"Pray I Hell, yes, Bill. Sure I can pray if it will get me off the contract."
How many prayers we offered just to get us "off the contract." Porter smiled.
"Never think that I forget you, colonel. Believe me, that my thoughts were with you every time a poor, outraged devil sent his screams up from the basement."
I looked at Porter, surprised at the tense emotion in his voice. His lips quivered and a sort of gray blight seemed spreading over his face.
"I can't drag out much longer," he said.
It was one of the few times that Porter ever voiced his loathing of the prison system of punishments, and yet he knew perhaps more of its ghastly outrages than any other convict.
Porter had already been night clerk at the hospital for a year and a half. He saw the broken bodies brought up from the basement when men were all but done to death in vicious floggings, in the water and in the hangings. He saw the doctors work over these tortured wrecks, and heal them just so that they could be further tormented.
And when some bitter wretch, driven desperate and insane, would attempt suicide in his cell, Porter was always forced to accompany the prison doctor and aid him to revive the convict. These attempted suicides were almost a nightly occurrence. Often they succeeded.
Comparatively easy as a place in the hospital was, no toil could have corroded into the heart of a man of Porter's temperament as did this unabating contact with misery.
He used to come into the post-office and sit for hours, dumb with a bleak, aching despair. In the blithest moments of his success in New York, Porter could never shake himself free from the clawing shadow of the prison walls.
Porter got me into the chaplain's office, but I didn't make good. I couldn't see my way clear to join the Sunday school. The chaplain took a violent grudge against me the day after my arrival. It was noon on a Wednesday when theminister and two convicts passed through the outer office into the chaplain's private study. One of the converts was a regular spittoon bully, in -for horse-stealing; the other was a cheap vaudeville actor. He had cut his wife's throat. They were not in my class.
"We're going to pray," the chaplain informed me.
"That's all right with me," I answered.
He scowled at me, his face white with irritation, his puny voice shrilling out, "Aren't you going in to pray?"
"No. Not with that crowd."
The nigger horse-thief, the cut-throat and the minister went into the study and the chaplain stood while the convicts threw themselves on their knees and immediately began mumbling and moaning to the Creator.
An hour later I was sent to the deputy warden for insolence and insubordination. He dismissed the charge.
"You don't have to pray if you don't want to. That ain't what you're sent to the pen for."
I was given a job in the post-office. Billy Raidler, another train-robber, was chief post-office clerk. In this new position I had considerable liberty, I was near to the hospital. Bill Porter, Raidler and I cemented a friendship that lasted until the death, first of Porter, then of Raidler.
Raidler was the most beloved man in the pen. He had been the terror of the Indian Territory in his outlaw days. Yet he was slender, fair-haired, soft- voiced as a girl. He had an impish wit and the most obliging nature of any man I ever met. In his last fight with the marshals he had lost three fingers of his right hand. Two bullets caught him in the neck, knocking his spine askew. He walked as though he had locomotor ataxia.
Bill Porter was just as much the recluse in prison as he had been in Honduras and Mexico. He did not make friends readily. Between him and the world was an impassable barrier. No man was privileged to break down that wall which hid his hopes, his thoughts, his troubles. And so he liked the outlaw prisoners better than other men. They had learned the fine art of indifference to the other fellow's affairs.
In the post-office, Billy Raidler, Porter and I passed many a happy hour. I came to see a new Porter, who afterward developed into O. Henry, the smile-maker.
The discovery came about in a peculiar manner.
I had started to write the memoirs of my bandit days. Every man in prison is writing a story. Each man considers his life a tragedy an adventure of the most absorbing interest. I had given my book a fine title. Raidler was enthusiastic about it. He gloried in "my flow of language."
"The Long Riders" was galloping ahead at a furious stride. There were chapters in it with 40,000 words and not one climax. There were other chapters with but seven sentences and as many killings as there were words.
Raidler insisted that a man be shot in every paragraph. It would make the book "go," he said. Finally I came to a halt.
"If I have any more men killed," I said, "there'll be nobody left on earth."
"I'll tell you what you do," Raidler said. "You ask Bill Porter about it. He's writing a story, too."
At that moment I felt myself far the greater writer of the two. I had not even known that Porter hoped to write. He dropped in to see us in the afternoon.
"Bill tells me you're writing a story," I said. Porter looked at me auickly, a dark flush staining his cheek.
"No, I'm not writing, I'm just practicing," he said.
"Oh, is that all?" I felt really sorry for the man who was destined to write the finest stories America ever read.
"Well, I'm writing one. In fact, it's almost finished. Come in and I'll read it to you."
Porter left the room quickly. I never saw him for two weeks.
A desk and a chair inside the railing of the prison drug store—the five wards of the hospital grouped around that store and in those wards from 50 to 200 patients racked with all manner of disease. The quiet of the night disturbed with the groans of broken men, the coughs of the wasted, the frightened gasp of the dying. The night nurse padding from ward to ward and every once in a while returning to the drug store with the crude information another "con" has croaked. Then, down the corridors the rattle of the wheelbarrow and the negro life termer bumping the "stiff" to the dead house. A desk and a chair settled in the raw heart of chill depression!
There at that desk, night after night, sat Bill Porter. And in the grisly atmosphere of prison death and prison brutality there bubbled up the mellow smile of his genius—the smile born of heartache, of shame, of humiliation—the smile that has sent its ripple of faith and understanding to the hearts of men and women everywhere.
When it first caught Billy Raidler and me, we cried outright. I think it was about the proudest moment in O. Henry's life. He had come into the prison post-office on a Friday afternoon. It was just about a fortnight after I had offered to read him my memoirs.
"Colonel, would you mind granting me an audience," he said in the bantering formality of his way. "I'd appreciate the opinion of a fellow-struggler. I have a little scrap here. I'd like to read it to you and Billy."
Porter was usually so reticent, usually the listener while others talked, that one felt a warm surge of pleasure whenever he showed a disposition for con- fidence. Billy and I swerved about, eager for the reading.
Porter sat on a high stool near the desk and carefully drew from his pocket a roll of brown paper. He had written in a big, generous hand and there was scarcely a scratch or an erasure on a single sheet.
From the moment that Porter's rich, low, hesitant voice began there was a breathless suspense until suddenly Billy Raidler gulped, and Porter looked up as one aroused from a dream. Raidler grinned and jabbed his maimed hand into his eye.
"Damn you, Porter, I never did it in my life before. By God, I didn't know what a tear looked like."
It was a funny thing to see two train-robbers blubbering over the simple story.
Perhaps the convict is over-sentimental, but the queer twist in Porter's story just seemed to sneak into the heart with a kind of overflowing warmth.