Oh, yes; Jim would be made to work. The town was quite right about that.
The other consideration, although not altogether so important, was a trifle more interesting. Jim’s “questionable father”!
It was his mother’s fault that public interest (?) was not gratified. And it never forgave the poor outcast for leaving the world with that seal of secrecy still unbroken. The heart broke, but not the seal. They cast her off utterly when, poor girl-mother, she stubbornly refused to reveal the name of her betrayer. To them there was nothing heroic in the answer, “Because my life is ruined, shall I ruin his?”
So they treasured it against her in her grave, and against her son after her, in his grave too, that living, loathsome sepulchre, the State prison.
But they had surmised a good deal regarding Jim’s paternal parentage. They searched for resemblances, birthmarks, peculiarities of feature, owning that nature always set her brand upon the bastard, and that the features, as well as the iniquities of the father, are always visited upon the illegitimate. If this be the case, Jim must have come of some strange blood. And yet, knowing him and his history, some might have traced the poor mother in the boy, although of that mother he knew very little. He had been told—oh, yes, he had been told—that she was found in a garret one December morning with a vagabond baby nursing at her dead breast. And old Nancy Piatt, the only one who ever seemed to dislike talking to the lad about it, had told him that she was “a pretty corpse, as pretty as the grave ever held,” and that the dead lips wore a smile, those dead lips that never would, and never could, give up their pitiful secret. Poor lips; death had granted that which life denied them—a smile. Stubbornness, the town gossips called the woman’s silence. In other circumstances it would have answered to the higher term of fidelity, or, perhaps, heroism. Jim was very like his mother, old Nancy said, despite Dame Nature’s habit of branding. Surely Nancy ought to be authority, for when the boy was left, at two months old, on the town, old Nancy Piatt, a drunken old crone, who washed the clothes of the rich all the week, and drank her earnings Saturday evenings, was the only one who offered to “take the cub” whom the authorities were ready to give away.
A sorry chance had Jim, although he never realized that. At ten he could drink as much liquor as Nancy herself, and outswear the ablest lawyer in the town. At twelve he could pick a lock better than a blacksmith, and was known as one of the most cunning sneak thieves in the place. At fourteen he beat a little boy of eight unmercifully. (Did anybody expect old Nancy to tell him that was the crown crime of cowardice?)
Then someone suspected Nancy of a crime. One of those nameless crimes concerning which the law is very jealous, not considering the slander prevented, the “good name preserved,” and the disgrace averted. All in high circles, and all set in the scale against a useless little baby,—a wicked little illegitimate baby, that is so heartless as to be born, and thereby bring a world of trouble upon wealthy and respectable people.
That old Nancy—for handsome considerations—had made away with the selfish baby, Jim knew as well as anybody. And when he was offered quite as handsome a sum to tell all he knew about it, his reply was to plant his fist in the eye of the man who had made the offer. Not that he cared for the cause the babe’s coming had disgraced. He only meant to stand by old Nance, and not all the money in the county’s coffers could have forced his lips to speak that which would hurt her. He was afterward arrested and brought before the magistrate, together with Nance, and swore, not by the calendared saints,—he hadn’t made their acquaintance,—but by “George,” by “Gum,” by “Gosh,” and even by God himself that he knew nothing at all about the matter. They knew he was lying, but there was no way to prove it, as he attempted no dodge. He was merely ignorant. Nance hadn’t asked him to do this; she knew he would do it if necessary. She had not attempted to win his love, his confidence, or his gratitude. Perhaps she believed, in her blind way, that these things are born, not won, like respect, and honor, and admiration. He was fifteen when this happened. At sixteen Nance died from the effects of a blow from a policeman’s club while trying to arrest her. Two weeks later the policeman died from the effects of a blow from Jim’s club while trying to protect old Nance. Two months later the prison door closed on Jim, and the town took breath again in a long, relieved sigh of “Safe at last!” As if vagabond Jim’s salvation had lain a weight for sixteen years upon their consciences.
It was certainly the face of a hardened creature that followed the sheriff to the railroad station that June morning. June, sweet, old love-laden, rose-burdened June. Of all the year to give up one’s freedom in June. And how many years before he would breathe the free, rose-haunted air of another June. Twenty. Why, the twentieth century would be dawning before he would be free again. Would his face be any the less hard at the expiration of his term? The penitentiary isn’t a hotbed of virtue, and Jim wasn’t wax. Nobody wasted any hopes on him,—except the lessees, who, finding him able-bodied, young, and healthy, sent him to the Branch prison to dig coal.
There an old gray-bearded warden offered a plea for his youth, and a protest against the associations of the Branch, and was promptly reminded that the Tennessee State prison was not a reformatory institute, but that it had been leased as a financial speculation, which was expected to yield at least ten per cent. on the money invested by the lessees.