Seventeen Years in the Underworld

BY WELLINGTON SCOTT
INTRODUCTION BY LYNN HAROLD HOUGH
THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI
Copyright, 1916, by WELLINGTON SCOTT

The two of us were sitting in a large park in an Eastern city, one beautiful summer evening. As the rich afterglow of the sunset turned to twilight and then to dark, my friend began to talk about the old furtive days in the underworld. He told me how in many an American city he had stood before some house of an evening when the shades were not drawn. Within he would see the father and the mother, and the happy little children, and all the bright light of home. He would turn away abruptly and walk into the dark, trying to forget it. He could never have a home like that.
Somehow there flashed upon me that night such an intimate sense of the tragic loneliness which a man can know in the underworld as I had never felt before.
Two years later I stood in the home of this same friend who for so many years had been a social outlaw. He had fought his battle and won. He was happily married, and his wife and he together were meeting life with quiet strength and courage. A little girl had come to them. I held this tiny baby in my arms as I pronounced the great old words, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” A great light was in the eyes of the father, and the mother’s eyes shone with the same gladness. The furtive man who had walked away in the dark trying to forget the sight of a happy home was replaced by a strong, capable citizen, a proud father, in a happy home.
I first met this friend of mine—Wellington Scott he calls himself in this narrative—in a certain State penitentiary. It was in the old days when stripes were still in evidence, and with the prison pallor on his face, and clad in the uniform of the institution, there was no mistaking the fact that he was under sentence. But even then there was something incongruous about it all. The powerfully built frame did suggest deeds which required strength and daring, but the face, ready to light up with friendliness and kindly humor, the eyes ready to brighten with hearty good comradeship, the whole bearing, despite a certain embarrassment at meeting a stranger at that place and under those conditions, suggested a man who might make a great deal of life, and who might mean much to his friends. As an old pal of his in the underworld said to me at a later time, “It never seemed that Wellington Scott belonged there.”