Title Page
The Author
Silent Sam
His Mother
In The Matter Of Art
Tammany’s Tithes
The Devil’s Doings
The Hired Man
About the Publisher
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Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins (November 14, 1876 – February 28, 1929) was an American novelist and journalist.
He was born in London, Ontario, in 1876. He studied in the University of Toronto from 1893 to 1897. He started out writing detective stories and later political and sociological articles for journals in the United States. He then began writing longer works of fiction, and then works on social questions with various specialists as collaborators: Ben B. Lindsey (The Beast and The Doughboy's Religion), Harriet Ford (On the Hiring Line), Frank J. Cannon (Under the Prophet in Utah), Edward H. Reade (psychoanalysis of prominent figures). He was led to psychoanalysis by personal illness, and utilized it in some literary efforts. He then moved on to do some literary works centered on women. He developed several plays, sometimes in collaboration with others.
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THE deputy sheriff who brought Sam from the county jail to the state penitentiary came always with one prisoner at a time, because he traveled on a railway pass and charged the state with mileage and expenses for each trip. He would have preferred to bring several prisoners together and make fewer trips, but this would have reduced his profits. He had a wife and two daughters to provide for; and though the trips were a weariness, he sacrificed himself for his family.
He was a bald and genial Welshman of the name of Johns, unhealthy looking, flat in the chest and flabbily heavy-waisted, as if the weight of his flesh had settled down toward the seat of the office-chair in which he spent so much of his time. He had a native genius for gossip—interesting human gossip, particularly of little political scandals and partisan intrigues. It was one of the jokes of his circle that he had been "born to wear a Mother Hubbard and gabble over a back-yard fence." He would talk to a prisoner as insistently as to a judge, with all the democracy of garrulousness, on the same terms of common human frailty, in a loud cheerfulness, with a cynical humor, protruding his tongue when he laughed. He was generally regarded as a comic character, but "no such fool as you 'd think."
He had found it impossible to get any reply from his prisoner, or even any attention. Sam sat dumb, staring at the red plush of the seat before him, with his black eyebrows raised and his forehead wrinkled. It was not that he ignored Johns, but, evidently, that he did not hear him.
The deputy decided, first, that Sam was "a sulky tramp."
As a tramp he was typical—collarless, in a dirty linen shirt, with a leather belt supporting trousers spotted with oil stains, his shoes looking as if they had been worn in a lime-pit, his straw hat soiled and stained, his beard rusty. And yet his face, in a painting, would have drawn the eyes of an art gallery. It was full of the record of life, of things seen and suffered, though perhaps not understood. His mild blue eyes were set in a vacancy of thought. The lifted eyebrows of his frown suggested a mute groping.
He had been found guilty of train-wrecking—of causing the deaths of thirty-two passengers on the "D. & C." railway, by loosening a rail on the bridge across the Little Sandy near Golden Gorge. And he had been sentenced to imprisonment for life.
This shocking fact did not affect the deputy at all. Professionally, he had no more interest in the reason for the man's imprisonment than a "funeral director" has in the cause of death; it was enough for him that "the body of Samuel Daneen was in his hands for delivery to its living tomb. He had had sufficient cynical experience of the courts of his state to know that innocence was sometimes convicted and that guilt often went free; but this was a matter that was not on his "beat," as he would say; he could not help the innocent any more than he could impede the guilty.
He was only anxious, at the moment, to know whether or not Sam was a bachelor—for it was one of his theories of life that marriage preserved a man to virtue, whereas bachelorhood led through dissipation to disease, shiftlessness, the poor farm, or a penal institution. His own wife, he held, had made a man of him.
He wished to preach to Sam from some such text, and it piqued him that Sam rejected his friendly overtures of conversation. He bounced himself impatiently on the springs of his seat, or he turned suddenly to look back over his shoulder at the car; and each time he contrived, as if accidentally, to give a twisting wrench to the bare wrist that was chained to his handcuff. At last Sam, without a change of his blank look, uttered a low, moaning groan that came as if it had worked its way up from the very depths of inarticulate distress.
It gave Johns a chill. He said to himself: "He 's bug! He 's crazy!" And, sitting very quiet, he watched his prisoner warily, askance.
Sam showed no further sign of life, having now sunken upon himself in a staring collapse. The deputy could not even see the blinking of an eyelid. "He 's got an eye like a fish." he said to himself, contemptuously. "He 's a dope fiend."
"He 's dotty," he concluded later. "He 's just a half-witted bum."
But though he was reassured, he remained watchful, with a sense of something uncanny beside him—and a nervousness that was not relieved till their train slowed down at the little muddy mountain town that made a railway station for "the Pen."
Sam rose to the pull of the handcuff, like a man drugged, and followed out to the station platform in a shambling daze. Johns turned him up the cement sidewalk of the hillside street, shuffling along beside his prisoner flat-footedly. The deputy's insteps had fallen in his days of police duty. Whenever he was accused of any political obliquity, he would admit, "Well, my feet don't track good"—with a humorous air of conceding the one fault of which he could be justly suspected.
To a man who has been condemned to prison for life, there may be something momentous in his arrival at the gates of doom; but to the little world that receives him, the event is commonplace and routinary. In Sam's case, his coming was only an incident in the arrival of Johns, whose visits were always welcome; and, to the officials who received him, the prisoner remained as inconspicuous as a boy led by the hand to make a call with his parent.
Handcuffed to the deputy, he was drawn up the stone steps of the administration building, in the cheerful sunlight, and led into the coolness of a white-tiled hall that echoed at once with Johns's "Well, boys, how are you? How are you?" There was a note of eager escape from silence in the exuberance of his voice. He turned Sam into a receiving office and held him standing before a wooden railing while he gave a clerk the mittimus from the judge who had passed sentence.
"All right," the clerk said. "I 'll give it to you on your way out"—referring to the receipt for the prisoner. He was busy making up his quarry accounts for the warden's annual report. "How are your feet?" he asked, with his pen across his teeth, grinning.
"Still steppin' heavenward, little one," the deputy replied from the doorway. "Be good."
He took Sam down the tiled hall to its farther end, where a turnkey sat in a cage made of two ceiling-high gratings across the passageway and two grated doors in the sidewalls. Johns greeted him jovially. He nodded in reply, with a slow smile, but he did not speak.
He had a manner of being unwilling that he should be distracted by conversation from his attention to his life-work of opening and closing four grated doors so as to have only one door at a time unlocked. He did not even glance at the new prisoner in reply to Johns's genial, "Brought y' another ol' bachelor, Jake." When they had entered his cage he locked the door behind them, spoke softly into a telephone on the wall, and then unlocked another door, in the side of his cage, to let in an official in a blue uniform whom the loquacious Johns greeted as "Cap'n."
"Here 's the noisiest bum I ever seen," Johns said, as he released Sam from his handcuffs. "He 's about as chatty as a load o' lumber."
Sam stared past them at nothing.
"He 's a terror to think," Johns said. "You can see that."
They looked at him for the first time, and there was something in the sadness of his set eyes that abashed all but Johns. The captain, with the bruskness of a man who had blundered upon the scene of a private emotion, immediately signed to the turnkey, who noiselessly opened the third door. The captain hurried Sam through it, holding him by the upper arm, and led him down the hall to a large arch that opened on the prison courtyard. A guard, sitting in a steel cage above them, with a pump-gun across his knees, looked down watchfully on their backs as they stepped into the graveled court. And Sam was "in the Pen."
Here, between the gray stone ramparts of the outer walls, stood a gray stone quadrangle of cell-houses, work-shops, and barrack-like buildings, guarded by sentries with rifles in watch-towers, or by men at grated doors with loaded canes and concealed revolvers. These men wore blue uniforms. Their sole work in life was to watch over seven hundred other men, in striped yellow-and-black uniforms, so as to prevent them from escaping from the little granite hell to which they had been condemned for transgressing those commandments of society which we call, proudly, "laws."
The sunlight that had shone on Sam as he mounted the entrance steps to the administration building shone on him again as he crossed the quadrangle to the hospital building, where he would be numbered, photographed, bathed and shaved, and photographed a second time in his stripes. But the difference between the sun in the courtyard and the sun on the steps was this: no matter how long Sam, might live to see the sun shining in the courtyard, he would never again see the sun shining on the steps.
Johns went at once to "talk politics" in the warden's office, where he was as welcome as a country peddler who brings all the neighborhood news. And he was still there—his hat pushed back from his bald forehead, his hands clasped pudgily across the bulge of his waist—when the day captain returned from entering Sam according to the prescribed formalities, and stood frowning at a paper in his hand till the warden should recognize him.
Warden Zug was merely a political henchman thriving in a political office. It was his business to make easy the fulfilment of prison contracts by faithful partisans, without public scandal—to collect his own graft on supplies and not be too greedy of the larger profits of the contractors—to find places on the prison staff for the lesser parasites of the party and see that in their grafting on the prisoners they stopped short of oppression—in short, to manage the prison (and its annual appropriations) for his political friends, while carefully preserving the appearance of administering it as a penal institution. He was a small, sandy-haired, wrinkled man, who had been known to his home district as "Foxy Zug."
"We 've got a pris'ner here," the day captain said, "that don't answer questions. I think he 's kind o' dotty. I 've filled this out the best I can." He put his paper on the warden's desk and held it with a forefinger pointing. "Sam Daneen 's the name on the mittimus. He looks about thirty-five, now he 's cleaned up. But I can't get his religion—ner whether he 's married."
"Ol' bach'ler," Johns put in, authoritatively. "He 's an ol' bach'ler. They always are."
"What 's the matter?" the warden asked. "Sulky?"
The day captain rubbed his forehead. "No-o. He don't seem to hear you. I don' know but what he 's simple. When you prod him, he jus' looks round at you an' sort o' don't see you. Jim had to strip him—an' do everything else fer him. Mebbe he 's sick. I don' know."
"What 's he in fer?"
Johns interposed: "Say, Warden, don't you remember the wreck on the Little Sandy—down by the Gorge—on the D. & C.? Judge Purvis gave him life fer it."
Warden Zug had begun to dip his pen. He looked up at Johns with a quick craftiness, stirring his pen around in the shallow ink-well. "Judge Purvis?" he said. "A 'D. & C.' case?"
And Johns, without releasing a muscle of his fat impassivity, dropped a solemn, sly wink of guile at him.
Zug scrutinized his pen-nib a moment and then returned to the paper before him. "'Unmarried,'" he said, scribbling it in on a blank line. "Daneen, eh? Huh. 'R. C.' Let it go at that. Where 've you put him?"
"Number one cell-house, Warden—till I find out where he 's goin' to work."
"Uh-huh." The warden thought it over. He said, absent-mindedly: "That 'll be all right, I guess," and held out the paper to the captain.
The man took it with an air of official indifference, but he had noticed the passage of looks between Johns and Zug, and he resented his exclusion from the secret. When the door had closed behind him, Johns hitched his chair up closer to the desk and said under his voice: "I did n't see the trial. Warden. I was off to the convention. But I remember when he was arrested. Gerter found him asleep 'n under a tree near the track, an' run him in on the chance."
"How many was killed?"
"About thirty, mebbe. I forget."
"Huh!" Zug nodded shrewdly. "What was it? Spread rails?"
Johns looked as wise as a joss—to conceal his ignorance. "Warden," he said, "that 'D. & C.' road-bed ain't safe fer a hand-car, half its time." He insinuated: "You know what Purvis is."
He was, in fact, trying to draw out information under the pretense of imparting it. He knew almost nothing of Daneen's case; he had scarcely given it a thought. But Zug's face of suspicion had started the hint of a judicial scandal for him, and he was smoking it out.
"The 'D. & C.' backed Purvis's nomination with twenty thousand," Zug said. "Gave it to us flat, fer the campaign in our distric', the night we put him on the ticket. He 's been doin' their dirty work ever since. There ain't been a cent o' damages collected from 'em in his court since he went on the bench."
"Well," Johns hazarded, "they 'd 've had some damages to pay on that Little Sandy wreck if they had n't hung it on this poor hobo. Him wreck a train!" He lay back and laughed shrilly—venting the pleasure he felt in having caught his scandal. "Why, the poor mutt ain't got spunk enough to derail a jack rabbit."
Zug said suddenly: "I want to see him."
Johns rose with ingratiating alacrity. "He 's in number one."
The warden merely growled: "Tell 'em to bring him in here."
As a politician, he knew, of course, that he could not meddle with any decree of injustice that had been inspired by the great "D. & C." It made the governors; it picked the legislatures; it nominated the supreme court of his state. But in forcing Judge Purvis on the district bench it had crowded aside Zug's favorite son-in-law, in Zug's own district, and humiliated him in the home of his friends. By their subsequent reward of that humiliation the "D. & C. people" had only served to justify his resentment in his own eyes, though he had come to feel less bitterness toward the "D. & C." than toward Purvis. He wished—humanly enough—to despise Purvis, to look down on him, to find him guilty of some act that should make him contemptible; for Zug was not so small in mind that he could be satisfied with a mere resentment.
He waited, frowning darkly.
He was disappointed in Daneen's appearance when the guard led him in to the office. The convict was no longer a possibly innocent man; he had been made into a criminal. His head had become the sinister cropped skull of dishonor. Stripped of his beard, his face below the eyes had a wrinkled, unwholesome, repellent pallor. His ill-fitting prison stripes disfigured him as much as they degraded. He stumbled in his clumsy convict shoes. He looked ridiculous, odious, evil. There remained only the dignity of pathos in his mute eyes.
Zug, without rising, dismissed the guard with a jerk of the head toward the door, and said to Sam, in a kindly gruffness: "Come over here."
Sam did not move. He stood with his arms hanging, his head drooped. Johns took him by the sleeve and drew him up beside the warden's table-desk. His prison cap lay on the carpet where he had been standing.
"He 's dotty, Warden," Johns apologized. "He 's doped."
Zng replied, in an undertone, impatiently: "Leave him alone." He was absorbed in his scrutiny of the heavy, slanted sag of the mouth, the perplexed corrugation of the forehead, the sightless, wrinkled stare of the blue eyes. "Look at me," he said. "Here." He rose and put his hand to Sam's chin, and turned the face toward him.
For a moment the eyes did not even see him. They looked through him, beyond him. When at last the pupils focused on him, it was with the empty dullness of the gaze of a sick animal.
"What 've they been doin' to you?" Zug asked.
If he had been holding a cowed collie dog by the muzzle to speak to it, it might have watched him so—not looking at his lips when they moved, as even an intelligent child would, but at his whole face in a large, meaningless, dumb regard.
"You never wrecked that train, did you?"
It seemed as if he were about to answer. His eyebrows twitched and contracted. The muscles trembled in his lips with a fluttering that accompanied a clicking of his teeth. His eyes wavered irresolutely, but with a light of intelligence. And then suddenly the eyebrows went up in their plaintive frown again. His gaze set on the distance. His lips sagged back into their loose droop. And Zug felt that he had been heard and, after some sort of despairing consideration, ignored.
He sat down and drummed thoughtfully on his blotter-pad. "I suppose," he said. "I suppose."
He summed it up to Johns: "He 's got his