I
There are five sick men, plus three consumptives, in the two rooms; and our large room looks deserted.
The patients wear a cheap, white shirt, instead of the striped one, and slippers instead of shoes.
A bald-headed man with small, kindly gray eyes and a close-cropped mustache, keeps perfect discipline without raising his voice, using profane language, or bullying the patients. In character, breeding, morals, education, he is superior to the warden and to most of the keepers. His name is Charles Noonan.
Between the hours of eight o'clock in the morning and four in the afternoon a uniformed hospital orderly attends to the distribution of medicine, takes temperatures, and reports to the doctor. At night another orderly takes his place.
The cleanliness of the two hospitals, the distribution of bedding, laundry and food, is in the hands of a convict, usually a patient; all the unpleasant tasks and irksome duties which the orderly is too proud or too lazy to perform the trusty is obliged to do.
Servant and boss, scullion and diplomat, doctor's help and sick man, waiter and majordomo, the convict orderly is the last buffer in the line of authority, the expiatory goat of the penitentiary hospital, a suffering soul in a modern purgatory.
When a criticism drops from the lips of the supreme Prison Commissioner, the Warden passes it along to the "Dep," who calls down the hospital keeper, who in his turn upbraids the orderly, who in the end roasts the trusty.
The present trusty is an old man suffering from an eczema on his fat legs. Tall, bloated, gray, pale, he is despised by the convicts for his avariciousness, his gluttony, his arrogant attitude. They suspect him of being a stool pigeon, and they revenge themselves by making his life miserable through a series of cruel persecutions.
Another trusty who sleeps in a cell downstairs, and eats in the keeper's kitchen, is a famous pickpocket.