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Page 26
Another time it was a gritting of teeth, as of some intolerable agony.
So terribly did the teeth crunch and grind together that it seemed they
must crash into fragments. A little later he suddenly stiffened out. The
hands clenched and the face set with the savage resolution of the dream.
The eyelids trembled from the shock of the fantasy, seemed about to
open, but did not. Instead, the lips muttered:
"No; by God, no. And once more no. I won't peach." The lips paused, then
went on. "You might as well tie me up, warden, and cut me to pieces.
That's all you can get outa me--blood. That's all any of you-uns has
ever got outa me in this hole."
After this outburst the man slept gently on, while the little girl still
held the parasol aloft and looked down with a great wonder at the
frowsy, unkempt creature, trying to reconcile it with the little part of
life that she knew. To her ears came the cries of men, the stamp of
hoofs on the bridge, and the creak and groan of wagons heavy-laden. It
was a breathless California Indian summer day. Light fleeces of cloud
drifted in the azure sky, but to the west heavy cloud banks threatened
with rain. A bee droned lazily by. From farther thickets came the calls
of quail, and from the fields the songs of meadow larks. And oblivious
to it all slept Ross Shanklin--Ross Shanklin, the tramp and outcast,
ex-convict 4379, the bitter and unbreakable one who had defied all
keepers and survived all brutalities.
Texas-born, of the old pioneer stock that was always tough and stubborn,
he had been unfortunate. At seventeen years of age he had been
apprehended for horse-stealing. Also, he had been convicted of stealing
seven horses which he had not stolen, and he had been sentenced to
fourteen years' imprisonment. This was severe under any circumstances,
but with him it had been especially severe, because there had been no
prior convictions against him. The sentiment of the people who believed
him guilty had been that two years was adequate punishment for the
youth, but the county attorney, paid according to the convictions he
secured, had made seven charges against him and earned seven fees. Which
goes to show that the county attorney valued twelve years of Ross
Shanklin's life at less than a few dollars.
Young Ross Shanklin had toiled in hell; he had escaped, more than once;
and he had been caught and sent back to toil in other and various hells.
He had been triced up and lashed till he fainted, had been revived and
lashed again. He had been in the dungeon ninety days at a time. He had
experienced the torment of the straightjacket. He knew what the humming
bird was. He had been farmed out as a chattel by the state to the
contractors. He had been trailed through swamps by blood hounds. Twice
he had been shot. For six years on end he had cut a cord and a half of
wood each day in a convict lumber camp. Sick or well, he had cut that
cord and a half or paid for it under a whip-lash knotted and pickled.
And Ross Shanklin had not sweetened under the treatment. He had sneered,
and cursed, and defied. He had seen convicts, after the guards had
manhandled them, crippled in body for life, or left to maunder in mind
to the end of their days. He had seen convicts, even his own cell-mate,
goaded to murder by their keepers, go to the gallows cursing God. He had
been in a break in which eleven of his kind were shot down. He had been
through a mutiny, where, in the prison yard, with gatling guns trained
upon them, three hundred convicts had been disciplined with
pick-handles wielded by brawny guards.
He had known every infamy of human cruelty, and through it all he had
never been broken. He had resented and fought to the last, until,
embittered and bestial, the day came when he was discharged. Five
dollars were given him in payment for the years of his labour and the
flower of his manhood. And he had worked little in the years that
followed. Work he hated and despised. He tramped, begged and stole, lied
or threatened as the case might warrant, and drank to besottedness
whenever he got the chance.
The little girl was looking at him when he awoke. Like a wild animal,
all of him was awake the instant he opened his eyes. The first he saw
was the parasol, strangely obtruded between him and the sky. He did not
start nor move, though his whole body seemed slightly to tense. His eyes
followed down the parasol handle to the tight-clutched little fingers,
and along the arm to the child's face. Straight and unblinking, he
looked into her eyes, and she, returning the look, was chilled and
frightened by his glittering eyes, cold and harsh, withal bloodshot, and
with no hint in them of the warm humanness she had been accustomed to
see and feel in human eyes. They were the true prison eyes--the eyes of
a man who had learned to talk little, who had forgotten almost how to
talk.
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