Al Jennings (appears in doorway at left; a wiry little man, wearing the uniform of a first-class prisoner—grey, with black stripes on trouser seams; vivid red hair and a temper to correspond; warmhearted to his friends, a trouble to his enemies): Bill.
Porter (turns and stares): Why, Colonel! You’re out of the hole!
Jennings: I’m out, and promised a job in the postoffice! How do you like me in my new dress? I’ve come to pay my thanks.
Porter: To me?
Jennings: They tell me, Bill, that you had the main finger where he had to listen. It’s not every convict has a chance to save his warden’s life!
Porter: Colonel, you and I are insiders. What saved that warden’s life was my bedside manner! Nature has endowed me with a rare blessing, the ability to keep silent when I have nothing to say. The warden was dying—yes, but dying of fright.
Jennings: Men sometimes die of swallowing arsenic, Bill.
Porter: Fowler’s solution, it was, and he hadn’t taken enough to kill. I gave him a dose of simplicity mixed with gall. I said: “Drink, and you’ll be well.” He did, and he was.
Jennings: And then you said to him: “Warden, I have a friend of happier days, who is having the soul wrenched out of him in solitary.”
Porter: I’ll tell you, Colonel; it’s fortunate that you have the gift of the gab, and have provided me with biographical details to touch the heart of even an Ohio politician. “Warden,” I said, “this Al Jennings, this outlaw, this desperado whom the newspapers and the railway detectives have hunted over two continents for ten years—this Al Jennings was born outdoors in a mountain snowstorm; he was suckled upon frost, he was weaned upon kicks and beatings, he was a street rat, hunted through the alleys; he was driven into crime by cattle thieves and political grafters—in the state of Oklahoma they have such, Mr. Warden. His crimes were wholesome, outdoor crimes, as one might say; lovely, picturesque, heroic deeds, which school-boys will thrill to throughout all time. To hold up a transcontinental express, and dynamite the baggage car, and ride all night through mountain canyons with sacks of treasure at your saddle-bow; to gallop into town with a fusillade of bullets, and gallop away with the inside contents of a bank—that, Mr. Warden, involves an expenditure of ammunition sufficient to constitute a war. A train-bandit may be a man of true loyalty, who would die before he would throw down a friend. Give Al Jennings a chance, and you’ll find him a valuable assistant; and more than that, he’ll stroll into your office of an evening, and produce for you an elaboration of anecdotal pyrotechnics to restore the shining days of Haroun al Raschid and his Scheherazade.” That’s what I gave him, Colonel.