Chapter III: Headquarters

Just a whisper, but it was enough. He had the drop on them. He not only had the drop on them, but the guards, anything but intellectual giants in other respects, were pretty good judges of certain men in certain circumstances. They knew that this man meant what he said.

“Lift your hands,” said Craig. “Steady!” He himself was as steady as concrete, but his nerves and his brain were nimble. He could see in all directions at once--or felt as if he could. “Now,” said he, “get up slow and easy--that’s right--and face the wall.”

They obeyed. They were not cowards precisely. It was just Mr. Death pointing his finger at them, that was all. Not all of them were brave men, either--one in particular. This was Copton, the guard responsible for the break that had sent Craig to the dark cells, _after_ a session in the hospital. Copton had gone flabby and white. He shook. To look at Copton was to see that he believed all this to be a measure of vengeance aimed solely against himself. Copton was sure of this when Craig spoke commandingly to him.

“Copton,” said Craig, “step backward to the table and put your gun on it, then your billy, then turn your pockets wrong side out--quick!”

Copton jumped. He did as he was ordered, as quickly as his flabby nerves would permit him to, expecting a shot in the liver from one moment to the next. But he picked up a bit of courage when Craig spoke to him next. And it was just as well that he did, too. For, even now, there wasn’t a second to be lost--no telling at what moment some other guard might come drifting in, or the principal keeper himself, thus spoiling everything.

“And now, Copton,” said Craig, “disarm the others. Holsters off with the guns! Billies and handcuffs with them.”

He had picked on Copton because the man was so deadly frightened that there was no danger of his disobeying. Just then, Copton would have murdered his own grandmother, if so ordered. He was that kind. And plus this fear of his, was his gratitude for being permitted to live yet a little longer. He had mistreated Craig. Now Craig had him in his power. Copton was sick with fright.

There was a guard named Tweed--a big, young man, without much sense, with something of the blind courage of a young buffalo. Craig saw, just in time, a premonitory flexing of Tweed’s arms.

“Steady, there, Tweed,” he said.

He made Copton handcuff Tweed right there, with his hands still up. But there were signs of wavering elsewhere. So Craig made Copton take a gun from the pile and drill it on his comrades, and the guards were more afraid of this frightened renegade with a gun, one would have said, than they were of Craig himself.

As a matter of fact, as measured by the ticking of a watch, all that had transpired since Craig’s first appearance here in the room upstairs, must have been at breathless speed, leisurely but fast, as is the way of big events, like the piling into each other of two racing locomotives, or the fall of a big redwood tree. And the danger was all over by the time that “Eddie, the Yegg” came crawling up from the subcellar.

Eddie quietly took one of the piled-up guns.

“I counted the hundred you told me to, sir,” he said in his prison whisper. Craig had ordered Eddie to wait that long.

“Good,” said Craig. “Now, take the gun from Copton. And”--he raised his voice slightly--“I’ll remind you gentlemen that no one will be hurt if you obey orders. One false move, and we’ll bag the lot of you.”

The six guards were marched with Eddie, sidewise, at their head and Craig at the rear down into the subcellar. There, Copton aiding, these keepers also were stripped--five of them, not including Copton. For Craig had other work he wanted Copton to do--work in which Copton would need his uniform. And Copton was willing. His gratitude at being spared was now greater than his fear that he wouldn’t be spared, and he would have murdered all five, and the one already in the cell, had Craig but spoken the word.

But now Craig turned out the feverish Bangor, and put two of the guards in that small box which had been Bangor’s sick room for upward of a week. Then he delivered an oath to George Washington, and George swore, while the other convicts, those still in the cells, uttered oaths of another sort and made obscene jests at the keepers’ expense, until Craig spoke to them.

Even in this short time Craig had grown in power other than the power of a gun and a commanding position. He told them to shut up for their own good, and they obeyed him. After having seen what they had seen, who wouldn’t have been ready to believe anything?

In George Washington’s cell, Craig also put two of the stripped and humiliated keepers, being careful to assure them, most politely, that, in a short time, he would see that every one got more comfortable quarters. But as to what all this was about, not a word, except such words as he had already spoken to Eddie, and Eddie to him.

Then the remaining keeper he had brought down from upstairs, always excepting Copton, he placed in the cell with the first night guard taken. Thus, while the night was still young, were six guards disarmed, disuniformed, locked up in cells where no amount of shouting would do them any good, and yet one other guard cowed, till no more dangerous than a rabbit in the presence of a rattlesnake.

“What are you going to do with him now?” asked Eddie, with his weak and tragic face reflecting a species of horror as he looked at the stricken Copton.

“I am going to ask him,” said Craig, “to go fetch us the P. K.!”

“Oh, Tommy!”

“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.