Three sevens

It mattered not at all to Craig that he had at least another ten years of prison ahead of him, nor that at least another month of this unexpired term would have to be passed here in the “cooler.” He had already considered these facts through long hours, and had found them as unproductive as stones. But the cat was a brand-new fact. He stroked her fur. He tickled her under the chin. In a sort of tremulous delight he wondered how she got here--where she came from--who owned her.

At this last phase of his happy speculation it was as if his mind gave a slight start of surprise. Did she come as a heritage, so to speak, from Chi Slim?

Here in San Pedro Prison, the punishment cells were a row of boiler-iron boxes, each of them approximately a five-foot hollow cube--six of them in all, ranged along one side of a dark subcellar. In each cell there was an iron door with two openings in it--one near the top, through which the guard could flash his light, when he made his rounds, and thus see what the inmate of the cell was doing; and the other at the bottom, through which things could be pushed, such as food and water pans, without the door being opened.

They took no chances with a prisoner, once he was in his cell. There he stayed. The door wasn’t opened until his time was up, and then there would be plenty of guards on hand to handle him--if he still required it, which wasn’t likely. He could groan. He could claim that he was sick. He could plead until he was hoarse. He could hammer on it, as had occasionally happened, until he was a senseless pulp. That door remained shut.

It did, that is, unless the inmate died. And that was what had happened to Chi Slim. So they took Chi out and put Craig in.

“Welcome to our club!”

Craig knew all about it before he had been in the cell five minutes. The other cells were occupied, all of them, and there was a waiting list, whence the allusion to the club. The prisoners talked when the guard was away. And they told Craig that he ought to feel honored. He not only had the cell with the biggest rivets in the floor, thus making it impossible either to sit down or lie down without torture, but he was the successor to an aristocrat.

That was right, too. For Chi Slim, notwithstanding his youth, had been one of the most famous crooks in the United States. And, more than that, he had died untamed.

As Craig stroked the cat’s soft fur he wondered at the hidden side of Chi Slim’s nature that had made it possible for him to tame the creature, win its trust. For Chi Slim had been bad--all bad. He had been a thief and a killer. He was never worse than when the odds were against him. As in prison, for example, where, twice, he had maimed his guards and made clean get-aways.

Chi had been famous as a jail breaker, scoffing at the trial judge on the bench, mocking the wardens, shrieking vengeance at the guards who mistreated him when they thought they had him safe, and then somehow or other, getting away in spite of them all.

Of course he had never, or hardly ever, accomplished his get-aways single-handed. Chi had been a man of many friends. It would have been hard to find a prison in the United States where some friend of his was not, or some friend of a friend equally ready to aid and abet any plan Chi Slim might evolve, from the murder of the warden to the bribery of a guard.

But San Pedro had got him and held him--right here in this same boiler-iron box, from the day of his reception to this, his last and cleanest get-away of all.