9009/Chapter 11
9009 had turned.
He had changed faces as he had changed stripes. Among his kind he now moved a being apart, hard-eyed, cruel-mouthed, a line of sullen craft between his brows, a sneer at the end of his ugly lips. And he was feared. He was different, now, from the others; a developed brute more dangerous than they. Processes meant to break him had merely warped him; they had made of him the grimmest thing that walks—a convict without hope.
He wore red stripes, as the convict who had killed the garotter had done, as Miller the highwayman had done. These red stripes singled him out from the others. They displayed him as a red blotch in the long gray lock-step line; they flashed him out, a red target amid the gray groups in yard or cell-house or dining-hall, to the guards pacing slow along walls or waiting in suspended cages with rifles loose in hand, like hunters. The red stripes meant this: that at the slightest disorder, the slightest tumult, the least suspicious movement or eddy in the mass of guarded criminals, it was he who was to receive the first bullets from the guards watching, rifles in hand, weary with monotonous vigil, and anxious to kill.
He worked in the foundry. Striped men made there stoves for thrifty housewives, and they were the desperate of the prison. The manufacture was simple. The convicts melted scrap in a furnace—a huge rusty-brown cylinder of iron, lined with fire-brick, which stood at one end of the moulding-room—then drew the molten metal and carried it in ladles to black-sand moulds, where it hardened. The glowing viscous metal poured into these moulds came forth rigid and black and shaped into parts, and the parts were put together into stoves. 9009 was a moulder.
They were a black-faced scowling crew of felons, dumb at their toil, hating one another. Their striped suits, red-blotched with iron rust, were tattered; their heavy brogans gaped where molten drippings had burned away the leather. Some limped from burns, and some bore on hands and faces ugly sores—the marks of spattered liquid iron. They were savagely reckless at their work, and the guards had to watch them closely lest they maim themselves. They sweated in torment and strange wordless feuds existed among them; stealthy blows were struck without cause.
The moulding room was long and low, earth-floored, dusky with shadows at noonday. On the earth floor, in rows flanking path-wide intervals, lay the moulds—wooden frames about which was tamped black sand. Walls and roof were of corrugated iron. The naked rafters overhead were crusted with dirt; black dirt lay in thin layers on the window-panes and hung in cobwebbed festoons from the bars. At one end of the room, looming tall into the shadows until it became itself a shadow among them, stood the cylindrical furnace, gloomy when dead, and on pouring-off days a menacing monster which at sudden intervals vomited red-hot metal. In the centre of the room, up among the dust-covered rafters, was a suspended steel-barred cage; and in it a guard stood, fingering his rifle. At the other end of the room, in the midst of a fiery spark shower, his black face catching weird high lights from the glowing rain about him, Jimmy Carroll, the little cell-mate, sat on a high stool at the emery wheel. Often 9009 glanced over there, especially toward night, when the little man swayed sickly on his perch.
Four days a week 9009 tamped black sand about the mould-patterns. He worked, pounding, pounding, pounding, with loose shoulders, the cold smell of earth, charcoal, and fresh iron dust in his nostrils; sombre-lined faces and striped forms flitted about him; at times his eyes, unconsciously rising, gave him a glimpse of the cage overhead, with the guard vague within, or of his cell-mate, swaying on his high stool in a Sodom-like rain. Two days a week he stood in line with the other moulders, holding his long-handled ladle and waiting his turn to slip it under the sullen red stream which the furnace gave. On these pouring-off days, the sweating felons strained like black-faced demons among lurid glows, emerging from deep shadows into abrupt flares and dropping back into their depths. They looked like men long dead and damned for all time. But always, to 9009, a glimpse of his cell-mate, swaying on his high stool in a fiery rain, came as a subtle respite.
When one of the convicts was hurt, the others laughed. And one of the jests of the moulding-room was to spit into your neighbour’s filled ladle, causing an explosion that seared him. A felon did this to 9009 one day. 9009 leaped upon him, and when he was dragged off, he was trampling the prostrate form of the evil jester.
For this he went to the dungeon for ten days. When on the morning terminating his sentence he reëntered the foundry and looked up toward the emery wheel, Jimmy Carroll was not there. Another convict sat at his place, in the fiery shower.
All that day, tamping black sand into wooden patterns, 9009 questioned about him, questioned with sharp glances from shifting eyes—but he got no answer.
That night he was all alone in his cell, and all night he pondered. In the morning, during cleaning-up time, he began again his questioning, furtive, lipless, but fiercer every moment; but again only shaken heads and shrugging shoulders met him.
For a week it was thus. He was alone in his cell at night; in the daytime a strange convict sat at the emery wheel—a long, lean man with a lead-hued face. And the toil was harder than it had been before—and his savage questioning, insistent and implacable, rebounded from the hard faces of his fellows as from blank stone walls.
Then, after a time, a rumour began to percolate slowly through the prison—in lipless words, from stone face to stone face, vague, incomplete at first, irritating as the tapping snatches of a telegraph receiver out of order, but little by little, in that mysterious way rumour has, growing more detailed, surer, more complete.
Jimmy Carroll the little cell-mate was dead. He had been shot.
This was all for a time; then by glance, by shrug, by swiftly stolen word, 9009 was directed to “Shorty” Hayes, the shock-headed safe-cracker who had laughed at him as he had joined the break. And one Sunday he cornered him in the yard and drew the whole story from him.
This convict was under a fifty years’ sentence. He had lost his copper long since. Now he was to get it back from the Governor of the State. In some subtle subterranean way he had got hold of the facts of Jimmy Carroll’s death, and the knowledge was worth to him his copper.
He crowed harshly over this, long, before he told 9009 anything. And while telling, every sentence or two he broke from the telling and croaked again his triumph. “They’re a-goin’ to get me me copper back from the Governor,” he would croak; “thirteen years’ copper they’re a-goin’ to give me back—fer what I know. Fer what I know,” he repeated, chuckling raspingly. “Ho-ho-ho, me copper fer what I know!”
What he knew, what he had gained in some mysterious way, was this:
Two mornings after 9009’s fight, and while he was in the dungeon, Jimmy Carroll suddenly had refused to work.
He had been taken to the office of the captain of the yard. And there, quietly, stubbornly, he had again refused to work.
They had taken him, then, to the whipping-post in the chapel.
“Put your hands up to the ring,” said the captain, pointing to the ring, stapled into the post a little more than man-height, to which the hands of the victim were manacled during the flogging.
“I won’t,” said the little black-faced man; “I’m sick; I won’t work; and I won’t be flogged.”
“Put up your hands,” said the captain.
“I won’t; I’m sick and I won’t be flogged.”
“Put up your hands,” said the captain, picking up the cat.
“I won’t,” said the little black-faced man, folding his arms upon his caved-in chest.
The captain’s face went very white. “Jennings,” he said to the guard standing by; “Jennings, you get your rifle.”
Jennings had disappeared, then had returned with the rifle.
“Put your hands up to this ring,” began the captain again when Jennings, rifle in hand, again stood in the chapel.
“I won’t,” said the little man. He stopped to cough, looking up at the captain out of his inflamed eyes, with their red-drooping lower lids. “You c’n kill me; I won’t be flogged.”
“Carroll, I’m man of my word,” said the captain, very white. “And so help me God, if you don’t put up your hands to this ring, you’ll be shot.”
“Shoot,” said Jimmy Carroll.
“Jennings, get ready,” said the captain.
Jennings stared at him, stared at Carroll, raised his rifle, and aimed it at the little black-faced man.
“Now, put up your hands,” said the captain, his face suddenly going black as the little man’s.
“I won’t,” said the little man.
“Shoot,” said the captain.
And Jennings had shot. And Jimmy Carroll had gone over backward in a thin little sprawl, a bullet in his heart.
“And now,” said the safe-cracker, his face, suddenly very sinister, bent close to 9009’s; “now Buddy, remember, I’ll cut off your head if ye open yer mouth!”
But 9009 did not answer. He sat there, his eyes upon the ground, long. And the next day, from the machine-shop of the foundry, he stole a big heavy file, just such a file as, months before, he had seen the red-striped convict of the jute-mill plunge into the shoulders of the garotter. And that night, through the long sleepless hours, he stretched deliciously to the rasp of it against his flesh, there beneath his red-striped jacket, upon his heart.