bill Igave him. All the other witnesses testified, word for word, as they did at my examination. I removed any doubts there might have been as to my guilt by declining to go on the witness stand. This trial consumed almost an hour.
Then I was tried for escaping from Her Majesty’s jail. That consumed fifteen minutes.
Having no lawyer, the judge asked me if I wanted to go over the points in the case. I thanked him and said I could not presume to instruct His Lordship on law points. He gave his verdict then, “Guilty, both charges.”
“Anything to say before sentence?” he asked.
Thinking he might be feeling better after lunch I asked till one o’clock to prepare a very short statement. He adjourned court. At one o’clock I stood up and said: “Your Lordship, my trial was fair; your verdict just.”
He looked at me a long time. “Two years in the provincial penitentiary for burglary; six months for jail breaking. Sentences concurrent—and thirty lashes.”
The prison sentence was no surprise to me. I expected a heavier one. I had long before admitted to myself its possibility, even its probability. But I had accepted that as a business man accepts a chance of bankruptcy, or as a laborer foresees an injury. The court’s order that I be lashed was a surprise and caused me no small concern. I couldn’t get it off my mind. I wondered if I could stand it; day and night I could feel the lash on my bare back. After turning it over in my mind I decided to make the best of it, and found some consolation in the thought that ifthe judge hadn’t ordered the flogging he would have sentenced me to five or ten years.
I dismissed all thought of escaping again from the jail. Even if I had my saws that were planted in the cell I got out of, I couldn’t have used them, for my jailer was determined to land me in the penitentiary and watched me closer than ever. I was wretched and almost lost hope. I envied poor dead Smiler and Foot-and-a-half George. I wished myself back with the larcenous-eyed Tex and his crew of cheap gamblers. My mind ran back to Madam Singleton and Julia and the overworked widow at my boarding house. I thought of the Sanctimonious Kid doing his fifteen years in a tough “stir” and wondered what had become of Soldier Johnnie, and how Salt Chunk Mary was faring in far-away Pocatello.
I was the most miserable of them all, and human-like I tried to fix the blame for all my troubles on some one else. I started in with the judge who sentenced me, then back to the Indian that pointed me out, then to the lawyer who had me arrested, and on back and back and through it all till I got to my father. The Sanctimonious Kid, who was something of a philosopher, said to me once: “Kid, ours is a crooked business, but we must not allow ourselves to think crooked. We’ve got to think straight, clearly and logically, or we are lost. Of course we’ll lose anyway, sooner or later, but let us not hasten the day by loose and careless thinking.”
His advice had not been altogether wasted on me. I got into the habit of thinking things over carefully. The trouble was I didn’t always follow out my conclusions. I knew I was taking a chance staying inCanada after my escape; yet I stayed. I had long realized that my every act was wrong and criminal; yet I never thought of changing my ways. After thinking it all over with all the clarity and logic and fairness I could command, I was convinced that nobody but myself was to blame, and that I had just drifted along from one thing to another until I was on the rocks. I hadn’t been forced into this life, and this predicament, by any set of circumstances or any power beyond my control. I had traveled along this road largely of my own free will, and it followed that I could get on the right road any time I willed it.
Strangely enough, I didn’t will to do it then and there. It seemed enough to know and feel I could do it if I wanted to. No use making resolutions until my sentence of two years was in. I would wait and see what that brought forth.
The same train that I was arrested on, in charge of the conductor I gave the bill to, carried me to the prison at New Westminster. My Scotch jailer loaded me with irons and handcuffed me to a seat to make sure of me and he delivered me safely. At the town of New Westminster I looked about me with interest; it was my birthplace. My parents were married in the United States, but spent the first year of their married life in British Columbia, where my father had some small business interests. He was a British subject and never took the trouble to become an American. That left me a subject of Great Britain, which I still am.
Like ninety per cent of the men arrested for felonies I had given a fictitious name and birthplace. My jailer called me a “damned Yank” because I registered athis jail as an American. At the prison a more complete biographical sketch was demanded of me, with the result that just so much more fiction found its way into the prison statistics. I was bathed, shaved, uniformed, measured, weighed, photographed, questioned at great length, and at last put in a cell by myself. I was notified that I would get fifteen lashes next day and that the remainder would be “laid on” one week before my sentence expired. I was further told very distinctly that by good conduct I could greatly soften the severity of the last installment, but that the first would be administered as the law provided.
Prisoners passing my cell looked in. Some gave me glances of sympathy, others grinned. One, a big, tough-looking gorilla, out of the British Navy, stopped and taunted me gleefully. “Oh, aye, Yank, I reckon an’ calculate as ’ow you’ll get a fawncy tampin’ in the mornin’.” I abused both him and his native language.
The convict librarian came along with his catalogue. I selected a book and he got it for me immediately.
My cell was furnished with an iron bed, a small table, a bookshelf, a three-legged wooden stool, and a galvanized iron bucket. On the bed, folded, were a heavy, clean pair of blankets and two sheets. On top of the folded blankets was a straw pillow in a clean slip. Later on a trusty brought me a gallon bucket of water, a tin cup, a small wooden vessel to wash in, and a clean towel. Every movable article in the cell had my prison number on it, and I kept them till the day of my discharge. On the wall was a card of “Rules and Regulations for the Guidance of Prisoners.” My first act was to read the rules. This wasprompted by curiosity to learn just what I was up against, rather than a desire to learn and obey.
I sat on my stool and tried to read, but my mind was on the morning. Every hour of the long night I woke up with the sting of the lash on my back.
In the morning, after the prisoners had gone to their tasks, a guard came and took me to a room in another part of the building where we found the prison physician waiting. He examined me, pronounced me “fit,” and told me to take off my shirt. The room was bare, except for a bench along one wall, and an arrangement in the center of the room that resembled a photographer’s tripod, only it was higher and stronger. Its three legs were secured to the floor.
A short, thick man in uniform, with a bristly brown beard and cold blue eyes, came in with a strap very much like a barber’s strop, except it was longer and heavier and had a different handhold. He sat on the bench, eyeing me speculatively. The deputy warden now appeared and gave an order. The physician sat down beside the man with the strap. Two guards led me to the triangle. My wrists were strapped to the top of the tripod where the three pieces joined and my ankles lashed to the tripod’s legs, leaving me with my arms up in the air and my legs far apart, helpless as any sheep in the shambles.
“Now, Mr. Burr,” said the deputy warden.
The man with the strap got up off the bench and stepped behind me a little to my left. Out of the tail of my eye I saw him “winding up” like a ball pitcher. Then came the “woosh” of his strap as it cut the air.
It would not be fair to the reader for me to attempta detailed description of this flogging. In writing these chronicles I have tried to be fair, reasonable, and rational, and rather than chance misleading anybody by overstating the case I will touch only the high points and leave out the details. No hangman can describe an execution where he has officiated. The best he can do is to describe his end of it, and you have but a one-sided case. The man at a whipping post or tripod can’t relate all the details of his beating fully and fairly. He can’t see what’s going on behind him, and that’s where most of the goings-on are. Furthermore, he does not approach the subject with that impersonal, detached mental attitude so necessary to correct observing and reporting. Mentally he is out of focus, and his perspective is blurred.
If I could go away to some lonely, desolate spot and concentrate deeply enough I might manage to put myself in the flogging master’s place and make a better job of reporting the matter. But that would entail a mental strain I hesitate to accept, and I doubt if the result would justify the effort.
All along I had my mind made up to take my “tampin’” in as manly a way as possible and to bite my tongue rather than cry out. Also I had tried to hypnotize myself up to a pitch where I could bow my back out toward the blows and hold it there till the thing was done. The first blow was like a bolt of lightning; it shocked and burned. Looking back at it now, it seems to me I jumped six feet in the air. But I couldn’t have jumped an inch, I was too securely trussed up. I got through it without squawking, but fell down sadly on the business of bowing my back out. With each succeeding blow I shrank farther awayfrom the blistering lash and when it was all over my back was concaved, my chest was bowed out, and I was trembling like a helpless calf under the hot branding iron.
It made no difference how I wriggled and squirmed, I got the full force and effect of every blow, and each one fell on a different spot. “Mr. Burr,” God bless him! served his apprenticeship as a flogging master in the British Navy, and he knew his little book.
I was untied and stood there a little bit weak in the knees. My back was blistered, but the skin was not broken. The doctor took a look at it and went away. One of the guards threw my shirt over my shoulders and, holding it on with one hand, and my trousers up with the other, I was marched out and up a flight of stairs to the prison dispensary. The man in charge was dentist, apothecary, hospital steward, nurse and guard. He was a big, brawny, muscular Irishman with arms like an iceman’s. While he was applying a liquid to my back, probably to prevent infection, I asked him what it was he was using. “You will speak when you’re spoken to,” he growled severely with a brogue that was triple X positive. He fixed my back in silence and locked me in a cell in the hospital.
It was a year before I spoke to him again and I waited till he spoke to me first then. Going into his place one day I found him tugging at a Chinaman’s tooth. After he got it out and sent the patient away he came over to see what I wanted. He was puffing and perspiring, and, feeling rather pleased with his job on the tooth, wanted to talk to somebody. “Man,” he said, “that was an awful tooth in that Chinaman. Sure I thought the jaw was comin’ off of him.”
“Yes?” I inquired. “Was it a molar?”
“No, man, ’twas no molar; ’twas a back tooth.”
He was our prison dentist. He wasn’t a bad fellow at that. He brought me a worn volume of Shakespeare and let me take it to my cell. I kept it for months and read it all, and often wondered while reading it what would have happened to the British Empire if the spirited Will Shakespeare had been flogged when he stole Mr. Lucey’s venison.
I’ve heard a lot about the humiliation and degradation of flogging. If anybody was humbled and degraded in my case it was not I. It may sound strange when I say I am glad now, and was glad then, that they lashed me. It did me good. Not in the way it was intended to, of course, but in a better way. I went away from the tripod with fresh confidence, with my head up, with a clear eye and mind, and sustained with a thought from the German, Nietzsche, “What does not kill me strengthens me.”
After three days I was returned to my cell and assigned to work on the farm gang. Mr. Burr, the flogging master, who turned out to be a very chatty Scotchman, came to my cell door the first night to have a talk with me, “so there would be no misunderstanding or hard feelings.” I don’t think he was afraid I would try to do him violence; he just came in a straight, manly way to explain the thing and his part in it. I didn’t gather from his talk whether he was in favor of lashing or against it. He appeared an intelligent, fair-minded man.
“You’ll find me bark is worse than me bite,” he said when he was leaving. I had already made up my mind I ought to hate somebody over the flogging andhad about settled on Mr. Burr. But when he was gone I thought it all over again and saw there was no more sense in hating him than any machine I had carelessly got my fingers into.
I settled down to my work and had a chance to look about me. The prison, a stone building, was on the finest site in New Westminster, a gently sloping eminence overlooking a broad sweep of the Fraser River where it widens to its delta. The prison contained one hundred single cells and the silent system obtained. There was never any overcrowding or haphazard makeshifts. When the cells were all filled, a batch of prisoners was at once shipped away to the eastern prisons at Kingston, Ontario, or Stony Mountain, Manitoba, to make room for newcomers. We were closely watched and guarded by the officers, who were nearly all ex-army and navy men, iron disciplinarians and sticklers for the enforcement of rules. I looked about for some way out of the place, but it seemed hopeless and I gave it up, settling down to do my time.
The prison population came from the four corners of the earth. Sailors and ex-soldiers, deserters from the navy, a few “Yanks,” fugitives from the “American side,” Indians from the Arctic Circle brought down by the Mounted Police to do time for violating laws they never could understand, and a sprinkling of Chinamen and Japs. The sixty acres of prison land were farmed intensively, yielding an abundance of fine vegetables, hay, and grain. Clothing, shoes, and socks were made by prisoners. The food was coarse but wholesome. An American prison commissary would not believe a penitentiary could be run without beans. In my two years at this prison I did not see a bean.An English prison warden would not believe a prison could exist without peas. I never saw a pea in an American prison. I never saw a cup of coffee in the place. We had pea “coffee” twice a day. It was made from peas grown on the farm, threshed out on the barn floors with flails, roasted and ground like coffee. It was very nutritious and not at all unpalatable. We had plenty of vegetables, mush and pea soup, lots of bread, not too fresh, and not much meat. The food ration, even to the salt and pepper that seasoned it, was regulated by law. Every prisoner got just what the law allowed him and no more. We always had good appetites, never quite had them satisfied, had no smoking tobacco, no coffee, very little meat, and plenty of sleep—the hospital was always empty and there was not a death in the prison in my two years’ time there.
The place was clean and well ventilated. We had coarse, warm clothing, enough blankets, plenty of light, lots of good books, and nothing to distract us when reading. I never saw a bug, flea, or mosquito while there. The guards were not brutal or overbearing. I never saw one strike a prisoner; I never saw a prisoner strike a guard.
One morning I glimpsed a familiar face and figure; it was Soldier Johnnie. I forgot the rules, and sang out, “How long are you doing?” Before he could answer I was snatched out of the line and locked in my cell.
The warden was a hardened man, old, sick, and cynical. His motto was “Break them first and make them over.” The guard submitted a written report of my misconduct, talking. My punishment was threedays on bread and water. The prison had no dungeon. The prisoner under punishment was kept in his cell, which was stripped of its furniture and darkened by placing a blank, wooden, movable door against the outer side of the cell door proper.
In my dark cell I thought of Soldier Johnnie, and wondered if he remembered how they bored a hole and fed me through it in the Utah prison. All the yeggs and “Johnsons” in Christendom couldn’t have put a crumb of bread into this dark cell in this backwoods prison—it was English. In all the time I was there I never had a chance to talk to Johnnie. He was discharged before me, and we had no chance to compare notes for years.
My cell was darkened many times and I lived many days on bread and water before I got my time in. I came to learn that a satisfying meal may be made of two ounces of stale bread if it is eaten slowly and chewed thoroughly. I was chewing my ration of bread two hours, taking small bits and chewing them to liquid in my dark cell years before I heard of Fletcher and his system of Fletcherizing food. My experience with short rations in many places has convinced me that we would all be healthier and better nourished if we ate half as much food and chewed it twice as long.
I soon got into a feud with the officers and guards. I talked and laughed and whistled and sang; all of which outraged the ironbound system of silence. The Fourth of July came along, and as I was registered as an American I refused to work on that glorious day. This was a very serious offense, and I was sentenced to twelve days bread and water. They opened my cell every fourth day, put in the furniture, and fed me theregular prison fare. No prisoner may be kept on bread and water for more than three consecutive days. That’s English, also.
When the Queen’s birthday, the big holiday, came around, I wrote a note to the warden asking permission to work; twelve days more, in four installments.
I read about hay fever in the encyclopedia, and when haying time came I refused to make hay on the grounds that I was a hay-fever addict. The doctor disagreed, and my cell was darkened again. When I was sentenced there was a law under which all prisoners got a plug of “black strap” chewing tobacco every week. While I was in prison the law was repealed. Newcomers got no tobacco, but those sentenced while the law was in force, even if they were life-timers, continued to draw their ration every week. A rule was posted forbidding a prisoner who drew tobacco to give a chew of it to one who didn’t. That’s English, too. I was caught throwing a chew to a chap that arrived too late, and got another dose of bread and water.
At last I tired of bread and water, got on my good behavior, and took to reading. The prison had a splendid library, not a worthless book in it. All the best English authors were there and I went through them hungrily. I became so immersed in reading that I was careful not to break the rules lest I lose three days or more from the books. I got schoolbooks and studied them. Remembering my poor arithmetic, I tried mathematics but couldn’t get anywhere. Then the grammar, but the rules seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to confuse the beginner and “repress his noble rage,” so I gave that up, gotintensely interested in a small dictionary, and almost went into the dark cell for carrying it out with me to work and looking into it when the guard’s back was turned. I read the best books in the library, except the Bible, and would have taken that only I already had six months with it in the Scotchman’s jail.
I went throughChambers’s Encyclopediafrom A to Z. Read all about acids and paper, metals and metallurgy, dies and molds. I studied the history of locks and lockmaking, poring over the pictures of locks and their escutcheons—all kinds of locks and keys, door locks, padlocks, combination locks, nothing was neglected. I read a most interesting paper on picklocks and lock-picking by a famous lock-maker of London. I followed the history of explosives from gunpowder down to nitroglycerin. I found a passage that told clearly and concisely which explosives did the greatest damage and made the least noise. What a mine of information! I was fascinated. I studied guns and pistols, drills and saws and files, braces and bits and drilling machines of high and low pressure and fast or slow motion.
I investigated poisons, herbs, and drugs. I discovered that the finest quality of morphine may be obtained from lettuce and proved it in the prison garden by extracting it and eating it. I read up on sleeping and dreaming and learned just what kind of noise is most apt to wake a sleeping person; just when he sleeps the deepest and at what hour of the night his courage is at its lowest ebb. I can sit in a hotel lobby to-day and pick out the sound sleeper, the medium sleeper, and light sleeper. I got it out of the encyclopedia, and proved it in practice later.
The time flew by. I read away the long evenings, Sundays, holidays, and rainy days. We ate in our cells and I always had a book propped up behind my pan of pea soup. My feud with guards was forgotten. I had no trouble with fellow prisoners; the silent system and single cells prohibited that. There was no whispering, plotting, scheming, and snitching as there is where the congregate system prevails. The stool pigeon, so fostered and encouraged in American prisons, did not flourish there. The silence obliterated him, made him unnecessary.
There was a little cloud on my mind that began to grow. My time was getting short, some of my credits had been forfeited, and not being able to find out how much, I was uncertain about the day of my discharge and expected to be called out any time for the last installment of my lashing. This made me very nervous, restless, and irritable. The books no longer held me.