"We're going home! We're going home!
No more to sin and sorrow."
Then other voices took up the lines they had heard at the Sunday services, and bawled the hymn in a horrible chorus. The sound infuriated Danner, and he rushed to the barred door and shouted:
"Shut up! Shut up!" and he poured out a volume of obscene oaths. From inside came yells, derisive in the safety of anonymity.
"You'll get nothing but bread and water for supper after that!" Danner shouted back. He began to unlock the door, but, glancing at the desk, changed his mind and turned and paced the floor.
But now the noise of the talking, the shuffle of feet on the concrete floors, came nearer. The door of the prison was unlocked; it swung back, and there marched forth, walking sidewise, with difficulty, because they were all chained together, thirteen men. Two of the thirteen, the first and last, were Gregg and Poole, under-turnkeys. Utter, Danner's first assistant, came last, carefully locking the door behind him.
"Line up here," said Danner angrily, "we haven't got all night!"
The men stood in a row, and Danner, leaning over his desk, began to check off their names. There was the white-haired Delaney, who had seven years for burglary; Johnson, a negro who had been given fifteen years for cutting with intent to kill; Simmons, five years for grand larceny; Gunning, four years for housebreaking; Schypalski, a Pole, three years for arson; Graves, the employee of Ward, one year for embezzlement; McCarthy, and Hayes his partner, five years each for burglary and larceny; "Deacon" Samuel, an old thief, and "New York Willie," alias "The Kid," a pickpocket, who had each seven years for larceny from the person; and Brice, who had eight years for robbery. These men were to be taken to the penitentiary. Nearly all of them were guilty of the crimes of which they had been convicted.
The sheriff had detailed Danner to escort these prisoners to the penitentiary, as he sometimes did when he did not care to make the trip himself. Gregg would accompany Danner, while Poole would go only as far as the railway station. Danner was anxious to be off; these trips to the state capital were a great pleasure to him, and he had that nervous dread of missing the train which comes over most people as they are about to start away for a holiday. He was anxious to get away from the jail before anything happened to stay him; he was anxious to be on the moving train, for until then he could not feel himself safe from some sudden recall. He had been thinking all day of the black-eyed girl in a brothel not three blocks from the penitentiary, whom he expected to see that night after he had turned the prisoners over to the warden. He could scarcely keep his mind off her long enough to make his entries in the jail record and to see that he had all his mittimuses in proper order.
The prisoners, standing there in a haggard row, wore the same clothes they had had on when they appeared in court for sentence a few weeks before; the same clothes they had had on when arrested. None of them, of course, had any baggage. The little trinkets they had somehow accumulated while in jail they had distributed that afternoon among their friends who remained behind in the steel cages; all they had in the world they had on their backs. Most of them were dressed miserably. Gunning, indeed, who had been lying in jail since the previous June, wore a straw hat, which made him so absurd that the Kid laughed when he saw him, and said: