The Man Behind the Bars

by Winifred Louise Taylor

I can give but one glimpse of his childhood. When he was a very little boy he sat on his father's knee and looked up into kind and loving gray eyes. The father died, and the son remembered him always as kind and loving.

The loss of his father changed the course of Wilson's life. The mother formed other ties; the boy was one too many, and left home altogether as soon as he was old enough to shift for himself. He went honestly to work, where so many boys along the Mississippi Valley are morally ruined—on a river-boat.

After a time things began to go wrong with him. I don't know whether the injury was real or fancied, but the boy believed himself maliciously injured; and in the blind passion following he left the river, taking with him money that belonged to the man who had angered him. Wilson had meant to square the score, to balance wrong with wrong; but his revenge recoiled upon himself and at sixteen he was a thief and a fugitive. Before the impetus of that moral movement was exhausted he was in the penitentiary—"one of the most vigorous and fine-looking men in the prison, tall and splendidly built," so said another prisoner who knew him at that time.

At the expiration of his three years' sentence Wilson began work in a Saint Louis printing-office, opening, so he believed, a new chapter in life. He was then twenty years of age.

During that year all through the West—if the Mississippi region can still be called West—there were serious labor troubles. Men were discharged from every branch of employment where they could be spared; and the day came when all the "new hands" in the printing-office where Wilson worked were turned off.

Wilson had saved something from his earnings, and while his money lasted he lived honestly, seeking employment, but the money was gone before he found employment. Outside the cities the country was overrun with tramps; temptations to lawlessness were multiplied; starvation, stealing, or begging seemed the only pathway open to many. None starved; there was little choice between the other alternatives. Jails and prisons were crowded with inmates, some of whom felt themselves fortunate in being provided with food and shelter even at the cost of liberty. "I have gone hungry so many days and slept on the ground so many nights that the thought of a prison seems something like home," was a remark made to me. "The world owes me a living" was a thought that came in the form of temptation to many a man who could get no honest work.

After Wilson had been out of employment for two or three months there occurred a great commotion near a small town within fifty miles of Saint Louis. Stores had been broken into and property carried off, and a desperate attempt was made to capture the burglars, who were supposed to be in that vicinity. A man who had gone to a stream of water was arrested and identified as belonging to the gang. He was ordered to betray his accomplices; he refused absolutely. The reckless courage in his nature once aroused, the "honor" observed among thieves was his inevitable course. A rope was brought, and Wilson was taken to a tree where the story of his life would doubtless have ended had not a shout from others, who were still searching, proclaimed the discovery of the retreat of his companions. Wilson and Davis, the two leaders, were sentenced each to four years in the penitentiary.

Defeated, dishonored, penniless, and friendless, Wilson found himself again in prison; this time under the more than double disgrace of being a "second-term" man, with consciousness of having deliberately made a choice of crime. He was an avowed infidel, and his impetuous, unsubdued nature was at war with life and the world. For two years he lived on in this way; then his health began to fail under the strain of work and confinement.

With the loss of strength his heart grew harder and more desperate. One day his old recklessness broke out in open revolt against prison authority. He was punished by being sent to the "solitary," where the temperature in summer is much lower than that of the shops where the men work; he took cold, a hemorrhage of the lungs resulted, and he was sent to the prison hospital.