With every human being in or about the jail the boy was the pet, the favorite with one single exception—“the gentleman who was going to die.” He favored me almost to the point of adoration, no one guessing why till he himself explained the mystery.
My heavy, brown braids and solemn, saucer eyes seemed to blind him utterly to the touching beauty of Goldy-locks, and when we stood before his cell door while he told wonderful stories, selected especially to suit the boy’s taste, his eyes were on my face, his fingers held a bit of my little, white apron, or he drew one of my long braids between the crossed bars of his door and stroked and kissed it. Though at that time I loved the stories and liked him, I could never quite make up my mind to kiss him, and Charley used to be angry about it, and once he told me “I wasn’t dratefu’, not one we’est bit on earf, not to kiss dear ‘Mr. No. 3’”; that’s what we always called him before we knew he was going to die—three being the number of the cell in which he was confined.
When I first learned that Mr. Clarks was going to surely die, on a certain positively named day, I was utterly amazed to find that, instead of being frightened and sorry and sending for doctors, everybody seemed to be pleased—that is, everybody out in the streets and in the stores and markets, and being an active, “two-legged why,” I sought information and obtained it in that form known to man as “straight.” He to whom I had applied was a very young man, who knew no reason why a child should be spared such horrible knowledge, and so, with brutal frankness and ample detail, he had explained exactly why Charles Clarks was going to die.
It was the first tale of crime that had been poured into my shrinking, childish ears, and it gave me a distinct shock. I was quite feverish by evening and had to have wet cloths applied to my burning head, while during the night I cried out again and again about the “lightning and the knife,” and the next day found me white and miserable, with only one strong wish, and that was to keep away from “the gentleman who was going to die.”
It was so hard to associate the man with the bright, blue eyes, the manly voice, the gentle hands—ugh! those hands!—with that wretch who had hacked the life out of a fellow creature for a sum of money. It seems curious, but the actual taking of the man’s life had not near the power to torture and torment me that this complete ignoring of a certain sentiment had. The victim had been a fellow-countryman who was unutterably homesick, and whose joy was boundless when he met a friend from the dear, old English home. I would moan aloud when I thought of the awful surprise and horror the man must have felt when he received the first knife-thrust in his breast from the hand of a brother-Englishman in a strange land. Then the shocking details that followed the death! The crime was committed at night during a memorable storm. The body lay upon a railroad bridge; the victim’s identity must be destroyed! The murderer attempted to remove the head; he had but his big clasp-knife, and it was not strong and sharp enough to sever the bone in the neck. He would have to leave the bridge to find a stone to serve as a hammer in this frightful deed! But in that inky darkness how was he to find his way back? He could only wait for the dazzling glare of God’s great flashlight, the lightning; and so with unshaken nerves, bit by bit he worked his unhallowed will. He found the stone and crammed it into his pocket (the other held the dead man’s effects); the knife he carried between his teeth. The mighty wind so tore at him that on the bridge he had to creep upon his hands and knees. He hacked off the head and tied it in a silk neckerchief, and no man knows more unto this day. The stream was dragged, trees chopped down, open ground carefully plowed, all in vain. The head was never found.
With devilish mirth the murderer would sometimes offer to find the head. “Leave me my hands free and send but two men, your bravest, strongest picked men to guard me, and I will send you back the head—I swear it!” he would say; and to the Sheriff’s smiling question, “And you? You say ‘send,’ not ‘bring.’ Would you not bring the head back?” he would reply, “Oh, I say now, you don’t think me quite a fool, do you?” and though he would laugh heartily enough, there would be a quickening of his breath and a hot spark away back in his eye not very pleasant nor by any means reassuring to the man who was responsible for his safe keeping.
Two days after I had picked this bitter fruit from the tree of knowledge I found myself, under the orders of my yellow-haired, little tyrant, slowly and unwillingly entering the jail corridor again. Holding me by the hand, he pulled me past the turnkey and made straight for the dreaded cell. At our entrance various greetings reached us: “Hello, babies!” “How are you, little ones?” “Come up here, youngster, where I can see you!” while the man with the cough called out, “Sissy, come here and I’ll give you half of my licorice!”
But I stood in silence, my eyes fixed upon the stone pavement, while my little companion, trembling with excitement, put his first, troubled, anxious question: “Dear Mr. No. 3, are you truly a-goin’ to die?”
The silence that came upon the occupants of the other cells at this question might have been the silence of death. Mr. No. 3 made a little sound like that the grown-ups make sometimes, and afterward say: “Oh, I had, a stitch in my side!” and then he answered, “Why—er—yes, my boy—we are all going to die—you know that!”
Charley’s delicate brows knit themselves together distressfully as he slowly murmured, “Yes, evweybody. My papa is the biggest mans in this town and he’s goin’ to die, the whole of him, only, only—” suddenly his brow cleared and he hurried on—“only he and us allis jus’ goin’ to die som’time, not a ’xac’ly day to know about. Are you goin’ to die in free weeks? Please don’t!”