Jennings: Never in this world. Bill. When two men have rambled over two continents together, fleeing from the law—
Porter: Someone might overhear you, now! (looks about fearfully)
Jennings (coming closer and whispering): It was that lousy scoundrel, Hickson, the bolt contractor, that brought it on himself. He pays the state thirty cents a day for the labor of us prison slaves, and gets eight dollars’ work out of us. He promised me extra pay if I’d raise the product of my machine, so as to show the others it could be done. Well, I did it, and I went to him for my pay—just think of it, he owed me twenty-five cents, and he was too dirty mean to pay it! Told me to go to hell, and if I made any fuss about it, he’d have me paddled and take the hide off my back. Well, first thing, I hurled a monkey-wrench at his head; it missed him by half an inch, and went through a plank. They paddled me for that. When I came out, I spent a month intriguing to get two candles. I tested one of them in my cell, to see how many hours it would burn; then I climbed into the loft, and set the other in a lot of boxes and shavings, and set it burning—I had it figured to start the fire in the night. Well, I heard the alarm, and I danced for glee, and when the fire spread, and the big bolt machines come crashing down from the fourth story, by Jesus, I shrieked like I’d gone crazy. Half a million dollars that fire cost Hickson, and he didn’t have a cent of insurance! Some day, when I get out, I’ll whisper it in his ear, and he’ll wish he’d paid me that twenty-five cents. How’s that for a story, Bill?
Porter (gravely): No, Colonel, I can’t use that story, I can’t write about things like that. No, you’ll never find a word in my writings about a prison, or anything that happens in a prison. I can’t face such things, I don’t know what to do about them. I can only suggest a little kindness to men, a little humor, hoping that some day it may become contagious.
Jennings: I know you, Bill.
Porter: You have had troubles, Colonel; I have had them also. Underneath this room is the basement where they do their punishments; I hear men screaming and moaning—night after night I have to pace the floor and listen, helpless—I have to do my work to that music. I suffer till I am dripping with perspiration—but I am merely one of the victims, it would be my turn next if I should interfere. At first I thought I couldn’t stand it; but—it seems we underestimate our power to endure. I have learned to go the rounds with the doctor, as Dante traveled through the seven hells; I answer calls when men have hanged themselves in their cells, or cut their throats, or bitten the arteries in their wrists. Every night in this hospital at least one man dies; they bring a wheelbarrow, and throw in the corpse, and a sheet over it, and cart it to the dead-house—through that passage they go (indicating the passage across the stage, on the other side of the counter) I hear them—rumble, rumble, rumble—bump, bump—while I’m trying to write. (he pauses) I have put a shell about me. I say, I am not here; I do not belong in this world; I have nothing to do with it; I live in my spirit, in my dreams. That is why I do not permit you to call me a convict, or to say that I carry the brand.
Jennings: Bill, let us fly away together, to those happy days in Central America, before the law closed its tight fist on us!
Porter: Be once more that little scarecrow, clad in a battered silk hat, and a dress-suit with one tail torn off, dumped out of the surf on the coast of Honduras!
Jennings: Be that grave, ample figure in a Palm Beach suit, steaming and fanning yourself in front of the United States consulate! You had your bedside manner with you that morning, Bill, in spite of an overdose of aguardiente!
Porter: Ah, dio mio, but those were happier days than we knew! If only your thirty thousand dollars had been dowered with immortality, we might have been there now!