My turn came, and I asked for an extra blanket, as the cold was intense and the metal springs of the bed offered no protection against it. This it seemed was also against the rules. When I suggested that as he was the warden he could make and unmake the rules, he did not answer, but asked irrelevantly how I liked his hotel?
I answered that it was preferable to the castle of San Juan de Ulloa in Vera Cruz.
He looked puzzled, then he smiled as if he saw the point.
"We'll take care of you," he repeated twice, waving a thin, wrinkled, old hand.
VII
At lunch time the sick convicts ask their keepers for permission to see the doctor. They are kept waiting in line near the head keeper's desk. The head keeper is a person of great power in the prison, only third in importance of rank, but as he comes in daily contact with the convicts, his good or ill will is felt more keenly than the warden's. The discipline of the prison, the distribution of the mails, of the clothes, underwear, shoes, all the details of management, are carried on through him.
As we were waiting for the doctor, the head keeper came along to look us over. He had a big brown face, and a large mustache covered his mouth; two piercing gray eyes gave the impression of an unlimited reserve of pent-up bile, anger and contempt, which at times flowed in a torrent of choice and rare blasphemies.
"Damn you, wop! I'll cure you! You s——!" he shouted, and with both hands he clutched the neck of an Italian, and shook him as savagely as a terrier shakes a rat. His face red and with sickness in his eyes, the unfortunate man tried to explain that he had a sore throat and a fever; but without success. He only aroused another fit of anger.
"You're a faker, that's what you are! You're all fakers, every one of you!" he yelled at us, and finished up by spitting on the floor. The next moment he punished a convict for doing the selfsame thing.