One day he came in with a scared-looking China boy about twenty years old. “Yank, here’s a cellmate for you.” He locked the Chinese in, thinking he was punishing me. The China boy later proved the jailer’s undoing and my deliverance. He knew some Chinook, but not one word of English. I learned from the Indian trusty that he was held for trial, charged with stealing a considerable sum of money from his employer, and that his case was about as hopeless as mine.
We got along great. I taught him the alphabet and many words of English while he instructed me in Chinese. I even humbled myself to ask the jailer for pencil and paper to teach the Chink writing. He went down to his office at once and brought me a lead pencil and pad of paper. I was surprised, and so grateful I thanked him half a dozen times.
Inside of a week he got drunk and ordered his Indians to take them away from me. I asked him no more for anything, and to this day I believe he gave them to me anticipating the warm, grateful, pleasant thrill he would get from depriving me of them.
The China boy’s company got him a lawyer. When he came to the jail he called me out and offered to take my case. I could have got money by writing to Salt Chunk Mary, but it looked like waste to fight it. When I asked him straight out if he could do anything with the conductor, he was shocked, indignant. “Oh, ah, but, my man! Tamper with the Crown’s witness, what?” He left as if I had the plague, and I don’t doubt he reported me to the prosecutor.
I’ve had a lot of dealings with Chinamen and never got the worst of it from one. If a Chinese doesn’t like you he will keep away from you; if he does like you he will go the route. By signs and a few words I conveyed to my cellmate that our only hope was to beat the jail. There was a barred window in our cell, the outside was not guarded. All we needed was a hack saw. He was for it. His “cousins” visited him regularly every week and if they could be made to understand what we needed they would get it.
There was but one hardware store in the town and to buy the saws there might cause talk. I had him tell his “cousins” to send to Vancouver to their company for them. After weeks of anxiety and uncertainty and much negotiating with their friends at Vancouver the precious saws were put into my cellmate’s hands under the drunken jailer’s nose. My plan was simple. Wait till spring when, if we got out and failed to get a train we could take a chance on foot in the country away from the railroad. Night after night we listened to the trains arriving and departing, checking the time. A freight train departed immediately after the one o’clock passenger. If I could “spring” into a box car, we could make Vancouver in safety. I secreted the saws and we settled down to wait for softer weather.
CHAPTER XVII
When spring came, my Chinese “tillicum,” which is Chinook for friend, and I were the only felony prisoners in the “skookum house,” or jail. The two half-breeds had finished their time and a couple of others had been brought in to take their places, four prisoners in all. The Indians watched us and we watched them. The tough end of our job was not to beat the jail or the drunken jailer, but the watchful trusties, our fellow prisoners.
I decided to cut the bars in the daytime and have my cellmate keep a lookout at the door against the appearance of our jailer or the Indians. The saws were dug up out of a crack and day after day, slowly, noiselessly, they bit into the thick bars. At night I put them away safely in their hiding place, and we slept as usual. Our jailer drank more and more, and we were searched oftener, but never once did he or his Indians look at the bars in our window. We were so closely watched and the jail was so tight the thought of our getting anything to “crush out” with never entered his foggy mind.
Strangely enough the China boy’s “cousins” never appeared at the jail after the day they brought him the saws. Whether they were afraid or thought they had done enough for him I never knew. To all my queries about them he “no sabied.” At the start I had figured on help in the way of money and food from them. Now I had to dismiss this. I determined not to go near the Chinese if we got out, but to get into a train and stay in it till hunger forced me out.