“Lock him up,” ordered the lawyer. “He has the exact amount of money I lost. The paper corresponds, and so does the silver.”
They handcuffed me. “You’re arrested in the name of the Crown, and anything you say will be used against you.”
I was taken to the city prison where I gave the booking officer a very brief and misleading biographical sketch. The jail I had fled from with the China boy loomed before me and my only thought was to cover up. I put in the balance of the night going over my case. It looked hopeless. The next morning my cell was not unlocked when the other prisoners were let out to wash. Later a jailer opened it, and a Siwash Indian boy handed me a bucket of water and a towel.
When I reached for them the boy looked at me and I turned cold. He was one of the watchful trusty prisoners at the jail I had escaped from. He knew me. This was the first of a long and bitter series of experiences with stool pigeons, and in all my life I never witnessed a more gratuitous, barefaced, conscienceless exhibition of snitching.
Without waiting to walk out of my sight he grabbed the jailer by the arm and began pattering away in Chinook, pointing at me. He didn’t “spill the beans.” He just kicked the pot over and put out the fire.
“To understand is to forgive,” it is said. I have long since forgiven the numberless, noisy stool pigeons that beset my crooked path because I don’t want any poison in my mind, but as yet I am unable to understand them.
Immediately the jailer came back with another officer and they put a very hefty pair of leg irons on me. At ten o’clock I was taken into the magistrate’s court. The attachés and loungers crowded close and stared at me curiously. The magistrate briefly and coldly remanded my case for three days. A photographer waiting at the jail took a number of pictures of me and I was locked up again. The jailer, a sad-eyed, solemn-faced Scotchman, gazed at me a long time through the barred door and smacked his lips as if enjoying the flavor of some delicious morsel or rare wine.
In a voice that seemed to come out of a sepulcher he said: “You escaped from the provincial jail in the town of ———.”
I already knew I was lost, but his solemn face and melancholy voice conveyed to me, as he probably intended, the full force and effect of my predicament. He made me feel like one buried alive; his measured words sounded to me like cold clods dropping on my coffin. I wasn’t taken out of my cell and “sweated” or third-degreed, or beaten up. That looked bad for me. The more a prisoner is questioned the less they know; the less he is questioned the more they know. If he is not questioned at all they know it all, or enough. My captors asked me no questions; they knew enough.
At the expiration of the three days I was remanded again. Then came another remand, and before it expired the Scotch jailer I escaped from appeared to take me back for trial where there was a cinch case against me and the charge of jail breaking to boot. The lawyer whose house I entered and who so neatly trapped me came to the jail before I was taken away. He was a fine fellow, an Englishman, and to use an English expression in describing him, I’ll say he was “a bit of all right.” He brought me a book from his library, Charles Reade’s “It’s Never Too Late to Mend.” He waived claim to the money found on me when I was arrested; told the jailer to see that I got it and wished me luck with my case. He neither lectured me nor asked any embarrassing questions. Shaking my hand heartily when he was leaving he said: “Do read that book, old man. And, I say, I’m not intimating that you’re an authority on burglary, but I thought you might tell me how I could prevent it in future.” I told him to buy himself a dollar-and-a-half dog, and let him sleep in the house.