It was a relief to get into the county jail, away from the bedbugs. It was clean. I was put in a cell with a fine old Mormon farmer, charged with polygamy—unlawful cohabitation, to use the legal phrase. He was well supplied with tobacco and food, from friends outside, which he shared with me. We were confined to the cells all the time, and I made no acquaintances while there. I did not try. I was much discouraged at this turn of things against me, but was still hopeful of getting out and returning to my father.
“You’ve been indicted by the grand jury,” said the jailer one morning, some three weeks later, “and to-day you go up to the ‘big house.’”
Utah then was a territory and all persons indicted were at once transferred to the custody of the United States marshal who, in addition to his other duties, acted as warden of the territorial penitentiary. An hour later I was taken out of my cell and turned over to a big, rawboned man with a worn pistol swinging from a holster on his belt.
“Young feller, I don’t put irons on none of ’em,” he said to me, tapping his gun. “Ef you want ter run, that’s yore business.”
In an hour I was at the penitentiary, where I made friends and incurred obligations that turned my thoughts away from home and sent me back on the road.
CHAPTER IX
To say I was shocked, stunned, or humiliated on entering the penitentiary would not be the truth. It would not be true in nine cases out of any ten. It would be true if a man were picked up on the street and taken directly to a penitentiary, but that isn’t done. He is first thrown into a dirty, lousy, foul-smelling cell in some city prison, sometimes with an awful beating in the bargain, and after two or three days of that nothing in the world can shock, stun, or humiliate him. He is actually happy to get removed to a county jail where he can perhaps get rid of the vermin and wash his body. By the time he is tried, convicted, and sentenced, he has learned from other prisoners just what the penitentiary is like and just what to do and what to expect. You start doing time the minute the handcuffs are on your wrists. The first day you are locked up is the hardest, and the last day is the easiest. There comes a feeling of helplessness when the prison gates swallow you up—cut you off from the sunshine and flowers out in the world—but that feeling soon wears away if you have guts. Some men despair. I am sure I did not.
Inside the prison I was brought before a convict clerk who took my name, age, and nativity. I lied about them all. I couldn’t cheat the scales or a measuring machine, and they got my correct weight and height. I did screw my face up a little when I was photographed, and felt good about it. My clothes were not taken, nor was my hair cut. I had a bath and was turned loose in the yard where there were about one hundred prisoners, some, like myself, in outside clothes awaiting trial, and others in convict stripes doing time. The penitentiary was small then. There was no work except farming and gardening, which was all done by “cohabs,” Mormons convicted of unlawful cohabitation, and a very decent lot of men they were, never complaining of persecution, always ready to help their fellow prisoners, and freely dividing the food, money, and tobacco with which they were well supplied by friends and relatives.
The other prisoners played poker all day in the yard on blankets, and occasionally a game of baseball, when they could get up enough ambition. The food was fair. There was no discipline. Prisoners were expected to appear at their cells at evening to be locked in, and to stay in them till they were let out in the morning. They didn’t always do that. In prison parlance, the place was a “playhouse.”
The first man to speak to me in the yard was Shorty, the safe expert we had visited. He came directly up to me and put out his hand. “Kid, that was tough about Smiler. I wanted to see you both and apologize. I thought you put me in the hole for some coin, but I found out that the people lost just what you both said. I couldn’t imagine a gambling house with a six-hundred-dollar bankroll.”