“Slippery John” Again at Liberty.
If the police of Charlestown, W. Va., succeed in their efforts to locate John Truslow, known to them as “Slippery John” and many other things, including aliases, it is probable that they will suspend a large anvil from his neck and nail his clothing to a cell wall. He has escaped, drat him! for the eighth time in two months, and, with right hands raised, the police are remarking that, so help them, never again!
John Truslow, according to the police, has been tried and found guilty of every crime of which a mentality such as John Truslow’s is capable. This has limited John’s activities greatly, but recently, while awaiting trial on a charge of stealing a straw hat, he burst from the jail, nearly sweeping it away, and ran to the bird store of John Fisher in the dead of a Saturday night.
There the police, attracted by eight electric bulbs that John illuminated, found him whispering to a gold fish and acting in a frightfully suspicious manner. They crept upon him stealthily, as the department requires them to do. Just as they reached him, a parrot, awakened its sleep, said: “Officer, there’s your man!” There could be no mistake, they had corroboration.
When the reserves, with Slippery John sliding along among them, reached the jail, they saw the warden come screaming from the building. They asked him wherefore the noise and whence his course, to which he replied that Slippery John, the demon skidder, had flown the jail. Then he saw the prisoner, and wept, kissed him on the forehead, and slammed him back in his cell.
All went well until the other night, at the well-known and justly revered witching hour of midnight. Peter[{64}] Austin, member of a very aristocrooked family, rose up feebly from his part of John’s cell and declared he was ill, requiring water. The warden, who sometimes drinks the stuff himself, was merciful, and let Peter patter out.
The cell door—gods, what an error!—was left open, and when Peter returned—tableaux! Slippery John gone again!
The warden is inconsolable. He has issued an order that hereafter all prisoners that gasp for water must remain in their cells and drink from the nozzle of the hose.