Goldsmiths Friend Abroad Again | Page 8

continue--the two women became reconciled
to each other again through the common bond of interest and sympathy
created between them by pounding me in partnership, and when they
had finished me they fell to embracing each other again and swearing
more eternal affection like that which had subsisted between them all
the evening, barring occasional interruptions. They agreed to swear the
finger-biting on the Greaser in open court, and get him sent to the
penitentiary for the crime of mayhem.
Another of our company was a boy of fourteen who had been watched
for some time by officers and teachers, and repeatedly detected in
enticing young girls from the public schools to the lodgings of
gentlemen down town. He had been furnished with lures in the form of
pictures and books of a peculiar kind, and these he had distributed
among his clients. There were likenesses of fifteen of these young girls
on exhibition (only to prominent citizens and persons in authority, it
was said, though most people came to get a sight) at the police
headquarters, but no punishment at all was to be inflicted on the poor
little misses. The boy was afterward sent into captivity at the House of
Correction for some months, and there was a strong disposition to
punish the gentlemen who had employed the boy to entice the girls, but
as that could not be done without making public the names of those
gentlemen and thus injuring them socially, the idea was finally given
up.
There was also in our cell that night a photographer (a kind of artist
who makes likenesses of people with a machine), who had been for
some time patching the pictured heads of well-known and respectable
young ladies to the nude, pictured bodies of another class of women;

then from this patched creation he would make photographs and sell
them privately at high prices to rowdies and blackguards, averring that
these, the best young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their
likenesses in that unclad condition. What a lecture the police judge read
that photographer when he was convicted! He told him his crime was
little less than an outrage. He abused that photographer till he almost
made him sink through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred
dollars. And he told him he might consider himself lucky that he didn't
fine him a hundred and twenty-five dollars. They are awfully severe on
crime here.
About two or two and a half hours after midnight, of that first
experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as were dozing were
awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a
little while a man was pushed into our den with a "There, d---n you,
soak there a spell!"--and then the gate was closed and the officers went
away again. The man who was thrust among us fell limp and helpless
by the grating, but as nobody could reach him with a kick without the
trouble of hitching along toward him or getting fairly up to deliver it,
our people only grumbled at him, and cursed him, and called him
insulting names--for misery and hardship do not make their victims
gentle or charitable toward each other. But as he neither tried humbly to
conciliate our people nor swore back at them, his unnatural conduct
created surprise, and several of the party crawled to him where he lay
in the dim light that came through the grating, and examined into his
case. His head was very bloody and his wits were gone. After about an
hour, he sat up and stared around; then his eyes grew more natural and
he began to tell how that he was going along with a bag on his shoulder
and a brace of policemen ordered him to stop, which he did not do--was
chased and caught, beaten ferociously about the head on the way to the
prison and after arrival there, and finally I thrown into our den like a
dog.
And in a few seconds he sank down again and grew flighty of speech.
One of our people was at last penetrated with something vaguely akin
to compassion, may be, for he looked out through the gratings at the
guardian officer, pacing to and fro, and said:
"Say, Mickey, this shrimp's goin' to die."
"Stop your noise!" was all the answer he got. But presently our man

tried it again. He drew himself to the gratings, grasping them with his
hands, and looking out through them, sat waiting till the officer was
passing once more, and then said:
"Sweetness, you'd better mind your eye, now, because you beats have
killed this cuss. You've busted his head and he'll pass in his checks
before sun-up. You better