Three sevens A detective story
“Oh, for God’s sake, think a moment, Mr. Masters!”
This from the cells where the remaining prisoners still were. And why
not? They had reason to dread Mr. Stievers, the principal keeper.
Almost every prisoner who had ever gone through San Pedro did.
“It’s merely to put him into safe-keeping, too,” Craig announced.
“Cheer up,” he added. “It’s to be a square deal for everybody--you
keepers, included.”
There was a groan and a curse, and a general muttering from the
cells. But old Eddie, the Yegg, had his say. Said he:
“’Tis a thought that’ll bring you luck.”
And these words sounded sweet in the echo of Craig’s brain as he
once more made his way up the stone steps and, this time, on through
the guardhouse and out into the sparkling pure night of the San
Pedro Prison yard. So long it had been since he had seen the open
night--smelled it and tasted it, as he was doing now--that he could
have fallen over backward for sheer agony of joy.
This he had had taken away from him! The sky was clear. The stars
were out. Well down in the southwest rode the crescent of a brand-new
moon. And the air was of that crystalline blue purity of wild places
far from cities.
It was in the midst of an unpeopled region that San Pedro stood. It
wasn’t much of a prison, as modern penal institutions go. It had been
under a curse from the first, so one would have said who knew its
history.
First of all, there was its location--as unlovely a place as ever
was, except on a night like this, such as would have glorified any
place. But ordinarily a region that was sterile, as bleak as Baffin
Land in winter, as dusty hot as Death Valley in summer--a freak of
nature--the bed of some long dead and dried-up sea, so the professors
said. And it pushed up in the midst of other hills, north, south,
east, and west, which were verdant, heavily timbered.
It was the worthlessness of this dead region that had made it the
chosen site of San Pedro away back in the early history of the State.
For the politicians had bought it in for a song, and then resold it
to the State, in the good, old-fashioned way.
Not even the railroad had been built past San Pedro at that time.
The railroad came only when the State began to grow and prosper so
fast that a newer and greater prison was built elsewhere, and the
railroad’s advent was all that kept San Pedro in existence at all.
For, even then, San Pedro was a place of evil repute. The initial
scandal of how and where and by whom it had been built--this had been
like a mother hen for the breeding of other scandals--generations of
them.
But, finally, the old prison had seemed to settle down. It became a
secondary prison--a sort of disciplinary prison to which the scum
of the other jails and penitentiaries were sent, or those prisoners
who had shown themselves contumacious in court--as had one, Thomas
Masters, who had refused any facts about himself even to the lawyer
appointed to his defense, when said Masters was tried for shooting a
man, with intent to kill, and so forth, in a labor camp.
So San Pedro each year had sunk a little lower in public esteem,
become a little more a place for honest citizens, as well as
lawbreakers to shudder at whenever its name was mentioned.
But San Pedro--a mere parallelogram of shimmering brick on a milky
plain--was a thing of beauty on a night like this. It was, even, to
others than to Craig--he who had looked at it a while back with the
fervent eyes of the liberated, whose eyes would have seen beauty in a
construction camp. For, so others had looked at it, too.
Ordinarily, train No. 93 didn’t stop at San Pedro at all. It was a
fast express, westbound, composed mostly of sleepers, and scheduled
to pass the prison at thirteen minutes past midnight. But, this
night, No. 93 stopped, as it was bound to do on signal. San Pedro was
an institution of the State, and for the time being, at least, the
State, not the railroad, was supreme.
The engineer looked down with surprise from the lofty cab as his
great Mogul rode by. He wasn’t used to seeing a crowd like that at
San Pedro, not at this time of night. Generally, when he made this
run, San Pedro lay as still and as dark and as apparently deserted as
the desert around it.
The Mogul panted to a stop; and, looking back, the engineer made out
that most of this crowd had been passengers. He caught a word here or
there:
“Governor’s orders---- Home for the holiday---- Good behavior----
Good-by---- Good-by----”
“Poor devils,” said the engineer, without anger.
And he began a mental calculation where best he could pick up the
time he had lost. It was a problem; but, at that, he felt better all
along the run, at the idea of snaking them away--farther--farther
yet!--those poor devils from the hell they had this night put behind
them.
It was the conductor of No. 93, though, who had had the real
surprise. What did the warden of San Pedro mean by dumping a load of
ex-cons like this on a first-class train at midnight? Twenty-four of
them--all in their new prison clothes--most of them smoking “State,”
as the tobacco of the prisons and poorhouses was called, and smoking
this in raw, new pipes!
“Quick, men! Into the smoker!”
But their passes were in perfect order--passes that would later
be turned in as vouchers to the State for payment--each pass duly
stamped and signed by “_Copton, acting_.”
“Isn’t Copton that pie-faced little guard that used to deadhead out
with us and get us to slow down so’s he could jump off?”
The conductor looked at his brakeman and the brakeman looked at the
conductor.
“Sure,” said the brakeman, who was slow of speech. “That’s him.”
“Well, how in the devil,” pursued the conductor, “did they ever come
to make a hit like that----”
The conductor paused again, as if he might have had some ill-defined
doubt or other in the back of his brain.
“He’s merely acting,” said the brakeman. The brakeman also took time
for thought. “I remember now,” he continued slowly. “I understand
that there’s some sort of a shake-up coming off in San Pedro--that
the governor’s going to appoint one of these swell reform guys, or
something.”
“We should worry,” droned the conductor, “even if they are going to
the end of the division. Only--better make out a report--to get that
car another sort of fumigation at the end of the run. Did you notice?
Looked like the majority of those fellows had been sick.”
The thought of all these convicts going free was in the brakeman’s
mind as he finally made his way to the rear platform of No. 93.
He wasn’t much of a poet, but--going home to celebrate the day of
the Great Liberator! And the thought, with something of its poetic
significance, lingered as he looked out through the starlight at the
receding prison in the distance.
Then the brakeman strained his eyes, while another sort of thought
took vague form in his mind. Just now it seemed to him that he had
seen something else putting the prison behind it. He wasn’t sure. The
starlight was dim. But it appeared to be one of the San Pedro auto
trucks ghosting off to the south. No, it couldn’t be. What would a
prison auto truck be doing out at this time of the night?
The starlight swallowed up the thing he had seen--or thought that
he had seen. And presently the starlight swallowed up dim San Pedro
itself. But all the time the brakeman was there by himself on the
rear platform of No. 93--trimming his lights, recoiling the end of
his bell rope--he was run through by a vague uneasiness, a hint of
something impending. Or, was all this but an afterthought?
He turned.
A man was crouching there in the doorway of the car. Over the lower
part of the man’s face a bandanna handkerchief had been tied. He
held an automatic pistol, as if he loved it, close to his breast,
but pointed at the brakeman. All this the brakeman noticed in the
first dazed sweep of his eyes; then something else. The stranger was
dressed in a stiff new suit of clothes, such as San Pedro furnished
to those it set free.
CHAPTER IV
BY PROCESS OF LAW
“Twenty-four away on the westbound express,” said Craig, “and
thirty-two thus far gone by truck, and that makes----”
“Fifty-six,” said Warden Green.
The warden was a large man with a beard, and the warden had a great
reputation as a laugher. Like many large men with a good digestion,
the warden laughed easily when prisoners complained of mistreatment,
laughed when they howled and cursed under punishment, laughed as he
censored their letters to the outside world. But he wasn’t laughing
now.
He sat there in the corner of his office, unarmed, with shackles on
his hands and feet, and a heavy desk shoved up close in front of him
further to hinder his movements in case he should care to make any.
“By truck and train,” Craig figured, “we ought to get at least a
hundred more away by sunup--fifty in that box car to be picked up
by the accommodation freight--and they can drop off here and there,
wherever they please--fifty more on the next run of the truck back
into the mountains----”
The warden blurted out something that was in his heart.
“Why don’t you turn ’em all loose right off and be done with it?” he
demanded. “What are you stallin’ for? You got all the keepers under
lock and key. You got me. I’ve opened the safe for you, haven’t I?
And I’ve give you my promise, haven’t I?--fair and square, not to tip
off the rest of the State until you’ve all had your twenty-four-hour
start--longer, if you say so.”
“You still don’t understand,” said Craig. “But me--as I told the boys
down there in the punishment block when this thing began--I believe
in prisons. I believe in law and I believe in punishment. I was
brought up that way. But also, I believe in justice!”
The warden laughed in his beard.
“I do,” said Craig, with a touch of controlled heat. “I believe in
justice.”
“You don’t seem to.”
“Those we’ve sent away already--those we’re going to send away still,
as soon as we can, without a hearing or, at least, without a trial,
have been punished enough, or more than enough, or are innocent.”
This time, the warden did laugh--mirthlessly, though.
“Innocent, like you are!”
“Green, if you knew all the facts, you’d change your tune.”
“You shot a feller, didn’t you?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Shot him in the back--Beekman----”
“If you knew all the facts----”
“I knew Beekman, and you shot him in the back.”
“If I told you----”
“What? You had a fair trial. The court found you guilty.”
Again the warden laughed, not because there was anything humorous in
the situation; although there may have been, at that, according to
his way of looking at it. The warden himself had received a quiet tip
to the effect that his days at San Pedro had been numbered, anyway.
The tip said that there was going to be a new warden. The new warden
was going to have enough to worry about.
Said Craig: “Green, if you knew all the facts you’d never laugh
again.”
“Maybe I know more than you think I do.”
“Let it go at that.”
“But you oughtn’t to blame me if my keepers laid on the rubber hose
a little heavy now and then. I couldn’t keep my eye everywhere. San
Pedro ain’t a Sunday school. I’ll tell you what. You pick out those
keepers that was rough and give ’em a taste of their own medicine.
That’ll square accounts.”
Craig felt his mental feet slipping from the eminence to which he had
climbed during those days and nights of toil and prayer. He hadn’t
intended to speak to Green more than was necessary. He needed all the
strength that remained to him. Green, and the thoughts Green stirred,
were a source of weakness.
“I am innocent!” hissed Craig, with a flash of color. “I’m innocent
myself and you--you----”