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----”

The warden did change his tune this time.

“What was that,” he demanded soothingly, “you said about trials, and so forth? Are you really aiming to----”

“Hold court? Yes.”

“Where?”

“Here in the prison.”

“With you as judge! Look here, Mr.--Masters----”

“Stop,” Craig ordered softly. “There’ll be a jury. Say what you have to say to them.”

That perfect night of great events in the isolated little world of San Pedro Prison had dissolved magically, into a perfect dawn--a rift of pink clouds high up in the sky where the stars still lingered, and then a shifting of purple light to blue, and, after that, a gradual transfusion through this blue light of a billion motes of gold, of crimson; and then, there was the first slant of the sun itself. It was as if all that had happened was the first act of a play, staged by a master stage director; or, better yet, it was as if this dawn had been designed especially for the isolated little prison--not only a Sunday dawn, but a Dawn of Glory.

So it must have seemed to many in San Pedro this day. For the rumor and quiver of great things had been running through the prison all the night, and the expectation of still greater things impending. It was curious--the silence! Silence, despite the fact that the night itself had brought permission for the prisoners to talk all they wanted, to sing--play such musical instruments as they might possess.

But the silence was such that almost the only thing heard at all as the sun came up was the clang of the chapel bell like a call to church; and afterward, the moan and chant of the chapel pipe organ, where Zabrewski, a musical genius gone wrong, improvised, and tried to express, and did express, the resurrection of his soul.

Only a few of the former keepers were on duty. The places of most of the others had been taken by men selected from among the prisoners themselves--old men mostly, and yet with something unfamiliar about them. And armed--all of them armed. There wasn’t going to be any prison riot to spoil everything--not at this stage of the game.

This new force of guards went about the usual work in much the usual way. They announced that there was to be a new deal, that each man in the prison would get a new hearing. Also they announced, in divers speech, but all of it clear, that the inmate who tried to start anything on his own account was apt to be buried at the starting place.

Gradually, however, the situation revealed itself. Inmate No. 3777, “Three Sevens” they called him for short, had made a successful break. But, instead of turning this to his own account, he had decided to let them all in on his good thing. There were forty-eight hours in which to carry the plan through--what was left of it, that is, for much had been accomplished already--committees appointed and sworn in, the first big detachments of parole men sent away. “Parole men” because they had given their word to do nothing to arouse suspicion, were under parole to break no law, to do their best to become regular citizens again--in short, not to abuse the liberty given them.

“Favoritism!”

There were already some whispers of favoritism. Not many, though. And they grew less as the day advanced. There was something too impressive, too suggestive about all this of the final Judgment Day.

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and
the books were opened and the dead were judged out of those
things which were written in the books, according to their
works.

That was the spirit. And Zabrewski, the musical genius, was expressing this on the pipe organ, too, whenever there was a lull--whenever the jury was debating whether it ought to send a man back to his cell again or turn him loose. All these sinners assembled there and trying to do justice in the sight of the Lord on this Sunday morning--it would have been enough to make an angel weep. And then, right in the midst of it all, it was as if an angel was there.

The chapel was filled with convicts at the time. The guards were around. On the platforms sat Three Sevens, otherwise and just for himself alone, Daniel Craig. To one side of Craig, the jury--furtive, wise, and wonderstruck. To the other side, the prison clerk with the prison books and records, showing who was who, and the crimes each man was charged with at the time of his sentence.

There was dim light in the chapel, although the windows had been opened for the first time in twenty years and the sunlight was pouring in. And there, quite suddenly, right in the full drench of one of these slanting bars of gold light, the angel. No! Not a regular angel, but a girl who looked like one--bashful, baffled, yet fearless.

Perhaps she may have shed a tear or two, at that. She was very human--very feminine, too, although dressed in riding clothes--short skirt, spurred boots. But her hair was down her back, in a single, heavy schoolgirl tress. She had been wearing a flat-brimmed Stetson, but she had taken this off as if in deference to her surroundings, and her hair was yellow and it shimmered in the sun. A wonderful picture she made standing there, with her profile tilted up--blue eyes, pink lips slightly parted.

So intense had been the interest in that greater picture of what was unrolling in the chapel that for what seemed a long time she had remained all but unseen. For there was a prisoner at the bar.

It was an old man whom the other prisoners had nicknamed “Uncle Josh.” So he looked, even with his hair and whiskers shorn, upward of sixty, sloping shoulders, a kindly but belligerent eye.

“Turn the old geezer loose.”

This from juryman No. 6.

“He maimed a neighbor for killin’ his hogs,” whispered the clerk.

“He won’t do it again.”

“Neither will his neighbor.”

The jury took a silent vote, signaled the vote to the judge.

“Free!” said the judge.

Uncle Josh reeled a little. His mouth snapped open, then shut, then open again, like a turtle taking the air, but not a word, not a murmur. He brought a gnarled knuckle to his eye. His head drooped. And, all this time, that genius Zabrewski wringing the heart out of the organ with _tremolo_ and _vox humana_.

Then, just as a friend or two started to lead old Uncle Josh away, about every one saw her--the girl.

There was a gasp, like that of an air brake on a train; and it was as if a real air brake had been applied to the march of things. For there was a dead halt. Even Zabrewski saw her. His back was turned. But there was a little mirror hung up in front of him that gave him a slanting view of the hall.

It was Craig who spoke up. He was the man to do it. He felt as if the whole court--or congregation--centered its voice in his.

“Who--whom was it you wished to see?”

The words spoken at the great crises in the affairs of men are usually small and banal like that.

The girl’s voice rang out sweet and clear, but with a slight huskiness of emotion in it.

“My father!”

There was a craning of necks. This was interesting. Who of the inmates of San Pedro, pray, could have a daughter like this? It was a question even more interesting than those of how the girl had come to be here, where she came from.

Eddie, the Yegg, wearing a uniform several sizes too big for him, here shuffled forward, dragging one foot slightly, as is the way of one who at some time or other has worn a cavalry saber or a ball and chain. But Eddie knew the way of courts. He tried to speak as a regular court attendant should.

“If it please your honor----”

It was terrible to hear Eddie speak aloud. He had conversed so long in whispers, inside of prison and out, that his voice sounded fragile and shaky, like big, mere balloons of speech, blown up by the breath of the man.

“What is it?” Craig asked.

“I was watchin’ the gate,” labored Eddie. “She come--asks fer her dad----”

Eddie stopped. He had done his part--all he could, at least. Craig had turned to the girl. There was a whisper among the jury.

“We turn her old man loose, whatever he done.”

And Craig felt easier for having heard this.

“What is your father’s name?” he asked.

For the first time the girl showed a hint of alarm, of fright. She threw a quick glance about her, brought her eyes back to the man on the platform as to the one thing, the one person, to which she could cling.

“Gracie,” she said. “I am Miss Gracie.” And, without further ado, there was the prison clerk looking through the books for the name of Gracie, but quite sure that there was no such name there--unless it was the name of a dead man, or some one who had been transferred elsewhere more than a year before. An awkward situation.

“He was to have got here this morning,” said the girl.

“Oh!”

But Craig was forcing his mind to stick to the facts.

“This is Sunday,” he said.

“I know.”

“And they were bringing him here, to-day?”

Did the girl understand? There was something she didn’t understand. She gasped the one word:

“Yes!”

“But they don’t receive inmates----”

Craig was going to say that they didn’t receive inmates on Sunday, or visitors either, but the girl cut in on him:

“Inmates!”

“Yes, but----”

“My father’s the warden,” she said.

“Warden Green?”

“Warden Gracie! The newly appointed warden. The governor--isn’t this San Pedro? What has happened? _Where’s my father?_”

Her voice was lifted on what, for want of a better word, may be called a turbulence. Not much of a turbulence, at the start, but a swirling riot of sounds subdued--a flow of speech, a resumption of breathing, the sounds of movement. On this, for a moment or so, her voice had as it were floated like something bright on the rising water of a muddy overflow, then sank in it.

“_Gracie, the reformer!_”

“_He’s on the way wit’ a bunch of fresh bulls!_”

“_Good night!_”

And other expressions that were incoherent. Not violent as yet, but hinting of danger as if the muddy overflow might rise, take on strength of a current, and become a flood.

Craig caught this feeling. So, most likely, did the girl. She turned, somewhat as if she would have left the place. But others may have caught the feeling, too--that feeling that was neither enmity, precisely, nor yet desire for evil. A subtle feeling that a change was coming over the face of things--a change for the worse. A crack in the iron chain of discipline. Caged jungle beasts that have got a whiff of blood.

The girl shrank back. The turbulence assumed something of the nature of a growl.

“Fellers,” a shrill voice intoned, “we’re in danger here.”

“Order!” shouted Craig.

But he was too late.

“And I moves,” shrilled the voice, “we take this gal as a hostage!”