“Anything to say before sentence?” he asked.
Thinking he might be feeling better after lunch I asked till one o’clock to prepare a very short statement. He adjourned court. At one o’clock I stood up and said: “Your Lordship, my trial was fair; your verdict just.”
He looked at me a long time. “Two years in the provincial penitentiary for burglary; six months for jail breaking. Sentences concurrent—and thirty lashes.”
The prison sentence was no surprise to me. I expected a heavier one. I had long before admitted to myself its possibility, even its probability. But I had accepted that as a business man accepts a chance of bankruptcy, or as a laborer foresees an injury. The court’s order that I be lashed was a surprise and caused me no small concern. I couldn’t get it off my mind. I wondered if I could stand it; day and night I could feel the lash on my bare back. After turning it over in my mind I decided to make the best of it, and found some consolation in the thought that if the judge hadn’t ordered the flogging he would have sentenced me to five or ten years.
I dismissed all thought of escaping again from the jail. Even if I had my saws that were planted in the cell I got out of, I couldn’t have used them, for my jailer was determined to land me in the penitentiary and watched me closer than ever. I was wretched and almost lost hope. I envied poor dead Smiler and Foot-and-a-half George. I wished myself back with the larcenous-eyed Tex and his crew of cheap gamblers. My mind ran back to Madam Singleton and Julia and the overworked widow at my boarding house. I thought of the Sanctimonious Kid doing his fifteen years in a tough “stir” and wondered what had become of Soldier Johnnie, and how Salt Chunk Mary was faring in far-away Pocatello.
I was the most miserable of them all, and human-like I tried to fix the blame for all my troubles on some one else. I started in with the judge who sentenced me, then back to the Indian that pointed me out, then to the lawyer who had me arrested, and on back and back and through it all till I got to my father. The Sanctimonious Kid, who was something of a philosopher, said to me once: “Kid, ours is a crooked business, but we must not allow ourselves to think crooked. We’ve got to think straight, clearly and logically, or we are lost. Of course we’ll lose anyway, sooner or later, but let us not hasten the day by loose and careless thinking.”
His advice had not been altogether wasted on me. I got into the habit of thinking things over carefully. The trouble was I didn’t always follow out my conclusions. I knew I was taking a chance staying in Canada after my escape; yet I stayed. I had long realized that my every act was wrong and criminal; yet I never thought of changing my ways. After thinking it all over with all the clarity and logic and fairness I could command, I was convinced that nobody but myself was to blame, and that I had just drifted along from one thing to another until I was on the rocks. I hadn’t been forced into this life, and this predicament, by any set of circumstances or any power beyond my control. I had traveled along this road largely of my own free will, and it followed that I could get on the right road any time I willed it.
Strangely enough, I didn’t will to do it then and there. It seemed enough to know and feel I could do it if I wanted to. No use making resolutions until my sentence of two years was in. I would wait and see what that brought forth.
The same train that I was arrested on, in charge of the conductor I gave the bill to, carried me to the prison at New Westminster. My Scotch jailer loaded me with irons and handcuffed me to a seat to make sure of me and he delivered me safely. At the town of New Westminster I looked about me with interest; it was my birthplace. My parents were married in the United States, but spent the first year of their married life in British Columbia, where my father had some small business interests. He was a British subject and never took the trouble to become an American. That left me a subject of Great Britain, which I still am.
Like ninety per cent of the men arrested for felonies I had given a fictitious name and birthplace. My jailer called me a “damned Yank” because I registered at his jail as an American. At the prison a more complete biographical sketch was demanded of me, with the result that just so much more fiction found its way into the prison statistics. I was bathed, shaved, uniformed, measured, weighed, photographed, questioned at great length, and at last put in a cell by myself. I was notified that I would get fifteen lashes next day and that the remainder would be “laid on” one week before my sentence expired. I was further told very distinctly that by good conduct I could greatly soften the severity of the last installment, but that the first would be administered as the law provided.