For a while, after the Kid had gone, Archie found it easier to accomplish his daily task, for the reason that the inspector did not throw out so many defective bolts. But McGlynn, the guard on Archie's contract, disliked him and was ever ready to report him, and Archie, while he did not at all realize it and could not analyze it, developed the feeling within him that the system which the people, and the legislature, and the committee on penal and reformatory institutions, and the state board of charities had devised and were so proud of, was not a system at all, for the simple reason that it depended solely on men and had nothing else to depend on. And just as the judge, the jury-men, the prosecutor and the policemen were swayed by a thousand whims and prejudices and moved by countless influences of which they were unconscious, so the guards who held power over him were similarly swayed. For each demerit he lost standing, and demerits depended not on his conduct, but on the feelings of the guards. McGlynn disliked Archie because he was German. He gave him demerits for all sorts of things, and it was not long before Archie realized that he had already lost all his good time and would have to serve out the whole year. And then the inspector grew reckless and bold. McBride was greedy for profits, and in a few weeks the bolts under Archie's machine were again disappearing as rapidly as ever, and his task was wholly beyond him. And then a dull, sullen stubbornness seized him, and one morning, in a fit of black rage, seeing the inspector throw out a dozen perfect bolts, he stopped work. The inspector looked up, then signaled the guard. McGlynn came.
"Get to work, you!" he said in a rage.
Archie looked at him sullenly.
"You hear?" yelled McGlynn, raising his voice above the din of the machines.
Archie did not move.
McGlynn took a step toward him, but when he saw the look in Archie's eyes, he paused.
"Stand out, you toaster," he said.
The next morning at seven o'clock Archie stood, with forty other convicts who had broken rules or were accused of breaking rules, in the prison court. This court was held every morning in the basement of the chapel to try infractions of the prison discipline. This basement of the chapel was known about the penitentiary as "the cellar," and as the word was spoken it took on indeed a dark and sinister, one might almost say a subterranean significance. For in the cellar were the solitary, the bull rings, the ducking tub, the paddle,--all the instruments of torture. And in the cellar, too, was the court. Externally, it might have reminded Archie somewhat of the police court at home, as it reminded other convicts of other police courts. It was a small room made of wooden partitions, and in it, behind a rail, was a platform for the deputy warden. It may have reminded the convicts, too, of other courts in its pitiable line of accused, in its still more pitiable line of accusers. For there were guards grinning in petty triumph, awaiting the revenge they could vicariously and safely enjoy for the infractions which never could seem to their primitive, brutal minds other than personal slights and affronts.
This strange and amazing court, based on no law and owning no law, this court from which there was no appeal, whose judgments could not be reviewed, this court which could not err, was presided over by Deputy Warden Ball. He lay now loosely in his chair behind the railing, his long legs stretched before him, the soles of his big shoes protruding, his long arms hanging by his sides, rolling a cigar round and round between his long teeth blackened by nicotine. He lay there as if he had fallen apart, as if the various pieces of him, his feet and legs, his arms and hands, would have to be assembled before he could move again. But this impression of incoherence was wholly denied by his face. The lines about his mouth were those of a permanent smile that never knew humor; the eyes at the top of his long nose were small and glistened coldly, piercing through the broken, dry skin of his cheeks and eyelids like the points of daggers through leather scabbards. Such was the deputy warden, the real executive of the prison, the judge who could pronounce any sentence he might desire, decreeing medieval tortures and slow deaths, dooming bodies to pain, and the remnants of souls to hell, and, when he willed, inventing new tortures. Ball was at once the product and the unconscious victim of the system in which he was the most invaluable and indispensable factor. He had been deputy in the prison for twenty years, and he stood far above the mutations of politics. He might have been said to live in the protection of a civil service law of his own enactment. He ruled, indeed, by laws that were of his own enactment, and he enacted or repealed them as occasion or his mood suggested. He ruled this prison, whether on the bench in the court or scuffing loose-jointedly about the yard, the shops, or the cell-houses, with his cane dangling from the crotch of his elbow, speaking in a low, soft, almost caressing voice, the secret, perhaps, of his power. For his slow and passive demeanor and his slow, soft voice seemed to visiting boards, committees and officials all kindness; and he used it with the convicts, sometimes drawing them close to him, and laying his great hand on their shoulders or their heads, and speaking in a low tone of pained surprise and gentle reproach, just as he was speaking now to a white-haired and aged burglar, wearing the dirty stripes of the fourth grade.
"Why, Dan, what's this I hear? I didn't think it of you, old chap, no I didn't. A little of the solitary, eh? What say? All right--if it must be."