"I haven't wasted it."
"Wasn't it your pepper and salt that was strewed on the shop-floor to-day?"
That hint that I was after them, and knew what they were about, was sufficient. There were no more complaints made.
Every woman was obliged to make, and tie up, her own bed. The prison women swept the rooms every morning. That gave them an opportunity to secrete many a nice bit for their friends. Indeed my sweeps ran a regular underground bakery express from the Masters kitchen, and also from the prisoners'.
Many a nice biscuit and slice of cake went from the range to the cells, and bread from my table was provided against mush morning, and brown-bread breakfasts.
Onions were a favorite vegetable, but their telltale odor enabled me to detect them easily.
One evening, I passed a cell where they gave out unmistakable evidence of their presence. I called to one of the sweeps,—
"Ellen, the gardener has made a mistake! He has put the onions, for the soup to-morrow, in one of those cells. Won't you take them out, and put them in the cellar. If one of the other Matrons, or the Deputy, were to come in, they would smell them as plainly as I do, and they might think you put them there for some one to eat privately, and get you reported."
That hint was sufficient; I never smelt onions in the cells again.
The officers professed to take no report from one prisoner against another; but when they got angry with a prisoner, and wished to remove her from their department, they did not scruple to avail themselves of information obtained in that way. Berry, my white-washer, was an apt agent. Sly, artful, and treacherous, she pretended sympathy, and got possession of knowledge which was Mrs. Hardhack's principal clew to find out what was going on in the kitchen and prison.