Tramping on Life Part 43

A fresher green came to the stray branches of the trees that crossed our barred windows. The world outside seemed to waken with bird-song. It was spring, and time for the sitting of the grand jury that was to decide whether we were, each of us, to be held over for trial by petty jury ...

days of fretful eagerness and discontent ... from the windows the yellow trusty-girl said she could see lines of buggies driving in to town. It was the custom of farmers for miles around to drive in to their county seat during the court a.s.sizes ... a week or so of holidays like a continuous circus for them.

When the sheriff would have occasion to come into the room in which stood our big cage, the boys would crowd up to the bars, each one hoping for news favourable to his case ... the prevailing atmosphere was one of hope.

The negro who had murdered his wife and her sweetheart with a shotgun had already had his trial. He was--and had been--but waiting the arrival of the prison contractor, as the latter went from county jail to county jail, gathering in his flock, and taking them away, chained together, to the penitentiary and the cane brakes ... "where only a big buck n.i.g.g.e.r can live," the little pickpocket had told me, with fear in his voice....

He came ... the contractor ... to our jail at midnight. All of us leaped from our mattresses to witness the dreary procession of neck-chained and be-manacled convicted men. In the light of the swinging lanterns, a lurid spectacle. Our man was taken out and chained in with the gang.

They clanked away down the stairs, leaving us who remained with heavy chains on our hope instead of on our necks and hands and legs ...

because of the sight we had just seen. For the pa.s.sing day or so we were so depressed that we wandered about saying nothing to each other, like dumb men.

One after the other the men had true bills found against them, and little slips of folded paper were thrust in to them through the bars of their cells. And shyster lawyers who fatten on the misfortunes of the prison-held being, began to hold whispered conversations (and conferences) from without, mainly to find out just how much each prisoner could raise for fees for defence....

Bud and I were the only ones left. All the others had had true bills found against them.

But there came an afternoon when the big, hulky sheriff, with the cruel, quizzical eyes, came to the back bars of our cell and summoned us up with a mysterious air....

"Well, boys," he began, pausing to squirt a long, brown stream of tobacco juice, "well, boys--" and he paused again.

My nerves were so on edge that I controlled with difficulty a mad impulse to curse at the sheriff for holding us in such needless suspense....

Taking another deliberate chew off his plug, he told us that after mature deliberation the grand jury had decided that there was not enough grounds for finding a true bill against us, and, as a consequence, we were to be let go free.

The following morning I had the satisfaction of hearing from old Jacklin, the jailer, that Womber, the owner of the warehouse, had himself gone before the grand jury and informed them that he did not wish to press the charge of burglary against us....

Womber, Jacklin said, had received my letter and at first had tossed it aside ... even thrown it contemptuously into the wastebasket. But his wife and daughter had raked it out and read it and had, day and night, given him no peace till he had promised to "go easy on the poor boys."

This was my triumph over Bud--the triumph of romance over realism.

"I'm glad we're getting out, but there's more d.a.m.n fools in the world than I thought," he remarked, with a sour smile of gratification.

And now, with new, trembling eagerness, we two began waiting for the hour of our release. That very afternoon it would be surely, we thought ... that night ... then the next morning ... then ... the next day....

But until a week more had flown, the sheriff did not let us go. In order to make a little more profit on his feeding contract, averred our prisoners.

But on Sat.u.r.day morning he came to turn us loose. By this time we seemed blood brothers to the others in the cage ... negro ... mulatto ... white ... criminal and vicious ... weak, and victims of circ.u.mstance ...

everything sloughed away. Genuine tears stood in our eyes as with strong hand-grips we wished the poor lads good luck!

We stumbled down the jail stairway up which, three months before, we had been conducted to our long incarceration in the cage. The light of free day stormed in on our prison-inured eyes in a blinding deluge of white and gold ... we stepped out into what seemed not an ordinary world, but a madness and tumult of birds, a delirious green of trees too beautiful for any place outside the garden of Paradise.

"Come on," said Bud, "let's go on down the main street and thank Womber for not pressing the case--"

"To h.e.l.l with Womber!"

"Well, then, I'm going to thank him."

"I'm grateful enough.... I might write him a letter thanking him ...

but I'm not anxious to linger in this neighbourhood."

So Bud and I parted company, shaking hands good-bye; he headed west ...

to China and the East, finally, he said ... I never knew his real name ... neither of us gave his right name to the town's officials....

As I sought the railroad tracks again, the good air and my unwonted freedom made me stagger, so that several negroes laughed at me heartily, thinking I was drunk.

I sat down on a railroad tie and tenderly and solicitously took a brown package out of my inside pocket--the brown paper on which I had inscribed with enthusiasm the curious songs of jail, cocaine, criminal, and prost.i.tute life I had heard during my three months' sojourn behind bars.

I looked them over again. With all their s.m.u.t and filth, they were yet full of nave folk-touches and approximations to real balladry. I was as tender of the ma.n.u.script as a woman would be with her baby.

The sky grew overcast. A rain storm blew up. A heavy wind mixed with driving wet ... chilly ... I found shelter under a leaky shed ... was soggy and miserable ... even wished, in a weak moment, for the comparative comfort of my cell again....

The fast freight I was waiting for came rocking along. I made a run for it in the rapidly gathering dusk. I grabbed the bar on one side and made a leap for the step, but missed, like a frantic fool, with one foot--luckily caught it with the other, or I might have fallen underneath--and was aboard, my arms almost wrenched from their sockets.

Not till I had climbed in between the cars on the b.u.mpers did I realise that my coat had been torn open and my much-valued songs jostled out.

Without hesitation I hurled myself bodily off the train. My one idea to regain the MSS. I landed on my shoulders, saw stars, rolled over and over. I groped up and down. And tears rained from my eyes when I understood those rhymes were lost forever....

It was midnight before I caught another freight. I climbed wearily into an empty box car while the freight was standing still. I was seen. A brakeman came to the door and lifted up his lantern, glancing within, I was crouching, wet and forlorn, in a corner of the car, waiting for the freight to be under way.

"Come on out with you! Hit the grit!" commanded the "shack" grimly.

I rose. I came to the door. I hated him in my heart, but quite simply and movingly I recited the story of my imprisonment, ending by asking him to let me ride, in the name of G.o.d.

He crunched away down the path, his lantern bobbing as he went.

All night long I rode ... b.u.mpity-b.u.mp, b.u.mpity-b.u.mp, b.u.mpity-b.u.mp! All night long my head was a-ferment with dreams of the great things I would achieve, now that I was free of the shadow of imprisonment.

When I walked down the streets of Haberford once more, though I was leathery and stronger-looking, my adventures had added no meat to my bones. I was amused at myself as I walked along more than usually erect, for no other reason than to keep my coat-tail well down in back in order not to show the hole in the seat of my trousers. As I came down the street on which my father and I had lived, an antic.i.p.atory pleasure of being recognised as a sort of returned Odysseus beat through my veins like a drum. But no one saw me who knew me. It hurt me to come home, unheralded.

I came to the house where I had dwelt. I pulled the bell. There was no answer. I walked around the corner to the telegraph office. I was overjoyed to see lean, lanky Phil, the telegraph operator, half sleeping, as usual, over the key of his instrument.

"Hel-lo, John Gregory!" he shouted, with glad surprise in his voice.