So Jim went to the coal mines in the mountains, leaving his life, his poor, puny sixteen years of dust and degradation, behind him. If there was anything of brightness, any softening memory, any tender touch of the human—dream touches are they to the castaway—which Jim carried with him, it was the memory of old Nance, drunken, filthy, murderous old Nance, and the face of the gray-bearded warden who had lifted his voice in his behalf.
It was noon of a day in June, early in the eighties, that Jim trudged across the coal-sprinkled ridge upon which rose the great gray, weather-beaten, rat-infested fence, which was dignified by the name of stockade. To go out of life into a dungeon like that, and at noon of a day in June. That Jim made no sign was accredited to his hardness of heart. That, having registered and heard an official sneer at the name, Jim Royal, and having passed through the hands of the barber, and being duly entered at last among the State’s hired help, and dropped down on his ill-smelling bunk, a rat came and gnawed his ear, and the vermin crawled unmolested over him, and still he gave no sign, was set down to the account of his laziness.
“He won’t be vicious,” the warden said, “he is too lazy,” and he thought yearningly of the raw-hide lash hanging in the office. That the stupor might be the result of weariness had never once suggested itself. If it had, why still there was the lash. The lessees’ ten per cent. must be gotten out of that herd in the stockade, even if it should be necessary to beat it out.
But when, the next morning, Jim fell into his place as brisk as any, the warden began to waver between the lash and the pool. If he did not need the one, he was fairly seen to require the other. All of them needed some one, may be two, of the prison’s medicines, and the warden made a special point of spying out the diseases of new arrivals, and applying the remedy as soon as possible. It told them, more plainly than words, precisely the manner of treatment they were to expect in case of any appearance of any of the several moral diseases with which all convicts, young, old, rich, or poor, were supposed to be afflicted.
Therefore, the warden “had his eye on Jim.” And when the gang started from the stockade across the black, coal-dusted mountains, to the blacker mine beneath, he called to the new arrival, draining the last of some sloppy coffee from a dingy tin cup at the greasy, board table of the shed room that served for dining-room, and laundry, during the week, and for chapel on Sundays.
“Come here, sir; what’s your name, sir? At least what one did you leave on the book out there?”
“The only one I’ve got,” said Jim. “The clerk down there made it to spell Royal.”
“Royal.” A sneer curled the lips of the official. “Here Black”—to the guard,—“add this royal renegade to your company. Here, you fellow, fall into line here, and be quick about it.”
To Jim, accustomed from the day his dead mother’s nipple had been taken from his toothless gums to having his own free will, the surly command came like a threat. He hesitated.