who makes likenesses of people with a machine), who had been for some
time patching the pictured heads of well-known and respectable young
ladies to the nude, pictured bodies of another class of women; then from
this patched creation he would make photographs and sell them privately
at high prices to rowdies and blackguards, averring that these, the best
young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their likenesses in that
unclad condition. What a lecture the police judge read that photographer
when he was convicted! He told him his crime was little less than an
outrage. He abused that photographer till he almost made him sink
through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred dollars. And he told
him he might consider himself lucky that he didn’t fine him a hundred and
twenty-five dollars. They are awfully severe on crime here.
About two or two and a half hours after midnight, of that first
experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as were dozing were
awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a little
while a man was pushed into our den with a “There, d—n you, soak there
a spell!”–and then the gate was closed and the officers went away again.
The man who was thrust among us fell limp and helpless by the grating,
but as nobody could reach him with a kick without the trouble of hitching
along toward him or getting fairly up to deliver it, our people only
grumbled at him, and cursed him, and called him insulting names–for
misery and hardship do not make their victims gentle or charitable toward
each other. But as he neither tried humbly to conciliate our people nor
swore back at them, his unnatural conduct created surprise, and several
of the party crawled to him where he lay in the dim light that came
through the grating, and examined into his case. His head was very
bloody and his wits were gone. After about an hour, he sat up and stared
around; then his eyes grew more natural and he began to tell how that he
was going along with a bag on his shoulder and a brace of policemen
ordered him to stop, which he did not do–was chased and caught, beaten
ferociously about the head on the way to the prison and after arrival
there, and finally I thrown into our den like a dog.
And in a few seconds he sank down again and grew flighty of speech. One
of our people was at last penetrated with something vaguely akin to
compassion, may be, for he looked out through the gratings at the
guardian officer, pacing to and fro, and said:
“Say, Mickey, this shrimp’s goin’ to die.”
“Stop your noise!” was all the answer he got. But presently our man
tried it again. He drew himself to the gratings, grasping them with his
hands, and looking out through them, sat waiting till the officer was
passing once more, and then said:
“Sweetness, you’d better mind your eye, now, because you beats have
killed this cuss. You’ve busted his head and he’ll pass in his checks
before sun-up. You better go for a doctor, now, you bet you had.”
The officer delivered a sudden rap on our man’s knuckles with his club,
that sent him scampering and howling among the sleeping forms on the
flag-stones, and an answering burst of laughter came from the half dozen
policemen idling about the railed desk in the middle of the dungeon.
But there was a putting of heads together out there presently, and a
conversing in low voices, which seemed to show that our man’s talk had
made an impression; and presently an officer went away in a hurry, and
shortly came back with a person who entered our cell and felt the bruised
man’s pulse and threw the glare of a lantern on his drawn face, striped
with blood, and his glassy eyes, fixed and vacant. The doctor examined
the man’s broken head also, and presently said:
“If you’d called me an hour ago I might have saved this man, may be too
late now.”
Then he walked out into the dungeon and the officers surrounded him, and