The Under Dog

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

"What for?"

"Sellin'."

The answer came without the slightest hesitation and without the slightest trace in his voice of anything that betokened either sorrow for his act or shame for the crime.

"Eleven months and three days of this!" I repeated to myself. Instinctively my mind went back to all I had done, seen, and enjoyed in these eleven months and three days. Certain individual incidents more delightful than others stood out clear and distinct: that day under the trees at Cookham, the Thames slipping past, the white-sailed clouds above my tent of leaves; a morning at Dort, when Peter and I watched the Dutch luggers anchor off the quay, and the big storm came up; a night beyond San Giorgio, when Luigi steered the gondola in mid-air over a sea of mirrored stars and beneath a million incandescent lamps.

I passed on to the next cage, Marny watching me but saying nothing. The scout was in this one, the "type" in Marny's sketch. There were three of them—tall, hickory-sapling sort of young fellows, with straight legs, flat stomachs, and thin necks, like that of a race-horse. One had the look of an eagle, with his beak-nose and deep-set, uncowed eyes. Another wore his yellow hair long on his neck, Custer-fashion. The third sat on the iron floor, his knees level with his chin, his head in his hand. He had a sweetheart, perhaps, who loved him, or an old mother who was wringing her hands at home. This one, I learned afterward, had come with the last batch and was not yet accustomed to his surroundings; the others had been awaiting trial for months. All of them wore homespun clothes—not the ready-made clothes sold at the stores, but those that some woman at home had cut, basted, and sewn.

Marny asked them what they were up for. Their answers differed slightly from that of the old man, but the crime and its penalty were the same.

"Makin'," they severally replied.

There was no lowering of the eyelids when they confessed; no hangdog look about the mouth. They would do it again when they got out, and they intended to, only they would shoot the quicker next time. The earth was theirs and the fulness thereof, that part of it which they owned. Their grandfathers before them had turned their corn into whiskey and no man had said nay, and so would they. Not the corn that they had stolen, but the corn that they had ploughed and shucked. It was their corn, not the Government's. Men who live in the wilderness, and feed and clothe themselves on the things they raise with their own hands, have no fine-spun theories about the laws that provide revenue for a Government they never saw, don't want to see, and couldn't understand if they did.

Marny and I stood before the grating, looking each man over separately. Strange to say, the artistic possibilities of my visit faded out of my mind. The picturesqueness of their attire, the browns and grays accentuated here and there by a dash of red around a hat-band or shirt-collar—all material for my own or my friend's brush—made not the slightest impression upon me. It was the close smell, the dim, horrible light, the quick gleam of a pair of eyes looking out from under shocks of matted hair—the eyes of a panther watching his prey; the dull stare of some boyish face with all hope crushed out of it; these were the things that possessed me.

As I stood there absorbed in the terrors before me, I was startled by the click of the catch and the clink of keys, followed by the noiseless swing of the steel door as it closed again.