Boston Blackie Stories Around the Opium Lamp-Jack Boyle

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1:00Graphics of Boston Blackie stories around the Opium lamp. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org Recording by Winston Tharp. Boston Blackie stories around the Opium lamp by Jack Boyle. A modern Opium eater. A newspaper man's story of his own experiences with the drug. Five years ago, I was editor and manager of a Metropolitan Daily newspaper. Today, I am a convict serving my second penitentiary sentence, a two-time loser in the language of the underworld, my world now. Between these extremes is a single cause, Opium. For five years, I have been a smoker of Opium. For five years, there has not been a day, scarcely an hour, during which my mind and body

2:03have not been under the influence of the most subtle and insidious of drugs. And now, after weeks of agony in a prison where an honest warden has made it impossible to secure the drug, I am myself again, a normal-minded man, able to look back critically and impartially over the ruinous past. If I can sit down here fairly and simply the story of those years, I shall have done something, I think, that may save many an unfortunate whose feet have turned toward the road I traveled. Few people in the United States realize the extent to which Opium and Kindred drugs are being used today in this country. You, my reader, may have read of the federal government's strict prohibitive law against the importation of smoking opium and concurred idly and without interest. But did you know that the United States Revenue Service has a roster of over 3,000 known users of Opium and San Francisco alone? Countless other thousands are unregistered.

3:05Every other great city in the country has similar rosters and numbers its fiends by thousands and tens of thousands. Hundreds of cans of the contraband drug are sold daily in New York, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Salt Lake, and Portland. The United States Army posts have been invaded and thousands of the wearers of our country's uniform are users of opium, morphine, and cocaine. The severest penalties have not seemed even to check the habit. Starting at the Presidio in San Francisco with transports returning from the Orient, the drug habit is spread among the enlisted men in the army by leaps and bounds. The reason is easily found. Not one man in a hundred once he has tested the peace, the mind ease, the soothed nerves, and the sarsice from all sorrows, disappointments and responsibilities that come from a first use of opium ever again has the willpower to deny himself that delightful Nephenthe. Opium is like the salary loan shark, a friend today,

4:08smoothing difficulty in trouble with a free and easy hand. Tomorrow it becomes a master, exacting a toll a hundredfold more terrible than the ills that he used. My first experience with opium was accidental. As a San Francisco reporter I had specialized in Chinatown and Chinese subjects. Not a licensed guide in the city knew the real Oriental quarter as I knew it. I had taken scores of friends to opium dens on slumming parties, but I had never touched a pipe or been tempted to do so. When I became a newspaper executive and finally attained the chief position of responsibility on the blank, I naturally spent less time in Chinatown, but I still kept in touch with my news sources, sources that had scored many a good beat for my paper. At the time of which I ride I was overworked. I was the one experienced newspaper man in an office of cups. Every line of copy in our eight and ten-page sheet passed through my hands.

5:09I wrote the more important headlines, plan the makeup, and in addition directed the efforts of the business office force. In short, I was doing the work of three or four men and the strain was beginning to tell on me. When my day's work was done I was always utterly exhausted. I slept brokenly and sat down to my daily task absolutely unrefreshed. I was approaching a nervous breakdown and knew it. But conditions on my sheet were such that I could see no immediate relief. One evening I attended an important dramatic opening that I did not care to entrust to one of my inexperienced cubs. From the theater I started for the club where I passed a few hours occasionally. On the street I met a fellow newspaper man, a dramatic critic, who liked myself as since passed into oblivion. Take me for a stroll through Chinatown, he asked. There are some things I want to see for his tent, and you're the one man I know who can get behind their doors. We went. During our trip my friend suggested it was it to a hop joint.

6:10I led the way to one little known to ordinary slummers. The mummified Chinese in charge was an old acquaintance of mine and welcomed us warmly. He was smoking opium when we entered, and the unventilated cell in which he lived was heavy with the fumes of the drug. I took one deep breath of the pungent, Swedish, smoke-laden air. My friend squatted on the bunk chatting with the Chinese. Again and again I inhaled the smoke fresh from the pipe, taking it in thirstily to the very bottom of my lungs. To my amazement, my weariness, my nervousness, my brain-fag slipped from me like a discarded garment. Say, Lee, I demanded when I realized that a light-full exhilaration that was stealing over me, cooked me up a couple of yin pokes, pills. I'm going to smoke of you. Willingly he toasted the brownish syrupy drug over his dim lap, rolled the pill into shape, definitely attached it to the bowl, and then handed me the pipe and guided it over the flame while I drew into my lungs my first pill of opium.

7:16In sixty seconds I was another man. My barren brain in which I had been conning over an introduction to the criticism I must write before I slept, leaped to its task. The ideas, the phrases, the right words which until then had diluted my fagged mentality, came trupping forth faster than I could have written them had I been at my desk. My worries and responsibilities fell from me. I remember even today that as I smoked my third or fourth pill, the solution of a problem that had been of bugbear for days came into my mind like an inspiration. I smoked six pills before we left. As my friend and I separated he looked at me curiously. I've often wondered how you do the work you do and hold up, he said, now I know. I'm going to try that myself the next time I'm stuck for my Sunday page story. My brain is virile and as clear as crystal and I didn't even take a pill. I just breathed the air. I've surprised your secret old man.

8:18Good night. I didn't tell him that he had seen me smoke my first pill. A half hour later I wrote a column dramatic criticism that was quoted on the billboards and I reeled it off as fast as my fingers could hit the typewriter keys. I was never at a loss for a word. The story in its entirety seemed to lie ready in my brain. My task finished, I went to bed without my customary drink and dropped the sleep as peacefully as a child. For the first time in weeks I slept soundly and awoke refreshed and clear-minded with a zest for the day's labor. That was the beginning. After that I visited Lee first at intervals of several days then by degrees more frequently until finally I had become a daily user of opium. I shall never forget one conversation with the old Chinese din keeper on the occasion of my third or fourth smoke. He looked up with his bland smile of welcome as I came in. It was evident that the man expected me. This nettle to me.

9:18Nothing could have convinced me then that the drug would ever become a necessity to me. Well Lee, I said throwing myself on the bunk. Sheff me up a few extra big ones tonight. I'll take more tonight, for this will be about my last smoke. I'm going to quit. In silence he adjusted my favorite bowl to the pipe. In silence he definitely toasted the pill, completed the operation and twirled the ivory mouthpiece around to me. Gretly I drew the fragrant smoke into my lungs. He noticed my eagerness. Indeed I could not even pretend to conceal it. He watched me inhale the smoke into my lungs puffed out like a pigeon's breast. Then exhale it slowly and little puffs, regretting each. And last he spoke, you know quit, he said softly. Every man all the time say he quit. Every man all the same you. Smoke one time, smoke two time, smoke three time, then smoke all the time.

10:23Shiny man, white man, chokeway, negro. All the same, no can quit. Blimey you die, you quit. Blimey maybe you bloke, no more money, no more fleeing, baller money, no can steal them money. Maybe you quit one, two days. Blimey maybe you go jail. Got no friend, bring you up. Got no money, give them policeman catch them up. You quit. You got money, no go jail, you know quit. I heaps are they. Blimey you see. I laughed at his warning. Had I but none it, the wisdom of ages, the experience of untold thousands of wrecked lives was summed up in the halting words I allowed to pass me unheeded. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire.

11:25Try them all only at McDonald's. Toyota's easy choice sales event is on. Whether you're looking for the performance of a camera, the versatility of her app for, the efficiency of a Corolla or all electric driving in the BZ. There's a Toyota that's just right for you. And with great deals across the lineup, now's the time to find yours. But hurry, these deals won't last long. Toyota's easy choice sales event end soon. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire. Try them all only at McDonald's. When I became a regular smoker, I bought a layout. Pipes, bowls, lamp, tray, yen hawks, everything. And indulged my habit in the joint of a white smoker where I was a favorite patron

12:26and could lie at ease privately without fear of discovery. By this time, the cost of opium had become a very appreciable and permanent expense. From a few pills at first, I increased my allowance day by day until it took 30 or 40 fune, a Chinese measure, there are 76 fune and an ounce, to give me the metal relief I craved. The physical craving, the body's demand for it, can be satisfied with approximately the same amount each day. The metal craving, the mines' demand, increases daily. What satisfies tonight is too little tomorrow, and so on. To feel even normal, I now needed three or four times the half-dozen pills which at first had given me such exquisite pleasure. To get the exhilaration, the sood-nerves, the contentment I craved, I, like each of the millions before me, had to use more and more each day. Thirty-six fune of opium and retail costs at an average three dollars.

13:28A fifty-cent tip to my cook and a quarter for the privilege of the room in which I smoked made my habit cost me about four dollars a day, which made a ghastly hole in even the good salary I earned. I began to buy my opium by the can, paying from twenty-five dollars to thirty dollars for tens averaging four hundred and sixty fune. The elimination of the retailer's profit helped temporarily, but the ever-increasing demands of my habit soon overcame the saving. I had been a user of opium about eight months when I first began to realize a mental change in myself, a new moral viewpoint, so to speak. I handled a story of the arrest of a criminal with real regret, while the news of a clever crime with the perpetrator's safety at liberty was a personal gratification. The realization of this change came about peculiarly. A big story broke one day. A prominent official had robbed the city of a large psalm. The man had disappeared. Detectives on a hundred reporters hunted the town over for him.

14:32His home, his friends, his relatives, and every outward-bound train were watched without result. I handled the story personally from the desk. As I rewrote an introduction to the mystery, I kept revolving in my mind the problem of the absconder's disappearance. Where had he hidden himself? The problem was complicated by the belief that a woman with whom he was infatuated was with him. I was still pondering over the mystery as I lay smoking that evening. I had reached the stage now in which I rushed from my work to the layout and lay beside it smoking and dreaming until far into the night. That night my habit appeased I lay seemingly half asleep, but with an alert mind working automatically without effort of will. Suppose I were in S's place, I argued, what would I do? Try to get away by rail? Nonsense! I would know that every outlet in the city was guarded, and besides, with pictures scattered, broadcast over the country, an appearance in any other city would be an invitation to arrest. Hide in a local hotel? With prying bellboys, clerks, and chambermaids? Never. My own and relative's homes, of course, were impossible. Where then would I go?

15:44The answer came to me like a flash. I roused my lethargic body with a sudden start. I know where that criminal would hide. Given its full quota of opium, my brain furnished the solution. If his flight had been planned in advance, he would have his companion rent an inconspicuous detached furnished cottage where they could live alone and at ease while the Hugh and Cry wore itself out. Then, when the hunt slumbered, a disguise, an automobile, and an obscure port, an esteemer to Honduras. But the missing man had been forced to leave without preparations owing to the unexpected appearance of expert accountants. What then? The alternative lay ready. One of the French roadhouses, a small and preferably, kept without attendance by some man and his wife of the type whose lips are sealed effectively with gold. Of course, how simple. At seven o'clock next morning I started in a motor car with a list of six roadhouses I had selected. My experience is during the hunt and not relevant here. It suffices to say that at the fifth house I located my man.

16:52My means of a tricked note I brought him down to me, white-faced and shaking. We have been acquaintances for years. What are you going to do, he's stabbard. Turned me over to the police. I don't wear a star, I replied angrily. Opium hates the law. I have a drop of copper blood in me. You're perfectly safe, but I want a signed confession covering this entire business. It can't harm you for they've got the goods on you anyway if you're caught. I'll hold up the story until our late addition. Meanwhile, at your move. His face lighted with relief. I'll do it, he cried. Have a drink. A half hour later I was glancing over a signed document that meant a beat that was worthwhile. As I rose to go he waved me back and ordered another drink. You've been right with me, he said, and I feel I can trust you. I'm a bit puzzled about the safest sort of a getaway from here. What would you do in my predicament? I replied without a second cessitation.

17:54In your place I said I would phone to some public garage for a machine to be here at noon. About eleven o'clock you and your friends stroll off through the woods in the rear. It's less than a mile to pierce. Maybe you know him? He nodded. Well, he would forget his own mother's name for a century note. When the machine gets here you'll be gone. Have the proprietor hear send the chauffeur down to San Am telling him to wait at the railway depot there for you until eight o'clock tonight. Leave plenty of money to pay him in advance. Tell the boss here to tell the exact truth to the police when they come. That you went away before the car came and ordered it sent down empty to the San Am railway station. The detectives here will have the chauffeur in custody before night, but there isn't a man who wears a star who will believe the truth. When he says he didn't see you at all and has been traveling around with an empty machine they'll laugh at him. Meanwhile, like close at peers, they'll never look for you with a mile of here and identically the same kind of a house. It's too simple for their complex intellects.

19:01As I talk, looks of startled wonder, flash-dram as heavy puffed eyes. Man, he cried. Are you a mind reader? First you locate me here, then you tell me word for word, the exact idea I had in mind. I'll tell you more, I said laughingly. You'll be hidden in a little furnished house somewhere instead of here if the expert said and come on you so unexpectedly. He leaped to his feet. You're on canny, he cried. I did intend that. Thank heaven you're not one of those police hounds. Are you an opium smoker? Are you, I retorted, ignoring his question. Yes, he said. And we smiled together. This brings me to the crux of the incident, the reason for its telling. It is proof of the most important point I wish to make, which is that an equal number of brain convolutions plus an adequate amount of opium will invariably produce precisely the same impulses and ideas.

20:02Take two men of similar intellects and propound a problem, preferably in criminality. If both men are users of opium, their minds will arrive at exactly the same result by exactly the same mental processes. I have tested at scores of times, and the results were the same, 19 times out of 20. In this lies the proof of the terrible power of opium over the mind of its slave. It controls his every thought and impulses as absolutely as the brain controls the muscles. An opium made plans, plots, inspirations, call them what you will are devious, tricky, shrewd because of their abnormality. No one but another smoker will ever come within leagues of guessing what a fiend will do under any given set of conditions. A normal brain and an opium brain have nothing in common. There is but one exception to this rule. An opium smoker suffering for the drug and lacking the money to buy what alone can still the frightful agony and nerve and limb is as simple as a cute.

21:08He will try anything that promises money. The more foolhardy the stunt, the more it appeals to him. Returning for a paragraph to the absconder, he made his escape exactly as we had planned. A year later he returned from the orient, deserted by his companion and broken physically and financially. He surrendered himself and went to prison. Another niche in oblivion for a slave of opium. I remembered as I read of his fate the similarity and our ideas on that foggy morning out at the little French roadhouse, but now I was too close behind him on the road to the penitentiary to worry myself with the future as long as I had opium and plenty of it. This fugitive's confession was the last dividend granted me by the drug by which I was now enslaved. Thereafter and always, it rested from me bit by bit everything that a man holds dear and sacred, leaving nothing in return but the temporary power to forget.

22:08The paper on which I worked was absorbed by another and I passed out of the newspaper business forever. I was rather glad at the time. I had just that many more hours a day to lie, amusing by my layout. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at McDonald's. McDonald's is putting value back on the menu. Whether you're craving a Big Mac, McNuggets or sausage egg and cheese, McGrittle's, make it a meal and save. Your favorite is now your wallet's favorite too. Extra value meals are back. Get a big something extra with a Big Mac or 10 piece McNuggets, fries and a medium Coke all for just $9. Limited time only, promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

23:08Toyota's easy choice sales event is on. Whether you're looking for the performance of a camera, the versatility of a RAV4, the efficiency of a Corolla or all electric driving in the BZ. There's a Toyota that's just right for you and with great deals across the lineup, now's the time to find yours. But hurry, these deals won't last long. Toyota's easy choice sales event ends soon. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. What were my thoughts during these hours? I have never read anything, not even dequeensis opium-eater, it gives a truthful and lucid impression of what opium dreams really are. The ordinary conception of them is miles from the truth. There is no riot of wonderful and strange colors dancing before the eyes. There are no visions of orientalized beauty, no loving women, sweetly perfumed, no luxurious air castles filled with jewels, gold and sensuous luxury.

24:10Instead, the brain works automatically on the important projects of everyday life. It plans and plots, rejects and reconstructs, always trickily and by devious means, and finally evolves a clean-cut idea. The intervening difficulties are lessened, the ultimate rewards accentuated. All this is absolutely without effort. You lie, why isn't? You're whole being apparently deep in lethargy. Your eyes have closed and unseen. You are perfectly content at peace with the world in yourself. Meanwhile, the brain, working out its own volition, independently of you, exactly as if it were a distinct personality, wraps out with gattling gun-repidity, various solutions of the problems that is set itself. It works always, however, in devious channels. If there is a direct road between two points, it mistrusts and rejects it, taking the crooked path. Time ceases to exist. Night after night I have lain down after the theatre to smoke. Finally, rousing myself to leave, believing at midnight or a little later, I would look at my watch, five o'clock, impossible.

25:23Not till I raised the curtain to a grey dawn could I believe. Night after night this happened. I smoked for five years and was surprised in you each time when the days seemed to come, hours before its time. And now I was ripe for the final stage of the opium habit, criminality. I had sunk step by step morally until I remained no semblance of the character that once had won me trust and respect. After I abandoned newspaper work, I dabbled in many semi-legitimate businesses. I occupied myself with price-fight promotion, gambling clubs and stock tricks, all verging unswindles, but permeated with the subtleness of the drug that created them. At last there came a day inevitable in history of all drug-fiends. When I found myself without the money to buy the opium, my body and brain demanded. My credit was gone, I was a derelict but with one single purpose to relieve with opium the anguish of a thousand tortured nerves.

26:24I stepped into a store, wrote a bad check, passed it and took a taxi cab to the joint. The latter is characteristic of the habit, provided enough money remains for the smoke immediately in prospect, nothing else matters. There is no future in the land of opium. Having smoked and being once again mentally alert, I realized keenly my danger of arrest. My mind, acutes ever, warned me that check-passing could lead ultimately to but one fate, a striped suit. I resolved never again to take such chances. It was not that scruples troubled me. My opium-sated brain simply refused to count on such idiocy. Three days later, again needing money to satisfy my habit, I drew another worthless check and entered a prominent bookstore. Almost at the threshold I met a detective whom I knew well, we chatted for a moment. Then deliberately I entered that store, ordered a complete edition of valuable books sent to a fictitious address and a return from my check received $37.50 in change.

27:31In twenty minutes I was in the joint, breathing in the smoke that was more of a liberty. Under the stimulus of the drug my brain kept bringing its warning, it is difficult to explain this mental duality. Given its opium, my mind was like a guardian, a mentor, pointing out reprovingly the folly of that same mind, committed while in want of opium. I hid myself in an obscure hotel and was safe while my money lasted and I had my drug. That gone I walked brazenly down the main street of the city intending to pass another check. I was arrested by the detective I had chatted with before the store, convicted, and sentenced to a year in the penitentiary. I do not intend to exploit here the horrors, the ignominity of that year, what it means to do time is subject enough for an article such as this. It is sufficient to say that I was able to secure opium while a convict. Meanwhile I lived in an environment and under conditions both moral and physical that create criminals instead of correcting them.

28:37I was discharged, uncured of the drug habit, and returned to society a hundredfold more dangerous of menace than before. By this time I had many friends among professional thieves. From the very first I had been right, which translated means that my loyalty to the underworld was established, that I was held to be above the suspicion of being a stool pigeon, no matter what the cost or reward. When I left prison I was received with open arms and was offered work of various kinds on a number of different criminal mobs. Once moved by some fleeting impulse I applied for work to a paper on which I once had made a reputation. My rebuff sent me flying back to my layout and thiefdom, never to return. I joined out with a mob and we prospered financially. Given plenty of opium I was a good money-catter. I took the minimum of risk and made the maximum of money. I lived on opium. Physically I was a wreck. Mentally I was is scheming a criminal as ever war stripes months past. Untroubled by conscience, ignored responsibilities and broken faith, I went on downward, living to smoke, smoking to live.

29:51Then the inevitable happened once again. Heavy gambling laws took our reserve fund. The arrest of one of the mob for a triviality was the excuse for police extortion that took the remainder of our bankroll. Our money gone we were warned to stay off the streets and had not the means to travel. One night the opium ran out. I secured a can on credit. That was soon gone. I endured twelve hours without the drug. Then with a companion went downtown induced a man wearing several thousand dollars with a diamond to accompany me to a room in a prominent downtown hotel, and at midnight without a mask and with my photograph in the police gallery of known criminals I deliberately put a revolver to his head and told him to put up his hands. He did so. I took his diamonds and money, bound and gagged him, and then blindly walked out of the place, passing hundreds of men, including two detectives. The brazen affrontery of the crime staggered even the police.

30:55Stopping only to lay in a supply of opium we boarded a car and in half an hour we were in the little furnished house I had rented with a long stem pipe passing around and round the circle. I smoked heavily and dozed. When I awoke it was night. Our circle was still unbroken the pipe still passed from lip to lip. But now opium once again having made me as near normal as was possible I sensed danger, imminent, immediately impending. It was not alone the knowledge of guilt. It was something more definite, something intuitive. In the underworld there's the species of foresight termed hop-head hunches. They regarded with superstitious awe the country over. Knowing that something threatened I scattered the boys out sending all but one downtown. We too remained. We had slept while the others smoked and now needed more opium and needing it no danger could drive us from the layout until we were satisfied. We intended to leave the moment we finished smoking but before we had inhaled a dozen pills a heavy knock preemptory, insistent sounded on the door. We both knew its significance. Snapping off the lights I peered out into the night.

32:09Everywhere were armed detectives the entire house was surrounded. We were trapped. They're gleaming gun barrels prove that they expected a battle and had I needed opium just then instead of being newly saturated with it they would have had it. It is upon such chances that life and death and murder turn in lives such as mine. Being near enough to normality to realize the absolute futility of resistance I turned to my pal. It's the pinch old boy I said. In that moment facing arrests that can only result in a long term in the penitentiary it was but one thought one anxiety in my mind. With the plant of opium I carried on my person for emergencies such as this escaped detection I wondered. Beyond that I was unconcerned. That thought is as eloquent as a volume an explanation of a drug user's mind. I threw open the door and admitted the officers who covered evident nervousness with a show of brusqueness. The stolen gems were not found for during the afternoon having smoked my opium self had warned me to hide them safely.

33:16The usual police methods third degree some call it were tried but without result. Each of us was told that the other it confessed and each was offered leniency at the expense of his comrade. The neither of us weakened proves that there lies even in humanity's drags the remnants of decency. There is really loyalty and honor according to a strangely twisted code among some thieves. Incidentally the diamonds were not found until returned by us voluntarily. Toyota's easy choice sales event is on whether you're looking for the performance of a camera the versatility of a rap for the efficiency of a corolla or a electric driving in the BZ. There's a Toyota that's just right for you and with great deals across the lineup now's the time to find yours. But hurry these deals won't last long Toyota's easy choice sales event and soon we make it easy Toyota let's go places.

34:18Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire. Try them all only at McDonald's. Kitchen and bathroom professionals know what goes behind the tile matters. That's why trade pros trust fiber cement party backer board to keep tile firmly in place, resist cracking and held block moisture. Chosen over 40 million kitchens and bathrooms party backer board what the best build on shop now at participating home depot lows and floor into core stores for more information visit James Hardy dot com slash party backer. Trial and conviction followed after the usual delays and tonight I write this in a penitentiary cell. No one who has never lost the freedom of the outside that perpetual elusive dream of every convict can realize what doing time means.

35:21But even the horror of prison life the monotonous hopeless sameness of each hour each day each month each year is not too great a price for what it has given me for I am freed from opium shackles. In this institution the drug traffic that makes many like places mere colleges for crime has been absolutely stamped out being unable to get opium or morphine and being given intelligence and humane medical treatment during the agonizing weeks during which the body and mind are breaking away from a habit almost as deep rooted as life itself men here are cured of the opium habit. I do not know what more can be said in laudation of any penitentiary. I was asked a few days ago to describe the sensations of the opium habit the word with us meaning the anguish that follows the need of the drug. It is a difficult task or it is like no other suffering. In the first stage come restlessness irritability eyes that stream tears and the mental incompetency I have tried to make plain here to for.

36:29This quickly passes into the most exquisite physical torture. Thousand pound weights drag each separate joint apart by infinitesimal degrees every jangling nerve throbs and twitches the muscles with a pain that would make a tooth ache seem perfect ease. Every pore in the body drips a clammy perspiration. The bodily functions are entirely disorganized abdominal cramps follow nausea. An irresistible force seems to be slowly dragging each muscle and nerve apart. Meanwhile the brain fights for the drug as life fights death. A million impossible schemes for getting opium suggest themselves as some inner force seems to be expanding within the skull and delivery bone is strained to the breaking point. A weight like a gigantic hand seems to be squeezing the naked brain as you would squeeze a sponge. Hundreds of drug feens have committed suicide in jails where they were confined without adequate medical attention.

37:31Three tried it in one week recently in a single jail in the west and hundreds more will follow in their footsteps if they can secure a weapon. This merits attention. The final stage of the habit is insanity. The feign becomes a raving maniac of unreleaved, but here the physician for stalls this by ever so slight a margin and with a hypodermic injection of morphine sends the unfortunate off to sleep. The next stage is the same torture over again until the needle again saves tottering reason, but each time the injection is lighter and finally the torture to lessons and perceptibly at first until the system begins to try to readjust itself to the new conditions. The mind however remains rebellious to the very last, crying out for the drug even after the body has begun to mend. I do not believe that any man with an opium or morphine habit of yours standing can deny himself the drug if it is within reach.

38:32I do not believe that any man, no matter what his previous character may have been, can use opium continuously and not have the impulse to be crooked. He may not be crooked, he may lack the nerve of a necessity to steal, but the impulse will be there. And if it ever becomes a question of theft or habit, he will thieve. I do not say this because of my own experience, it is the history of every opium smoker I have ever known. That I have been freed from the servitude of the past years seems almost too unreal to be possible, and yet I confidently believe that this is true. For nearly a year I have not touched opium in any of its forms and all physical need for it disappeared long ago. But what about the mental craving? If I were free now to use it or not, would I do so? I believe I would not. I believe I am free from opium forever for this reason. I fear it too intensely. My mind now is free from the taint of the drug. My will is not undermined and controlled by it.

39:36Being normal mentally, I am able to realize fully what it has cost me, and so I believe that I could keep a bottle of morphine in myself and never be tempted to touch it. But if I were to take just one dose, that fatal first pill, I believe I would slip rapidly and irretrievably into my former condition of absolute for all of them. I repeat that I fear opium and its power too deeply ever to test myself with that first pill. I am the fourth man I have known who has escaped, if I have escaped. Each of the four was saved exactly as I have been by an institution like this where honesty of purpose is placed above the easy money that can be made by letting the drug traffic go on behind prison walls. It would surprise most breeders to know how many penitentiaries are managed without such qualms. And now one final word. If ever you are invited to try a pill of opium or to still a pain with morphine,

40:36are most important of all to give your children any medicine patent or otherwise that contains opium, morphine, blood num, heroin or any of their kindred alkaloids. Remember the old Chinese lying beside his opium lay out and mumbling his warning. You know quit. You smoke one time and smoke two time and smoke three time and smoke allie time. You know quit. I heap savvy. Why me? You see. That reader will be as bitterly true for you as it had been for me if you ever try that fatal first pill. And of a modern opium eater by Jack Boyle. Section one of Boston Blackie.

41:40Stories around the opium lamp by Jack Boyle. This liberal walks recording is in the public domain. The price of principle. A massive safe seemingly impregnable was in the corner of the darkened office. Before it stood Boston Blackie, chief of the mob of Peter Craxman. Greyhared, stern faced, laconic and efficient, Blackie had made his criminal profession an exact science. Given a strong box of certain dimensions, certain thickness and certain make, he knew to a fraction of a drop. How much soup, as the profession styles nitroglycerin, would force the steel door from its hinges and drop it with the least possible noise on a bed of mattresses placed by his assistance. In his eyes a drop too much was a stupid blunder, a drop too little, an inexcusable catastrophe.

42:44Snapping on an electric torch, he carefully examined the plaster of soap with which he had made airtight, the tiny crack between the door and the safe walls. In the center of the door at the top was fashioned a soap cup capable of holding a couple of tablespoon foos of the liquid. At the inner and lower edge of the cup, a tiny orifice, unsopened, and the crack of the door, made room for the explosive to trickle down behind it. Satisfied with his inspection, the chief turned to one of the two men behind him. Gave me the soup, cushions. The youngster called cushions, produced a bottle with hands that were not quite steady. On quarking it, the cracksmen poured a couple of teaspoon foos into a physician's measuring glass, then examining his measure with infinite care. He added a couple of drops and was satisfied. Returning the bottle to the youth, he poured the heavy fluid into the soap cup. A few drops spilled on the cement floor by a shaky hand would have ended the careers of the trio, but blackies' hands didn't shake.

43:50Taking a fullminating cap from his pocket, he placed it firmly against the crack through which the explosive had flowed into the safe and crushed the soap cup over it to hold it in place. A six inch fuse dangled from the cap. Great why give Gemini the signal was the next command. The third man who until now had neither spoken or moved, slipped silently away toward the front doors of the store. A moment later a peculiar tapping scraping sound made with the backs of the fingernails was heard on the glass. It was the opium smokers rap, a signal familiar the country over to users of the drug. An answer from across the street came a few whistled bars from a popular song. Everything's okay, report K.Y. noiselessly re-uddering the office. In his absence, Blackie and his helper had covered the entire safe with heavy blankets, filched from the store's shelves. Get the mattress ordered Blackie. The two men dragged in a big double mattress and laid it on the floor in front of the safe door.

44:56A little to the right and a couple of inches farther back, instructed the mob leader measuring the door with his eye. Get down behind that counter out there and lie close to the floor. Here she goes, he said striking a match and igniting the fuse. Meet the Red Bull Dragondary Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at McDonald's. Then with the same match, he relided the cigarette between his lips and without any haste, slipped through the doorway and dropped down behind the counter where his pals lay waiting. There was a hissing, sputtering sound as the fuse burned. Then a smothered detonation that rattled the store windows, followed by puff of smoke, and the right outer door of the safe torn from its place by the irresistible power behind it, sagged outward and dropped squarely in the center of the mattress, still swadden in the torn folds of the blankets.

45:59In a second, Blacky was in the inner door of the safe, testing the combination with fingers of experience. Taking a light sledge from among the tools laid out ready on the floor, he laid it flat against the door near the top and brought it down with a sharp wrap on the combination. It dropped, cut off as cleanly as by a knife. Then with a steel punch, he forced the broken shank back into the lock, using a leather covered hammer to deaden the noise. A few turns of a knob and the broken tumblers and discs slipped apart. A moment's prying and the wrecked door swung open, the safe was cracked. Unhurried and without excitement but quickly, Boston Blacky forced drawer after drawer, tossing out flat packages of bills to the men behind him, and finally emerging himself with a coin-sack marked gold. This, he dropped into a concealed pocket inside the lining of his overcoat. "'That's all, let's go boys,' he said.

47:00The tools were left on the office floor, sludges and hammers, drills and a few punches are cheaply bought at midday. They are hard to explain away, however, found on a man and the vicinity of a wrecked safe at three o'clock in the morning. Diagonally across the street from the store they had just left an automobile engine began to cough. Crossing to the machine in which sat a driver muffled and goggled, Blacky and his companions climbed into the tunnel and the car shot away into the night. A half hour later the quartet lay on their hips in a circle, an opium layout in their midst, while the erstwhile chauffeur, called Jimmy the joke, rapidly toasted the pungently Swedish brown pills, as the pipe passed round and round the circle from lip to lip. There was no discussion of the job they had just turned, no excitement or exaltation over its success. It was all a part of the day's work with them, and anyway, opium smokers and the throes of a habit have no desire for speech.

48:02Boston Blacky, whose piercing black eyes and New England birthplace had won him his nickname, lay in the position of precedence to the left of the cook. Next came K.Y. Looze, second in command, whose drawing southern accent betrayed his Kentucky boyhood. Pillodon him was the cushions kid, so called because once when the rest piled into a freight car to make a short trip, he paid his last five dollar bill for a railway ticket. And went hungry for 24 hours in consequence. And lastly, there was Jimmy the joke, who had been christened James Tenor. Long years before he had done a jolt in a Western penitentiary, the judge sentenced him to ten years. Is that meant as a joke, Your Honor? Quarried the prisoner blandly. A joke, a jackulated the old judge. Yes, Your Honor, replied the prospective convict. Didn't I just understand you to say a tenor for tenor?

49:03An hour passed. Each of the four was beginning to feel the physical relaxation and mental exhilaration that binds its victims to opium. A knock, the fiends wrap, sounded on the door. Come in, called Blackie. The owner of the joint in which they lay entered, a haggard-faced skeleton of a man called Turkey Neck Martin. Good evening, Blackie. He commenced after carefully closing the door. Hello, boys. How's every little thing? The joke's chuffing as usual, eh? Some cooked you are, Jimmy Old Boy. Need any more hop yet, Blackie? That's not what you butted in here for. What does it you've got to say, this from Blackie? The human wreck half-coured into the reprimand. Well, it's this way, fellas. Not that that's really any my business, he began hesitatingly. But knowing what a right crowd you fellows are and how you put up the dough for that Denver kids' bonds and...

50:05Ah, cut out that stuff and get down to what you're trying to say, growl, Blackie. It's this way, again, Turkey Neck again. The pinch came off yesterday. They've got him right. And it's a trip over the bay to the big house if it ain't squared. He's broke. And the boys are taken up a purse. Whose pinched you, gabbing fool, interrupted Blackie. I'm mitten-a-half-kelly. He... What? Why'd Blackie raising himself on his elbow and glaring at the frustrated joint keeper with more excitement than any of his listeners had ever seen him show? You come here to me from that white livid rat? Why'd he just missus being a copper? I don't put it past him to stool at that. We're a different breed here from that skunk. Tell him from me that he's safer behind a bars than... But the joint keeper had slipped from the room and Blackie choked back the flow of his indignation. His three friends waited in silence for the explanation they knew would come.

51:05Blackie took the next pill in a long draw, inhaling the smoke until his lungs seemed bursting, then exhaling slowly in short puffs. I'm gonna tell you the story, boys, of a fellow who had principles and paid for them. Same as we all must pay for anything that's worthwhile having, he commenced. The man I mean is... Pre-fingered Mac. Poor old Mac. I remember when he got his jolt. Chimed in, Jimmy. He had won before that, went on Blackie. It was characteristic of him that having smoked, he dropped the argot of the joint bit by bit and reverted to the clean speech of his college days. Fifteen years is what they gave him. It was a bank safe job. Fifteen years. That's nine years, five months solid, allowing for good conduct, copper. A judge can say fifteen in a fraction of a second, but it's a long, long stretch when you have to do it, one day at a time.

52:09Mac had a woman, loyal and true as steel, who did his jolt too on the outside, one day at a time. As the worst of this rotten business, our women have to do our time the same as we do, if they're worthwhile, which Mac's wife was. Almost all the money he'd laid away went to his mouthpieces, lawyers at the trial. So she opened a little millenary shop and took care of herself and the kid while Mac was buried. She rode every week and never missed a visiting day in all those long years. Well at last he got his time in and they turned him out at the gate to start life with a five-dollar gold piece and a con suit. I ran across them on the train to the city. Mac, his wife and a long-legged boy had been an infant when Mac went across. I was looking for a man to fill in my mob just then and felt him out. He shook his head. Blackie, he said, I'm done. I haven't lost my nerve and you know I've always been right.

53:10But look at that little woman there. She's waited and worked for me for nine years and five months. She saved up enough to buy us a little chicken ranch up Petalumaway. And I'm going in for the simple life, with her and the boy to hold me straight when I get restless for the old exciting days. I shook hands with him and told him how lucky he was to have a woman like that, continued Blackie. Then he asked me where Mitt and a half Kelly was living. He had a message for him from a pal who was doing twenty up above. He's living at the Palm same house with me, I said, but he's undercover. You and the folks come on to a show with me and I'll take you up to see him afterward. Not tonight, he said, I'm going to spend the night at home with them, nodding over his shoulder to his wife and son. I'll meet you tomorrow night, though, for we leave for the country the next morning. We went to the orphan the next night and Mack missed half the show explaining to me how much money could be made with chickens. Afterward we went up to the Palm looking for Kelly. He was out. I asked Mack down to my room but he refused.

54:15He knew I was due to smoke and didn't want to tempt himself with even the smell of hop, he said. So I led him into Kelly's room with a past key and went downstairs to my own layout. It was midnight then. It couldn't have been over half an hour for I was still smoking off my first card when I heard a copper's tread on the stairs, then two more of them. I planted the layout and lamped out through the trancem. I could see them at the head of the stairs hammering on Kelly's door and every man had his gun out. Mack opened the door and in less time than it takes me to tell it they had three rods that his head and the cuffs on his wrists. Then after searching the room they took him away along with the bundle of clothes they had found. I stepped down from the trancem laughing to myself. I knew the coppers were working a bomb rap. For Mack had been with me all night. There was no doubt in my mind that they would have to turn him loose in the morning. When they had gone I slipped down stairs where I was not too eager to interview the chief myself just then.

55:19All the way down on the stairs there was a plain trail of blood and in the doorway a big splotch where a man had stood while he used his latch key. I knew then that somebody had gotten bad and had been hurt. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so? Fire. Try them all only at McDonald's. I spent the rest of the night at the joint and got the first editions of the papers. I found what I was looking for plastered all over the first page. A Peter mob had been surprised at work on a safe out on the south side by a harness bowl in a foreign policeman. Just as the midnight watch was changing. There was a lot of shooting. The copper got his and died on the operating table at the hospital. One of the mob too was hurt, the paper said, for a trail of blood led up the street in the direction they had gone. A later edition announced the capture of three fingered Mac, a desperate criminal just released from the petitentuary.

56:24In his room at the Palm Hotel he was caught stripping off his blood-soaked clothing. A policeman, noticing blood on the sidewalk, had traced it to the hotel and up the stairs to Mac's room. In the room they found a bloody handkerchief and a 44 colts with every shell exploded. The prisoner had no visible wound except a gash on his head, probably made by a night stick. The blood on the clothing, it was explained, came from the wounds of the dead policeman with whom the prisoner had had a hand-to-hand struggle as he fled. I knew then that poor old Mac wasn't going to start for that chicken ranch the next day. I went downtown and sent a lawyer up to him and then went out myself to break the news to that little woman of his. She hadn't been to bed and was waiting for him. It was the toughest job I ever tried to hand her that paper. He's innocent as you are, man, I said. He was with me from eight o'clock until midnight and this job was done before 12. I took her up to the lawyer's office and we waited all day for him to get to Mac.

57:29When the mouthpiece finally came and he had a worried frown and I could see more trouble ahead. He had given me a crazy man for a quiet, he said irritably. He swears he is innocent but admits he knows the guilty man. Says this mysterious friend came in with a bullet wound in the arm and that he dressed and bandaged the hurt. Then the fellow changed clothes, threw his revolver in the bureau drawer and skipped out, knowing the police would follow the trail of bloody left behind. While Mac was washing the blood off his hands, the coppers came battering at the door. He opened it and bold-done again wrapped him on the head with his stick cutting along gash on the scalp. Then he was pinched. Not a bad yarn that, true or not, but right there he crabs at all. He absolutely refuses to tell who this other man is. Says he'll take a jolt rather than turn in former. Can you beat that for idiocy? He says he has an alibi that he was at the theater with a friend, didn't leave him between eight and midnight. That's true, I'm that friend I interrupted.

58:31We went to the theater, sat through the whole performance. Here are our seat checks. And then went up to the hotel. It was just midnight when Mac went upstairs to that room to wait for his friend. I know he couldn't have had a hand in that job. Your testimony will help, Blacky, the lawyer went on after a moment's thought. But you know you're not exactly a witness that will carry weight with a jury. Mac says there is a bullet hole in the right sleeve of the coat belonging to his friend. Mac's coat is bloody, but there is no hole in the cloth and no wound in his arm. If I had that coat, I'd acquit him. But listen to this. Mac says Bull Donegan has been trying to force him to betray that friend of his. He told the detectives the same story he told me. Donegan came out flatly and told him he believed he was telling the truth. But that somebody would have to swing for killing that policeman. It's either you or your friend, take your choice, said Donegan. You'll come through or you'll swing, and I don't give a finger snap, whether you are innocent or guilty. I'll get you.

59:32And Mac's wear is he'll never stool. Can you beat it? Mac's woman had been leaning forward looking at the lawyer with a light in her eyes that would have burned asbestos. She had aged ten years since I saw them on the boat two days before. Also happy and carefree. My poor boy, my poor boy, she cried. I can't lose him again. I won't. Not when I know he isn't guilty. Oh, Mr. S. save him someway. Save him from him himself. You'll have to do it all yourself. For Mac won't help you. He'll never snitch on a friend. I know him. I can't see him go back there to prison. Only yesterday I was so happy, so hopeful, and now, oh, it drives me mad. Then she broke down and the tears came. I was glad anything is better than a terrible dry eyed grief of a woman who sees her man being torn from her, and unjustly at that. She told the lawyer all their plans about the chicken ranch, and he perked up a bit.

1:00:32He told her not to worry, and finally sent her home, heartened up some, because he assured her that her testimony would help more than anything that had turned up. When she had gone, he turned to me. Is that yarn true, he asked? Absolutely. Every word of it. If I could get that coat with a bullet hole in it, I'd acquit him. But, Blackie, will we ever see that coat? He looked at me questioningingly. None of those framing coppers are wise that it will acquit Mac. Done a gun will railroad him for this as sure as eggs make omelettes, unless he snitches. And he won't, I replied. A month later they put Mac on trial. All through that month I had been expecting Kelly to show up and do something. I thought he'd get his mob together and stick up the patrol wagon taking Mac to and from the county jail to court. But he didn't show. The trial wasn't long. The papers and all took it for granted that Mac was guilty, and the jurors admitted reading about the case,

1:01:34but declared they had no fixed opinions and could give him a fair trial. That word fixed must save many a juror's conscience, any of them have any. The coppers testified about the trail of blood that they had traced almost from the scene of the crime, to the room where they found Mac washing his bloody hands and wiping blood spots from his clothes. Then they produced the revolver and empty shells and proved that the policeman was killed with that sized gun, and that it smelled of fresh powder when found in the room. Then Donegan filled in all the gaps in the chain of evidence. First he told what a desperate criminal Mac had been, and produced his photograph and stripes taken at the penitentiary. The judge refused to permit this in evidence then, but the jury had all seen it before it was ruled out. Then he swore that Mac had a scalp wound received before he was arrested, presumably from intimations by the prosecution and the death struggle with the murdered policeman. Then Donegan settled Mac's chances, with the foulest perjury I have ever heard.

1:02:36He told how he reached the dying policeman's cot in the hospital ten minutes before he died. Did he know who shot him? asked the prosecutor. He didn't know him by name, answered the detective slowly, turning so the jury would be sure to get every word. But he said the man was a big fella with dark clothes, and he also said that two fingers were missing on his gunhand, and that he had a scar from his eye to his chin on the right side of his face. There sat Mac in full view of the jury with his mutilated hand and plain sight, and the scar on his face turning fiery red as he heard the lie that damned him for life. I knew it was all off then. The lawyer did his best, but we were beaten before we started to put a defense in. I told my story, the exact truth, but they sprung my record on me, and I knew by the looks that the jury wasn't even paying attention to me in my story. Mac's woman made a great witness. I tell you, boys, no one who heard her tell about their plans for that chicken ranch, and how her husband had determined to live square could help believing her.

1:03:45There was something that choked up my throat in the desperation with which she fought every step of the way for her man. The jury seemed impressed for a few moments, but it didn't last until they commenced balloting. The landlady of the palm was called into proof that Mac did not rent or own the room where he was caught. As ill- luck would have it, Kelly had got me to rent the room for him, he being undercover, and old mother McGunn showed my name on the books, and swore she didn't know whether one or twenty men visited the room as long as the rent was paid. We demanded the coat with a bullet hole in it, and made an awful howl when the police denied even seeing it, but the jury set it all down as a fake of ours. Mac made a good witness, he told the truth in a straightforward manner, that is, all but Kelly's name. On cross-examination, the district attorney asked just one question. Who was this man, you say, came and wound it just before you were arrest?

1:04:45Every drop of blood seemed to leave Mac's face. He started to speak, stop, looked over at his wife and whose eyes there was the look of death itself. He hesitated a second, then turned to the jury. I refused to answer, he said. Thank God it isn't my business to be a copper like that lying perjurer there, pointing at Dunnigan. I've never betrayed a friend or sent a man to jail yet, and I never will. Mac was convicted anyway, but that refusal settled every doubt. The jury was out just long enough to get a dinner at the expense of the county, and then brought in a verdict of guilty and fixed the penalty at life imprisonment. A couple of them objected to hanging. As they took Mac back to jail, Dunnigan passed by him. Just to remember while you're doing another man's time, he whispered. And I said I'd get you, and I did.

1:05:45Mac leaped at him and would have brained him with a handcuffs if the deputy sheriff said no repowered him. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at McDonald's. The papers next day called it a desperate murderer's attempt to escape. Half a dozen times the pipe went around the complete circle before another word was spoken. What did the woman do? Ask cushions at last. There are some things too painful for even hardened crooks like us, and sometimes those same things also were too fine and sacred for a bunch like this to talk over in a place like this. That little woman and her dead hopes and plans for that ranch are among them answered blacky slowly. And now boys, you know why I said what I did about Mitt and I have Kelly.

1:06:46Mac is doing all of it, life imprisonment, because he was too right to snitch even on a skunk. Kelly didn't do a thing for him, not even as much as sending dough for his defense. Cushions my boy. When your turn comes to do time and it will if you stick by hop and us, remember Mac who had principal and paid for it like a man. What a price though, when you think of that wife and boy of his. Jimmy the joke toasted the last pill of hop and handed the pipe to blacky. Lose, pulling back the heavy curtains, let an array of bright morning sunshine. They all bundled into their overcoats. I'm going, said blacky. You know the meat for us tonight, eight o'clock sharp. You three go out one at a time, five minutes apart. No bunching up on the street. Lose, you size up that hawk shop job this afternoon.

1:07:47Press the button for turkey neck in his bill. The joint keeper came shuffling in. There's an extra just out, he began in his quavering voice. Another swell jobs come off. That Peter mob that has been doing a whole of this rough stuff around town got another one last night. It's the Boston department store this time. Good for them, said blacky without interest. About that dough to spring Kelly from jail. We let it go, let it go. Turkey neck broke in. The moment you refused the money. Refuse the money, cried blacky turning on the astounded joint keeper like a flash. Refused nothing. I said Mitt Kelly is a low-life skunk who ought to be shot on sight. But I didn't say I wouldn't chip in dough to help him beat the big house. I'd give up my last five-case note to keep the fleas on a yellow dog from doing time. We'll put up fifty dollars. If you don't get enough, say so tonight and I'll make up the rest. But tell him from me that he has the black curse of the snitch on him now and forever.

1:08:51He'll never have a day's luck while he lives, and he'll die in a gutter like that cur he is. So long, fellows. Postscript The man described here as Mitt and a half-cally was found shot to death in a doorway near an opium joint in Seattle some six months after the date of the incident in this story. No trace of his murderer was ever found. And of the price of principle by Jack Boyle. Section two of Boston Blackie. Stories around the opium lamp by Jack Boyle. This liberal box recording is in the public domain. The story about Dad Morgan. Boston Blackie, the master crackman of the mob of safe-blowers that had given the detective force,

1:09:55the most strenuous and prophetless months' work in its history, emptied tray after tray of diamonds into a shami-skin sack held by his youthful assistant, the cushions kid. The hall was a gigantic one. The door of the big strongbox lay wrecked on the floor. Inside the safe, the stock of gems that had attracted thousands of Christmas shoppers to the window display of Lodstrom and Company, lay at the mercy of the thieves. Rapidly, Blackie searched the safe, throwing aside gold bracelets, watches, and costly trinkets of every description. He took only diamonds and money, both are well-nigh and possible to identify. The crime was a climax in a frontery. Forty feet away from the safe on the main street of the metropolis, the night traffic of the city flowed past the store's front doors. Within half a block, the presses of three big morning dailies had just commenced to roar. On the corner, an eager crowd of newsboys, a dozen or more placid-faced night-hawks, and a couple of policemen laughed and bandied jests as they waited for paper and the owl cars.

1:11:06In the midst of all this, Blackie had cracked the safe, undetected. With a skillfully-made skeleton key, he and cushions had entered the candy store next door to the jewelry firm. In a half hour, they had burrowed through the wall of plaster and lath, and were beside the jewelry safe. The glazed windows of the office in which the safe stood hid them from the street. It was Blackie's task to blow the safe without breaking the glass. With the manufacturer's plan of the safe before him, he had spent long hours studying the problem, computing the risk. Blackie was a crook who reduced everything to simple arithmetic. For a $1,000 job, he took a certain amount of risk. For $10,000, exactly ten times that risk. But if the trick involved ten times the unit of danger, and promised but nine times the money, it was abandoned. The Lodstrom job was more than risky. It was all but foolhardy. But though the danger was great, the loot was greater. And now the trick was accomplished.

1:12:09The noise of the explosion, slight though it was, had been effectively drowned by the staccato explosions of an automobile engine, apparently stalled a few doors away. Emptying the last of the diamond drawers, Blackie motioned cushions back through the wall and noiselessly followed. Standing at the street door of the candy store, they stopped listening. Seemingly intent on his reluctant carburetor, Jimmy the joke whistled cheerfully as he worked, giving them thereby the safety signal. Blackie unlocked the door, stepped out and turned to re-lock it. In the middle of a bar, Jimmy's tune changed suddenly, sharply. Now it sounded the dreaded warning coppers. The safe-blower turned the key like a flash and stepped away from the door toward the middle of the sidewalk. He was too late. A grey-clad Pinkerton watchman had turned the corner less than a dozen feet away and had seen the cracks went at the door. Cushions, white to the lips, slipped his right hand into his left sleeve, where he carried a revolver after the fashion of the gunman of the Chinese tongs.

1:13:15The watchman reached for his whistle. There was a tense half-second in which life and death hung on equally balanced scales. Unblackie strode forward, gripping cushions elbowing in imperative negation as he passed. Why, here's the very man we want! He cried out, glad surprise, and every tone. Watchman, I'm Mr. Archibald, manager of our other candy store on Mission Street. Here's my card. Our cashier had telephoned me an hour ago that she was not sure she had locked the safe and was worried about it. I thought it best to come down and make sure. It was locked, but my man, it might not have been. That brings me to my business with you. We are carrying considerable money just now, and I'd appreciate it if you would give us little extra care until after the holidays. The safe is in plain sight from the windows, you see. He motioned the watchman to the window of the candy store and indicated the safe, which was manifestly intact and locked. Blackie jingled the keys he had used in locking the door and dropped them into his pocket.

1:14:16Just look out for us for the next fortnight, and I'd drop in and present that card to the cashier and Christmas Eve. I think she will have a little token of our appreciation for you. Of a cigar? Good night, chauffeur, drive me home. 1816 Page Street. The address was spoken loud enough for the watchman to hear. Blackie and Cushion stepped into the car, Jimmy threw in the clutch and it leaped forward. Behind them, the slow-witted Pinkerton underling stared at the card in his hand and indecision. It bore the name B. S. Archibald, and the address was 1816 Page Street. That was where the gentleman had told the chauffeur to take him. The lingering doubt vanished. Gee, that was a close shave. The man muttered to himself, wiping his dripping brow. I had no doubt I'd run file of a gang of burglars right in the act. I might have known he was too well dressed and educated like to be a burglar.

1:15:18Suppose I tried to arrest him, the manager of the store. They'd given me the sack sure at the office. A man can't be too careful in this business. He's got to go slow. Anyway, I've got the number of their auto if I ever want it. Yes, the safe sure alright. He studied it carefully and then satisfied, passed on down the block, trying the doors. The automobile sped on unhindered toward the outskirts of the city. In a conveniently isolated spot, Jimmy stopped the machine to touch the false number dangly behind and substituted the real one. It was a precaution invariably required by Blackie. The car was left in a garage where Blackie was known as a wealthy easterner with decided inclinations toward the night sports of the idle rich. Turning into a side street, the three let themselves into a detached cottage with a large vacant lot on either side. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now.

1:16:18Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at McDonald's. They had rented it furnished. With a big job on hand, the mob leader did not care to risk the danger of meeting each night in the comparative publicity of a known opium joint. K.Y. Luz, fourth member of the mob, had to lay out ready the bulls-hot and a half dozen Yen Polks, cooked pills, waiting to be smoked. He had not participated in that night's expedition, as it was a part of Blackie's creed never to endanger more men than he actually needed. Had his companions gotten into trouble, it would have been Luz's task to free them. The pipe made the circle twice, easing the strain on the tense nerves of the men before the night's work was mentioned. Then Luz asked the question, what luck, he queried. Rotten luck, but great results answered Blackie. He drew the chamois bag from an inner pocket and laid it beside the layout.

1:17:20All sparks, he continued. A couple of thousand in dough, too. It's a big haul. There'll be a frightful squawk in the morning. We're done in this town. Undercover here is our program until it's safe to travel. Then a jump to New York. Fred'll take old Rosenbaum himself to fence his big a lot of stones as they're in that bag. One of the eyes, watchman, stopped us. When I slipped him a quick package of bullcon, and for fear making a blunder he let us go. Give me a couple of pills out of turn, and I'll go down and plant these diamonds where they'll be safe in case the impossible happens and this place is raided. While he was gone, cushions related the experiences of the night. And after making the copper believe he was manager of the store, Blackie promised to be Christmas present regarding the safe. Can you beat it? Concluded the youngster, as Blackie re-ended the attic where the layout was spread. I wonder which will be the worst disappointment. The cigar Blackie gave him?

1:18:21Or the Christmas present he promised him, chimed in Jimmy the Jope? Cushions laughed. The other two, as usual, bore their companions alleged humor and grim silence. For an hour they smoked without exchanging a dozen words. Then the opium having brought them the temporary contentment and relaxation which cost such a bitter price in the end. Little snatches of conversation began to enliven the circle. A story from Luz, a few of the jokes, LaGubrius' wittisisms, an anecdote from the kid at the expense of a green pickpocket who had tried to crack wise, used thieves slaying. And not knowing what he was saying had floundered into all manner of pitfalls. Blackie lay silently staring through unseeing eyes, unconscious of the merriment around him. Blackie is as funny as one of Jimmy's jokes, said Luz at last. What's the matter, chief? You look like we were all inside, looking out through the bars.

1:19:23Instead of lying here with a fresh can of hop just open, and enough sparks planted down below to let Broadway know we're in town when we hit the bright lights in Little Old New York. I was thinking of different Christmas as I have spent Blackie answer. The far away opium steer still in his eyes. One in particular I was thinking about. I was in the stir, penitentiary. And something happened on Christmas night, and I've never been able to forget it quite. Cushions started to me thinking about it by talking about Christmas presents so while ago. It was while I was doing that five spot in California, he began. After Luz always politic had given him two pills in succession. They had more men than cells at the prison, and had to use big dormitories holding a couple of hundred cons apiece in order to house all the prisoners. I was in one of the dormitories, being a short timer with only a few months left to do.

1:20:27There was an old man bunking next to me with whom I got to be friendly. He was no thief. He was as much out of place and stripes as I would be in a copper's harness, star and all. He never should have been in the penitentiary. That's a trouble with a court. Then when he was any judgment and sin-ancing man, and so make criminals instead of curing them. I rob a bank, for instance, because that's my business. I go to the penitentiary. You rob another bank because your wife or children need a doctor, a food, or a roof to shelter them, and you'll work in stripes right beside me. When we come out, we're both criminals, usually. The old man and I got shummy. Morgan was his name. Dead Morgan, we called him. He was 69 years old and was just starting on a five-year jolt. His hands and deep-lined face showed he had worked and hard, too, all his life.

1:21:29He was doing time because he'd borrowed $500 from a loan shark on his little home, saying it was unencumbered when in reality it was already mortgaged. He couldn't give the money back, so they sent him over the road for false pretenses. It was months before he told me his story, and then it came out piecemeal. He had a daughter, an only child. Her mother was dead, and he had taken care of the girl ever since she was born. He didn't just live for her, she was his life, all of it. At the time he was arrested for bulking the money-lander, she was engaged to be married, and came to him for money for a trussel. I gathered from between the lines in his talk that she felt she was marrying above her station in life, and was very much in love. Dead Morgan didn't have the money she needed. But father, I can't go to rob without clothes like a beggar girl, she told him. I wish I were dead. Then she began to cry. That settled it.

1:22:33Dad went out and got the money from the loan shark, and the girl kissed him, and they were both happy. I would have paid the money back, every cent of it, the old man told me in his quavering voice. If they'd given me a chance to work, I'm good for several years yet, and I was waiting to take a job on one of the aqueduct gangs when they arrested me. Maybe I did wrong, but I didn't intend to. You see, Millie needed the money, and there was no one but her old dad to get it for her. That was this whole philosophy of life, whatever Millie wanted he had to get. One night he showed me her picture, he kept it a little old lock at hung around his neck. One look at the photo would have given me the key to the whole story, even if the old fella's unintentional disclosures hadn't betrayed it. Women sure are a puzzle. There's nothing half way about them. They're either all right or all wrong.

1:23:33Pure gold or common brass. The brass ones help fill the penitentiaries. But I'd rather have one right woman who loved me, working to free me, than the best lawyer money could hire. Old Morgan's picture showed a pretty doll-like girl with big coils of yellow hair and a petulant, willful mouth. There was something I just can't describe in her eyes, too, that tipped her off to me. Vanity and selfishness were stamped on her face plain as a cattle-brand. But old dad, she was perfect. After her father was arrested she visited him once at the jail. She cried and talked about the disgrace he had brought on them and how noble Rob had been about it. They were going to be married right away and go to San Francisco to live. She begged him to plead guilty and avoid the publicity of a trial. That is if you were guilty, daddy, she said.

1:24:34Because it might come out in court that you gave me the money for a true sell. And I know that would mortify Rob terribly. He so sensitive. As though the old man pleaded guilty, offering no excuse or explanation and came up to the big house with his five years to put in. Millie lived in Frisco, just an hour's ride from the prison. And when I first knew Morgan he was still rejoicing because he had been sent there where Millie could come over and see him on visiting days. During visiting hours on Saturdays and Sundays, the captain's runner came through the gate with passes for the lucky ones who had friends in the reception room. The runner came into the yard where the men were loathing, being off duty at those hours, and called the numbers from his slip. Then the lucky ones, all smiles and happiness for the moment, took their passes and went out for a half hour with wives and mothers and children. Everything we cons mean when we say the outside.

1:25:34And how the neglected ones envied those whose numbers were called. It used to get me sometimes too, and I was an old timer at the game, even then. An hour before the visitors were due, old dad would plant himself where he could get the first glimpse of the runner as he came through the gate. There he waited, anxious, expectant, picking flecks of dust off his striped coat, are brushing and re-brushing his shoes with an old bandana handkerchief. Finally, in would come the runner, a sheaf of passes in his hand. Dad's number was 22-492. Often there would be a number commencing with the same figures as Morgan's. Number 22-1400, the runner would call slowly. At each word, the old fellow rose from his bench, inch by inch, his dim old eyes lit up like a boys with a hope in his heart. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer.

1:26:34It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at my doubles. And 76, the runner would finish, while dad dropped back down on his seat with shaking hands on an agony of disappointment in his eyes. This went on week after week month after month. Every visiting day, dad was there, bathed, clean, and brushed long before the visitors hour, and he waited long after there was the slightest chance of any more passes. He always took his place on a corner bench, hopeful, and always left it at lock-up time, utterly crushed, with drooping shoulders and the eyes of a hurt animal. Each week found him a little frailer, a little more tremulous. He was failing fast, and we boys all knew it. The hot lamp burned low, and cushions of the signal from Luz rose noiselessly and filled it from the can of peanut oil.

1:27:41Blacky went on with his tail. Opium had taken him back to the days of which he told. His half-closed eyes saw only the prison yard, walled in on every side, and hundreds of striped figures trampling, trampling endlessly. Back and forth, with the hopeless restlessness of caged creatures. Sometimes, dad got a letter from Millie, but as the months dragged by, they came at longer and longer intervals he continued. He gave me one to read once, a short, perfunctory note hastily written, and as chilling as a slap in a face, but the old man read into the lines what had never been there. I used to humor him, praise the girl, inventing excuses for her failure to visit him. That was the reason he liked me better than the rest. I always pretended to believe in her, and her love for her old father in stripes.

1:28:41It never for an instant occurred to him to criticize or blame her. We spent hours thinking of reasons for her absence. Her husband needed her at home. She had friends to be entertained. And then there was the baby, for old dad was a grandfather now. In rainy weather, of course, she couldn't bring the baby out, and on bright, sun-shiny days, Millie and Rob naturally would want to take him for a sunning in the park. These, and a thousand other excuses we invented, I encouraging him, and helping him to fight down the doubt that he would not let grow in his tortured old mind. We talked about the kid, wondering whether he had blue eyes or brown. Millie never thought to say in any of her letters. And then sometimes he would open the locket, gaze at it with low, hungry eyes, hoping that the youngster looked like my little girl. Before the holidays, the old man was taken sick.

1:29:43He had a cough, and at night his breathing was terrible to hear. The doctor said asthma, gave him some ill-smelling stuff to smoke in a pipe. That was like the croaker. He'd give a man a pill to a man to broken bone, at a pipe full of weed, for a broken heart. One day just before Christmas, Morgan came to me, trembling like a leaf, but with eyes bright with happy excitement. She's coming, blackie, he cried, waving a letter at me. She's coming on Christmas Day, and she's going to bring the baby. Do you understand? She's going to bring the little fellow over here to see his old granddad. Maybe they'll let me hold him on my knee. Oh, blackie, what a Christmas I'm going to have. Think of it. I'm going to see my little girl and her boy at last. I shook his hand, padded him on the back, and enthused with him. There was fear in me. I knew he couldn't stand much more disappointment about losing all hope, and once a man loses that, the better part of him is dead.

1:30:48Still, I argued that the girl couldn't fail him on Christmas Day, not even a girl with those patchal unselfish, pouting lips. Christmas Day came. A bright, sun-shiny, glorious day, even a penitentiary's bolts and bars and bitter, wrangling hatreds disappear under the spell of the Christmas spirit. Guards and convicts both feel it, and greet each other with a smile and a nod on that one day. Dad was like a kid going to his first school picnic. He spent the whole morning cleaning his clothes and getting barbed. He even got a man in the tailor shop to crease his striped trousers. He had a merry greeting for everyone. He gave away all his carefully-saved tobacco, and when I protested at this generosity, he told me he wanted all the boys to have just as perfect a Christmas as his was to be. You know, a little gift, even a sack of tobacco. That shows someone is thinking kindly of you.

1:31:50Means a lot to a man in here, Blackie, he said. And after I've seen my little millie and her boy, I won't care if I ever have tobacco again. Only two more hours to wait, Blackie, but every minute seems a week. At last, the gates opened, and the runner came through with a thick packet of passes. There were a lot among us who were not forgotten that Christmas day. Old Dad was perfectly sure that at last he was to get his reception. He edged up to the front of the crowd that surrounded the runner. If he had been a millionaire instead of a convict, his face couldn't have beamed with greater happiness. One by one the runner cried the numbers, and each time someone stepped forward, seized his pass, and hurried off. There were only a dozen left, then six, then three. And still there had been no call from Morgan, number 22, 492.

1:32:52Dad stood facing the runner with trembling, sagging knees, and the look in his eyes was pitiful to see. The last pass was gone. Dad had not been called. He wilted like a flower thrown into a blazing grate. Then the runner drew a quite slip from his pocket. Number 22,492. Morgan, he called. Dad leaped forward like a racehorse when the barrier rises. He couldn't speak, but he held out both trembling hands toward the slip of paper that was more to him than anything that gold could be. The runner put it into his hands gently. That I know reception, Dad, he said kindly. I wished it was. It's just an order to report to the captain tomorrow for change of work. He's going to give you a swell, easy job for a Christmas present. And say, Dad, I think sure you'll get that reception tomorrow. Sure I do. I got a hunch.

1:33:56I put my arm around Dad and let him over to the bench. He hung a dead weight on me. She didn't come. She didn't come, he said, over and over to himself. She didn't come to see her old Dad, and it's Christmas day. I sat with him on the bench a long, long time. I tried to comfort him. I lied to him, saying that there was such a crowd of visitors that day many had been turned away till the next day, and that Millie certainly was among them. He didn't even hear me, I think. The last half hour had made him an old man, very feeble. Just before lock-up time he looked up at me. I mustn't be unreasonable, just because I'm so disappointed, he said. Millie would have come here if she could. Maybe Rob or the baby is sick, or maybe something's happened.

1:34:56You know Millie would surely have been here if she could possibly. Don't you blacky? Sure Dad, I said, but I had to turn my head away. All that evening up in the dormitory he lay on his bunk, staring at the picture in his locket, while the cons light-hearted in that one day's forgetfulness froliced about the room. His asthma was worse, every breath was an effort. I hope she's had a happy day, he said to me just before tap sounded, and the lights went out. I hope she hasn't worried because she couldn't get over today. I've been thinking tonight of the other Christmases we've had together, once he was just a little taunt on my knee, and his voice failed him, and he turned away his face to hide the tears that were dropping on his white beard. Damn that girl! Came involuntarily from cushions. Then realizing that he had voiced his thought, he dropped back red and embarrassed.

1:35:57You don't need to. She did that for herself, son, lucky one on. There isn't much more to tell. Away along in the night, I was waken by a horrible, gurgling, choking sound. It reminded me of the noise a man who strangled himself with his suspenders made in a cell next to mine long ago. I sat up wide awake, the noise continued. Other men were awake, too, whispering and wondering where it came from, for the room was in black darkness. Suddenly I thought of Dad. I leaped out of my bunk and struck a match to a paper spill. By its light I saw old Dad Morgan lying on his bunk, gasping for breath. His eyes were glazed. He was unconscious. My call brought a dozen men to his bunk. They propped him up with pillows while I bawled for the guard. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now.

1:36:59Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at McDonald's. When he finally heard me and came to the window angry at the racket inside, I had hard work to convince him that the man was sick enough to necessitate routing out the doctor at that hour of the night. Finally he went away to the hospital, and after a long time came back with two trustees and a stretcher. The doctor had sent word to bring the sick man over to the hospital. The big steel doors were unbarred, and the trustees came in. Around old Dad's bunk half the convicts in the room were kneeling, some making and burning paper torches while others bathed his face and worked his arms up and down. The hospital trusty laid his hand on the old man's breast, then put his ear to his heart. He's dead boys, he said. Poor old Dad. He's done his time quick.

1:38:01They laid him tenderly on the stretcher and crossed his hands on his breast. In one of them was the locket with Millie's picture, then they carried him away. When he saw him again, but two days later they took him out to sell house seven, the prison burying ground. And he's lying out on the sunny hillside now, doing his time, like you and I, and all of us will do it some time boys. Maybe he's better off. He must be at peace there, and maybe he's dreaming, untroubled, of the Millie he thought he knew, but who never existed. The day they buried him, a letter came from her to her father. She said Rob had decided to have their Christmas dinner in the middle of the day instead of the evening, so of course she hadn't been able to keep her promise for Christmas Day. Then she hoped he wasn't disappointed, and said she'd try to get over on New Year's.

1:39:07When I heard that letter, I thank God that old dad was living at peace out on that brown hill. Centuries out there are shorter than the first half hour after he knew Millie had failed him on Christmas Day. If there is such a thing as justice or right anywhere here or in some other world, that old man is a lot coming to him, said cushions reverently. I wish the four of us had his chances on that last great day when the graves in Selhaus Seven will open, answered Blackie, as lose blew out the opium lamp and put away the layout. End of the story about Dad Morgan by Jack Boyle. Section 3 of Boston Blackie. Stories around the opium lamp by Jack Boyle.

1:40:07This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Deathsell visions. The town is red hot, said KY lose, and getting hotter added Jimmy the joke. There's a $5,000 reward for the arrest of one or all of us, gloomily, from cushions kid. Boston Blackie, their chief, took his pill of opium in a single draw and blew out the smoke reflectively. In the Argon of Thieves, a red hot town is one in which outraged public sentiment has forced an apathetic police department to make a real effort to stop a wave of crime. So the town's burning up, eh, said Blackie. And there's a reward out for us, and that sack of diamonds buried down below. Well, what did you expect? Did you think the Chamber of Commerce was going to tender us a vote of thanks for cracking us safe in the busiest block on the main stem?

1:41:09Did you expect the mayor to invite us to a banquet? Of course the town's hot, and going to be hotter, as the joke said, from the tone of paper's take and looks as if it's up to the police chief to catch us a resign. That's just it, could cur a Jimmy. They're carrying this town for us with a fine tooth comb. If they happen to spot this house, we all know what it means. We'll be lucky if one of the four of us fights his way on alive. And you know Blackie, that Pinkerton watchman got a good square look at you as you left the store. It's an even money that is identified your mug in the Bertle and Galerie. Don't you think it's time to play checkers and move fast? A week before, a sensational diamond robbery in the heart of the city following a long series of similar crimes had aroused the entire town. Businessmen's associations met and passed resolutions. The newspapers printed double column editorials bemoaning the inefficiency of the police department. And the harried chief of detectives put his entire force on the case, telling the men with a curse to go out and arrest the safe blowers of repair to lose their wings, which in police parlance has to go back to patrolling a beat.

1:42:21Meanwhile, the four men responsible for the fior lay undercover in the furnished cottage they had rented in the suburbs. In action under fire is the final test for courage, and although anyone of Blackie's mob would have unhesitatingly fought against any kind of odds until he dropped, the strain of endlessly doing nothing was telling on over strong nerves. It's hard for the deer to lie quiet in the thicket and listen to the hunters trampling the woods around about, but the wise old buck does it and remains a deer instead of becoming venison, said Blackie slowly. But it's that way with us. Of course we're at danger here, but if we started to travel, hundreds would see us every day, but none one gets a glimpse of us now. If they have identified my picture, which is possible, the alarm has been sent out all over the country. On any railroad train or street corner, we're liable to be tapped on the shoulder and turned to look down a gun barrel.

1:43:21I figure there are nearly forty chances of a pinch if we travel now, to one while we lie quiet here. I wouldn't mind swapping lead with a couple of coppers at that, boasted cushions. He was rather afraid that his former remark had been taken as a reflection on his nerve. A quick wit beats a quick gun nine times out of tens, son, returned Blackie in quiet censure. Remember that, and you're less likely to have a rope start you on your long jolt underground. If I ever have to go that route, it will satisfy my curiosity anyway, the boy brag. I've always wondered what it was like to do time in a death cell. I've often dreamed I was in one waiting to be topped, hanged. Maybe sometime I'll know. Blackie sees the pipe and past it backward around the circle before another pill was smoked. It is the opium smoker's charm against the ill-lock of foolish boasting.

1:44:22If you are really so curious to know what it means to a man, a light caged up in a steel tank counting the days and hours of life that he has left, I'll tell you. It may keep you from burning prouder too soon sometime, said the Greyhaired Craxman after his silence. He hesitated before continuing. It isn't a thing I ever talk about. I've tried for years to forget it and haven't succeeded. But I'll tell you the story tonight. It made it was all good, the way we're fixed. I did three months in a death cell once, and at all but eaten my last meal when a reprieve came. All of Blackie's companions stared in astonishment, closely as they had been associated with him for years, not one of them had ever heard of this new chapter in his eventful career. I was sentenced to death in the electric chair years ago, continued the speaker. It wasn't guilty, but that's not essential now. The coppers made out a good circumstantial case against me. I was a known crook, and the jury brought in the death verdict.

1:45:32As I lie here now, I can feel again when I felt that day when they took me up to the old prison that I never expected to leave alive. Hurry up with a couple of pills, Jimmy. It gives me a habit whenever I recall that day and the ones that followed. They're like a brand on the brain, something that can never be a face. It was early summer. The sun was bright and warm and beautiful. There were birds and flowers everywhere outside the car windows. Inside, handcuffed to the seat, I leaned toward the window and saw the children playing, man at work and fields, farmers on laden truck wagons, city folk and automobiles. Everywhere there was life, and I was going to death. Everything my eyes saw was for the last time. I could never look again upon any of these simple everyday sights that now, since they were lost to me, for the first time seemed so deeply worthwhile.

1:46:35I remember the executions I had read of in the papers. They had never impressed me very much, and now my thought came to me as a shock that my execution would mean as little to the outside world. They would read that I died stoically or cravenly with a curse or a prayer on my lips, and forget me in the box-score of the ballgame. At the prison, all the preliminaries over, I was led across a beautifully flowered garden to the death house. I walked slowly beside the captain who had me in charge. I took a last look at the flowers and the sunshine and then another, and still another. That's right, said the old captain. Take your time and get a good look round. It's your last chance, son. Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire?

1:47:37Try them all only at McDonald's. I shuttered, and was ashamed of myself, was I who had always prided myself on my nerve, weakening already with the days still weeks ahead of me. The heavy door of the death house opened. We entered, and it closed behind us, plotting out the sunlight. I had said my last goodbye to life. I was glad it was over, for the strain was getting on my nerves. After being stripped and given new clothes, I was led down a corridor with cells on either side. Faces, it seemed curiously yellow in the glare of the electric lights peered out at me from behind curtains as we passed down the tier. There were fourteen men there before me, all waiting as I was for one inevitable end. They put me in a cell with another condemned man. I threw my coat on the iron bunk and turned to look at him. His face was yellow like the others I had seen, and haggard. His eyes were bright and glowed as if there were a flame behind.

1:48:41When do you go away? What's your day, yes? August 31st, I said. My day too, he cried out. We go away together. But maybe you've appealed and will get us stay, the thought seemed to hurt him. I didn't have any money and couldn't appeal, I answered. Well then we will go away together. My appeal was denied last week. He seemed relieved. As soon as we had told our names, he commenced to tell me the news and gossip of our little world. For to men in the dust cells the whole world lies within the four walls that blot out forever that other world on the outside. A wife murderer was the next due to go away. He had refused to see the priests, and through in the chaplain's face a Bible that had been sent him. Another man whose time also was nearly up, babbled secrets in his sleep and was thought to be insane. It is hard for a man in here to know whether or not he is sane, said my companion, looking at me intently.

1:49:46Strange things happen in this place. Things neither of us would ever believe on the outside. I'm glad they put you in with me. Either you will see what I see or you won't. Either way it will help me. What do you see? I don't understand, I replied, puzzled. The suspicion that he was crazy grew in my mind. You will know soon enough, he answered, and dropped the subject. Along the not-ness days dragged wearily by. We were glad each time night came, and yet begrudged the lost day. Each night left one day less of life for us. We read magazines, played checkers, tried novels, sang with the other condemned men, but no mental diversion ever removed the specter of the chair that waited at the end of the road we were all traveling so swiftly. I remember one night I was reading an absorbingly interesting book. It was Paig Gordio by Balzac.

1:50:48I read on and on my eyes following the printed words on the pages. My cellmate spoke to me, and I came out of my dream, realizing that from many pages I had not sensed one word I read. While my eyes traveled the lines of the book my mind had been on the chair. I was wondering whether the cold, damp, cap that was to be clamped over the shave in the spot on my head would send a shiver through me that would be mistaken for cowardice. I threw down my book and discussed. Paig, I said to my cellmate, what's the use of lying to ourselves? Neither of us mentioned the chair, allowed. But both of us are thinking of it every minute we are awake and dreaming of it when we sleep. What do you say if we quit pretending and talk about what's in our minds? It may help us to pass the time. You're on, e.g. eagerly. I wanted to suggest it, but didn't know how you would take it.

1:51:49After that we spent hours debating every imaginable phase of our approaching end. We recalled every printed account of an execution we had read. We argued the relative ease of death by hanging, by a bullet, and by electricity. We even made a sort of game of it in this way. I would say, what will happen 11,520,000 times yet before we go? You see, boys, I still remember even the figures after all these years. It was my cellmate's task to guess what I referred to. In this case, the answer was our heartbeats. Each of us vied with the other and inventing and computing these conundrums. Always we selected something in which the answer was some gigantic number running into billions sometimes. It seemed to push the chair farther back into the future to have such an uncountable number of units of any kind between it and us.

1:52:49We used reams of paper, figuring out how far an express train travelling sixty miles an hour could carry us in the days of life we had left. We estimated how far an ocean greyhound could take us in around the world trip. We learned how fast the earth travels and worked out with painstaking accuracy the exact distance it would carry us through space before the day. We read a magazine article on a comet which was said to be travelling toward us at dizzy speed and learned how many round trips to the moon we had time still to make if we could travel with it. We made a table showing how many heartbeats and how many breaths were left us at the end of each of our rapidly dwindling number of days, and all this helped us to pass the time and keep down the ever increasing metal tension. The wife, murderer's day, came. The night before he refused to sleep, preferring the long torture of consciousness rather than to lose one of his precious minutes and in sensibility.

1:53:54All night long we sang for him from cell to cell, hymns, ragtime, popular heirs, everything. I recited the girl with a blue velvet band and Frankie and Johnny. By the old old songs many of us had learned in childhood pleased best. Finally dawn came. The curtains would drop before our cells, and at last they led the doomed human creature out through the door from behind which no one ever returns. The chair was within twenty feet of one of the walls of our cell, but although we listened, dry, lived, and trembling, after the death party passed out, no sound came to relieve the strain of that frightful silence. It was on the day that the second man was elicricuted after my arrival that my cell partner broke down. After the last chorus of goodbyes had been shouted as the death party passed down the tier, the door closed behind them.

1:54:57That terrible, unbreakable silence that seemed the very embodiment of death itself was upon us. We could have heard a pin drop at the farthest end of the cellhouse. Each of us was picturing that hidden scene so close behind us in the execution room and each of us saw himself in the chair. At last, someone coughed. The sound was like a blow. My partner cried out hysterically and tore at the wall with his fingernails. I picked him up in my arms and laid him on his cot where he lay sobbing like a child. Blackie, he cried. I can't. I can't face going to the chair, knowing what lies beyond it for me. It's hard, all right, partner. I said. But what can be helped must be born. And none of us knows what does come after the chair. Maybe it's peaceful sleep. Anyway, you and I will find out together. We'll share whatever lies over there.

1:56:00No, no, we won't. That's just it, he sobbed, his voice rising in fear. You haven't been hounded by his face like I have. You haven't even seen him, and he's been here many times since you came. His face will be waiting for me after the chair. That is what frightens me. I don't believe in God. I've tried, but I can't. But I do believe what I can see, and every night the eyes tell me planer than words that I will have to face him when the chair has done its work. Crazy as a bat, I said to myself, and tried to quiet him. But he babbled on and on about the face that came and stared at him at night with menacing, unmoving eyes. It was the face of his partner who me killed, he said. My bunk lay with its head toward the corner where the face appeared, he told me. He asked me to move it, and watch with him for this thing that terrified him so frightfully. Of course I knew the man was it sane, but I humored him.

1:57:03Blacky smoked a pill and motioned for an extra one before he spoke again. The others twisted uneasantly on the palate. Remember what I said in commencing, the smoker went on in low tones. I myself saw what I'm going to tell. It was strange there in the death cell where mystery hangs like a fog all around you. Told here before the four of us in this everyday room, it seems unbelievable. And yet it is true. I know where I saw. Well, that night we lay awake, talking. I kept trying to cheer up my cell partner where he was terribly shaken, and I knew there would be a frightful scene when our day came if he didn't regain his nerve. The lights in the cell were out, but those in the corridor, shown through the bar door almost as brightly. The far wall of the cell was in shadow. Everywhere else there was light enough to read by. I don't know what time it was. Not laid anyway.

1:58:06There had been silence between us for many minutes. Suddenly my calm rod reached out and caught my hand in his, like a frightened child seeking protection from something. His fingernails sank into my flesh until they brought the blood. Look, look! He whispered from the anteath that clicked like castonets. See, he's coming! I looked where he pointed with shaking forefinger. At first I saw nothing. Then, so gradually that the transition was scarcely perceptible, the dark stone wall before us seemed to glow luminous near the center. It was like nothing I had ever seen. It was as if the light came through the wall from behind. Faint, but unmistakable. I stared. Slowly a change began near the center of the frame of light. Two spots more luminous than the rest appeared. They looked like eyes. My God, they were eyes.

1:59:09The outlines of the head grew visible than the face filled in around them. I see perspiration ran in streams from my forehead. I wanted to, but I could not turn my eyes away. At last a whole face was there, a human face, with stern menacing eyes that looked straight at my companion, cowering beside me. The threatening eyes pierced like a knife. There was not the slightest movement, not a flicker of an eyelash. In the terrible steadiness of the gaze there was unutterable hatred and irresistible power. And then, as I stared, it may have been minutes, it may have been hours later, I don't know. The outlines of the head blurred and faded. The light that shone through the wall dimmed. And I found myself murmuring a prayer of thankfulness as I stared at the stone wall which was once again its familiar self. My companion turned toward me, a face blue-white with emotion. After many trials he managed to articulate.

2:00:15You saw? You saw it, Blackie. Now tell me, was I right? I nodded. I couldn't speak. Did you ever see the picture of the man I killed? I shook my head. Then, right, right, he cried. Right now a description of that face as if it were a man you had met. I did as he wished without understanding what he intended to do. As I wrote, blood splashed down on the paper. I looked at my hand. It was gashed to the bone by my partner's fingernails. I hadn't known it till then. When I finished, he rushed to the box in which he kept his letters and papers. Flinging them to the floor in his haste, he finally found a clipping from a newspaper. There was a photograph in the center of the page, and he handed it to me. It was a picture of the face I had seen on the wall. Every feature was there, absolutely unchanged and unmistakable, except the eyes.

2:01:17In the picture, those were kindly. I have told you what they were like as they stared at us from the wall. My partner read aloud the description of the face I had written. With the picture before me, I could not have improved it. I had described accurately the face of a man I had never seen, except in that damnable vision. You know now, Blackie, why I'm afraid to go away? It isn't the chair that terrifies me. It's what comes after, my partner said. He was calmer now than I. You read the message in his eyes. I was too stunned and paralyzed with surprise and fear to talk or even think. That I, Boston Blackie, should have seen such an impossible, miraculous sight, in a place where human trickery was obviously out of the question, staggered my reason. The barriers of unbelief were swept away by the certainty that I had seen proofs of the one unsolvable mystery. I was like a little child beginning all over again to build up new beliefs on the ruins of those convictions which until then had been certainties to me.

2:02:28There was not an hour of sleep for either of us men in the cell that night of horror. The following day my partner's wife came to visit him. It was next to her last visit. Our time had dwindled away now to something less than twenty days. A heavy wire screen kept her back from the cell door, but though she could not touch him, they could talk freely. She was a wonderful woman, of the same type as three-fingered Max wife of whom I told you once. She was a firm believer in a life somewhere beyond the grave where there was no such thing as sorrow and crime, and where those who had loved in this world met again in peace and happiness. Like a mother talking to a little child, this woman with tears streaming down her face sought to force the comfort of her faith on the unbelieving mind of the doomed man she loved. Each strained against the intervening steel that kept them from even so little as a hand-class.

2:03:30If there were ministers who could plead as that woman did, maybe there would be fewer men like us. But there never will be a woman where our love is involved as inspired. She's more than human. She begged him in the name of their love to have faith that the chair met only a reunion for them, a reunion where there could be no barred doors, no suffering, no sin, no death. We'll meet each other there, my husband," she said. If only Mary, he interrupted. If I thought the chair would bring us together again anytime, anywhere I would long for the day to come. But I can't believe it. I can't believe you will be given to me ever again. That will be my punishment. Someone is waiting for me there, though. Then he told her for the first time about the face of the murdered man as it appeared to him. His wife's face brightened as he explained. The light of some new and wonderful resolve shown in her eyes.

2:04:33She pressed her face to the wire netting and whispered to him like a mother. "'Dear, dear boy,' she said. "'You've solved everything for us. Thank God you told me in time. You believe in that face you can see. You shall have my faith, too. When the time comes, you shall go knowing it is to join one who loves you, not hates.' The guard came to say that her visiting time was up. "'Come closer so I can see your face once more, my dear, dear one,' she said. "'I want to see you smile again as you used to in that little house we both loved so. Don't fret or worry, I will save you from all your fears. God has shown me the way. Goodbye, my love, for a little while. A very little while.' Bravely, she kissed her hand, stretched it out toward him, and was hurried away by the insistent guard.

2:05:34That night the face appeared on a wall again exactly as before. The following night it came again, and so, night after night we came to watch for it with a fearful fascination. The hateful eyes stared out at us as menacing as before. My partner, who had been cheered temporarily by his brave little woman's confidence, fell into a terrible state of fear and hopelessness. It was awful for me to contemplate what I feared might happen on the last morning. On the tenth day before we would do to go away, the warden personally brought a letter to my cellmate. It was very unusual. His manner, too, was strangely constrained. Read this letter, he said. It's from your wife. I've got some news for you. I'm sorry. My partner held it up before his eyes, but his nervous hands let it slip to the floor. He motioned to me to read it to him. As I lie here now, I can see every word of that letter as clearly as I did that morning.

2:06:40It was only a few lines. My darling, when you read this, I shall have solved the problem for us both. I shall have taken the one certain way to prove to you that my faith in the future somewhere together is surely true. Don't sorrow for me. I am happier as I write this than I have been since trouble came to us. Before you face the last ordeal, you will know as I know that it ends our separation forever. I have prayed that this knowledge may come to you, and it will. I shall be waiting for you. Don't fear to come to your...mary. The man looked at the warden with terrible fear in his face. She's—she's—he couldn't speak the word. Yes, my boy. She's dead, the official answered, happened sometime last night, an overdose of morphine, they say. Her husband dropped on his bunk in a swoon that looked like death to me. I hoped it was. It would have been easier and quicker.

2:07:44They sent the doctor up and finally brought him back to consciousness. It's a strange thing that they will do anything at all to stave off death until they can kill you in their own way. The rest of that day was one that I still have to force out of my memory. I don't intend to put those hours of agony into words. It seemed almost as much of a catastrophe to me as it did to her husband, that the brave little woman who had cheered us only a few short days ago should now be gone forever. Hours passed, and night came, and neither of us knew it. The warden sent in a flask of whiskey, but had lay untouched on the floor. It must have been very late when we caught both together the first glimmer of light on the dark stone wall. We clung together like scared children. I'm not ashamed to tell it. Slowly it grew in the way that now was familiar to us. The cold eyes appeared, the head, the whole face.

2:08:45Once again we stared at the vision of the murdered man, and then, as we looked, came a transition. The unchanging eyes seemed to soften, the hatred died out, the contour of the face altered, the lines of the head melted into curves of wavy hair, and before our eyes on that wall we saw the face of the dead woman, my partner's wife. He fell on his knees, stretching out his arms to her. Her eyes, kind and loving and happy, looked straight into his, giving as the others had done, a message that was planar than spoken words. The kneeling man's eyes flared with a sudden, great hope. Mary, Mary, my wife, he called. I understand. I believe. I believe. I'll come to you, glad and unafraid. The vision faded. I was gone. He leaped to his feet, blacky he cried, seizing my hands and clasping my shoulders in the ecstasy of his newfound hope and belief. She's waiting for me. It's true, all true. We're going to be together again.

2:09:57I wish I could go to the chair tomorrow. No, now, this minute. I can't wait. Mary has saved me. No man ever went to the chair, as that fellow did. Instead of fearing and begrudging the flying hours, he checked them off eagerly, impatiently, like a boy waiting for a long, expected holiday. Perfect peace and trust were in his heart. He was the one happy man I ever knew or heard of in a death cell. And when the day finally came, they told me he marched down the corridor and threw the little door with a happy smile on his face, and perfect love and trust in his eyes. That, boys, is what a woman's love did for that man. Cushions was very white. The other's more solemn than usual was blacky finished. Thank you, blacky. For catching my arm when I started to draw my gun on that pinker to the other night, the boy said reverently. All I've told you tonight flashed through my mind in the second in which I decided to risk talk instead of lead. Answered the grey-haired opium smoker.

2:11:05It has saved me several times in similar moments of peril. That's why I told you the story. I felt I ought to. The heavy opium smoke all but hid the far walls of the room, but the man smoked on. The pipe passed round and round the circle many times. Did any priest or scientist ever try to explain what you saw, blacky? I asked Jimmy at last, as though there had been no break in the conversation. No one ever had a chance. I never told anybody but you three was the answer. I read once, though, that some professor laid an occurrence somewhere similar to what he called hypnotic thought suggestion between two overstrained minds. That's rubbish, though. I know what I saw. How did you beat the chair? Asked Jimmy, voicing the question each had been eager to ask. The man who really killed the Jew came through with the truth, answered blacky. He wasn't such a rat after all.

2:12:06He was safe in Lima, Peru, and he wrote a letter, confessing his guilt, and telling that the gun he had used was hidden in a hollow oak just outside the house where the Jew was killed. Its disappearance was one of the mysteries of the case. He gave its number and told where he bought it in a pawn shop. There was a lot of other cooperative detail in the letter, and the district attorney after an investigation was convinced that I was innocent. He laid the letter before the governor, who commuted me to life imprisonment. I can still feel the sunshine on my face as it felt on that morning when I left the death cell for the open prison yard. Six months later, the governor was convinced I was innocent, and he gave me a pardon. I left that prison determined to live straight. I was young, then. But here I am, greyhead, and still a thief. How did you come to turn back? Asked cushions eagerly.

2:13:06That's another and a longer story, son. Sometime, maybe I'll tell you. Boys, we've all had enough hot. Smother the lamp, Jimmy. And of death cell visions by Jack Boyle. Section 4 of Boston Blacky, Stories Around the Opium Lamp by Jack Boyle. This liberal box recording is in the public domain. A Thief's Daughter. In a wall bash avenue flat in Chicago, Boston Blacky and K.Y. lose lay beside their opium layout. Both were ill at ease. There are two companions, Jimmy the joke and the cushions kid, who completed the roster of Blacky's safe-cracking mob, were missing.

2:14:12And when an opium smoker neglects his regular hour for the pipe, something is seriously wrong. A series of daring and successful robberies in the West had made Blacky and his men a prize long and eagerly sought by the police. Having sold their stolen gems to a New York fence, they still were forced to lie hidden, scarcely daring to show their faces in an indecidly in the country. Blacky let one of his pills burn, a certain sign of keen anxiety. It's a pinch sure, or they would have been here long ago, he grumbled. I'll give them one more hour, then we'll have to get busy. Listen, Luz whispered, raising himself on his elbow. A key turned in the street door, and a man commence to climb the stairs. It's no cop or Blacky, it's the joke, said Luz with a sigh of relief dropping back on his pillow. The boys are all right. Jimmy's alone, cushions as pinched, contradicted the chief.

2:15:13Jimmy gave the opium fiends wrap, the safety signal of the underworld, then unlocked the door and entered. The kid's yaffled, he announced, laconically, two dicks detectives on West Madison Street got him. Hurry up some hop, K.Y. I'm half dead with a habit. Blacky looked glum. Was it a wrap? Or just a pickup? He asked when Jimmy eased his tortured physique with a couple of pills. Among thieves, a definite accusation is a wrap. A pickup is an arrest merely on suspicion for purposes of investigation, and without any certain knowledge of wrongdoing I did. Just a pickup, I think, replied Jimmy. We were coming out a big mic saloon over on the West Side. The kid was a step ahead of me. As we went out the door, he turned and ducked back into the saloon, signing coppers to me. We've all told him a hundred times to walk past a dick without batting an eye once he's been seen, put in Luz an exasperation.

2:16:13I know, but the kid don't stop to think, said the joke. I stepped out past him and bought him pack of cigarettes across the street. They didn't pay any attention to me, but followed cushions and collared him in the back room. After a little talk on the corner, they called the wagon and took him over to the displaying street. Did he have a rod, grip all over? Or anything on him? Asked Blacky. Not a thing, he was clean as a whistle, replied the joke. He said he'd be sprung tonight, said the chief. It won't do it to let those fly mugs get the studying him too closely. Blacky Rose went to the telephone. He called up the residence of an attorney, noted from coast to coast as the best fixer in Chicago. It was late at night. Hello, is that you, Bob? People you have on the connection was complete. I'm glad I caught you in. This is Boston, Blacky. Didn't know I was in town, eh? Well, you know, worse off than the coppers at that. No, no, we're not here for business. Just a little pleasure trip.

2:17:16Suppose you're as strong as ever over at the display in the street. You could square anything short of a murder, and maybe that? Well, Bob, this isn't anything serious, just a pick-up. One of my mob was grabbed by a couple of dicks and big mics placed tonight. I want you to put him on the street. All right, a hundred goes, but tomorrow morning won't do. I want him sprung now, just as soon as a taxi will land you over in the cap's office. What's that? Sure, this is a one-party private phone. You think I'm from Newton, Kansas? A century and a half to spring him tonight, eh? I'll call that before you raise it to two hundred dollars. No, I don't know what name he gave. The cushions kid is the man I want. You remember him? He was with me when we met you over in K.C., Kansas City, a year ago. Goodbye, Bob, and say, not a word to the cap about who the kid is, or that I'm in town, or you'll find his price will rise. Phone me when the kid is out.

2:18:16Sure, the dough will be at your office at noon tomorrow. Goodbye. Blackie hung up the telephone and dropped back on his bunk perfectly content. This was a simple business transaction, too ordinary in his circle to be worth discussing. In this cavalier fashion, the underworld and the police too often call a truce to their mutual advantage, while a great American public pays the bill. Two hours later, cushions appeared at the apartment, red faced and sheepish. Lose glared at him stonely. Jimmy Grin, but it was at Blackie the culprit looked for a verdict on his escapade. The chief's face was inscrutable. The boy threw himself on the palate, eager for a pill. Gee, I'm glad I'm here. He said to cover his confusion. I'm dead for a smoke. How'd he given a hundred casenote to have been here when they had me locked up in the can? You're cheap, said Lose pointedly. A hundred casenote, eh? Why it cost us a hundred and fifty mag dollars. For the pleasure of your company here tonight, just because you couldn't look at Dick and E.I.

2:19:23The boy flushed angrily. Next on a heavy talk, K.Y. said Blackie intervening in time to prevent an angry retort from the youngster. We all make mistakes. Cushion sees where he was wrong. The lesson is cheap at one hundred and fifty dollars. I heard they had St. Louis fat in the tanks, kid. Did you see anything of him? Not a glim. Answered cushions, grateful for Blackie's intercession. The can was filled with a lot of bombs and a couple of cheap guns, pickpockets. There wasn't a grifter, thief, in the place that any of us would take a drink with. The underworld, as well as the four hundred, has its social strata, with the lines of demarcation as plainly drawn and as hard to cross. There was an old gray haired mall, woman, wine-bomb brought in, that I would have picked for a partner as soon as any of that mob of doormat grifters, continued cushions. Say, she sure could swear faster than a copper can run, and she wasn't bashable about talking to him either, what I mean.

2:20:28She held out that her name was Mary Harris, so that they could hear her over the river, and gabbled about Dayton Tom and... Sutter name was Mary Harris, and talked of Dayton Tom, eh? Interrupted Blackie with that far away reminiscent look in his eyes, the show that the remark had carried him back today's long past. Poor Mary. So that's what came to Mary Harris, a wine-bomb, lying like a beast on a stinking jail floor while a gang of half-wise kids poked fun at her. Now there was a time, but that was ten, yes, all of fifteen years ago. What changes time makes? It's a good thing we can't look into the future. Who knows where, or what we'd be, fifteen, or even five years from now. Well, she really, Dayton Tom's girl, queried cushions interestedly. He came before my time, but I've always heard of him spoken as a classy man. Not his girl, she is his daughter, corrected Blackie. She's only about thirty-five now, although I suppose she looks fifty.

2:21:37When our kind hits the toboggan and lands on the gutter time as encountered in years, when she was eighteen, a lot of us would have walked from Hyde Park to Pullman, if Mary had said the word. She was twenty when we met in the dock in the west side court in Denver. That was the last time I heard of her, until the night. Boy, she did a thing that day that had tidied there forever to the respect of any man who calls himself a right thief. As was his custom, Blackie signed for a couple of extra pills before beginning his story. A strangely twisted coat of honor had Boston Blackie, Master Thief, but he lived up to it, and so, as he continued the history of the drunken pariah, his voice was softened by the depth of his feeling for the woman who had also had a code which he held in violet. Mary Harris is the daughter of Dayton Tom, one of the old guard among con men. Her mother was, but there's no use calling names. She's dead. Let her name rest, he began.

2:22:44The never was a sweeter, a clever, or a prettier girl than little Mary, and the days when Tom lived like a prince on the thousands he made, selling everything from the United States meant to the city park, the rubes from the Dakotas. The girls' parents were thieves. She was born in Fony Nix Hopshop right here in Chicago, and from the day she was able to talk, she was taught to hate a copper and love a thief. When she was 12 years old, she was the swellest little hop chef in the country. She never burned a pill and never handed you a green one. Quick! Say, boy, she could take a man's habit off quicker than the joke. And he's just as fast a hop cook as you will find nowadays. Many and many a time I've laid in Dayton's flat out on Wentworth Avenue, talking business with old Tom, while Mary chuffed up real DUN, first grade opium, the like of which isn't to be had now. Tom taught her to smoke, of course, but she was a strange kid even as a child. Pearl, her mother was dead, and Mary kept house and bossed the old man as her mother used to do.

2:23:55But though she was around to lay out seven days a week, she never smoked but a few pills, never enough to get a habit. She's the only woman I ever knew that Hop couldn't ruin. Tom used to brag to the bunch that he was going to make her the classiest con woman that ever played a mark. She would have been a wonder too if she had been a thief at heart, and she figured to be by birth, environment, and training. But she wasn't. When she had finished cooking hop for us, she'd pull out a library book about Joan of Arc or Charlotte Corday, who killed one of the leaders of the French Revolution for the sake of France, and then went to the guillotine with a smile on her lips. Tom let her go for schooling to a woman who gave private lessons to those able to pay for them, and by the time Mary was seventeen, she was a well-read, educated young woman, that no man could have ever been ashamed of as a wife. Don't think that none of Tom's friends ever asked her either. She refused a dozen of the best money-makers this country ever saw in our line.

2:25:02She was as gentle as a kitten and as kind as a mother to them all, but when she had said no, they knew she meant it. She was a strange girl, and that is all guessing. Now don't misunderstand me, there was nothing of the copper about her. You couldn't get a word out of her that would have hurt one of us for all the money ever coined. She was as right a girl has ever lived, but she wouldn't steal. You've got your coat of right and wrong, Dad, and I've got mine, she used to say when Tom would argue with her. You do what you think is right, and I'll do the same. That's only fair. I don't ask you to turn square, and you mustn't ask me to turn thief, because I won't. Then she would kiss him and go on reading one of her everlasting histories. Along before this time she had cut out hop absolutely. She still cooked for us when Tom asked her, but she never touched a pill herself. If there is any harder test for willpower, you'll have to show it to me. It was an open book to me for a long time as to what was going to happen eventually.

2:26:11I was smoking with Tom the day she told him. She came in, and we both noticed that her eyes were brighter than usual, and her cheeks had more color. What you been doing, honey, they'd bring that flesh in your cheeks, Tom asked. He idolized her. She dropped down beside the layout and took the pipe from him. Let me cook you a couple of pills, Dad, she said, and then I've got something to tell you. She shoved him up three or four and laid down the pipe. I'm going away, Daddy, she said, and there was a quiver in her voice. I can't ever cook another pill for you. I'm going to Denver. I was married this afternoon. My husband is waiting for me now. I've come to say goodbye to my old dad. Married? cried Tom, jumping up. Surely, girl, you haven't fallen for that cocoma kid that's been hanging around here for the last few weeks. No, Dad, she said, I'm not a thief, and I couldn't marry a thief. I've married a straight man. I'm the wife of Willard Harris. He's the brother of Miss Harris, my teacher.

2:27:19He's cashier for a real estate firm in Denver, and we're going west tonight. I'm sorry to leave you, Daddy, but I couldn't stand this life any longer, and Will loves me, and we're going to have a home, an honest money to live on, and everything that I've dreamed of all these years. While a bunch of us crooks had been lying around that flat, letting her cook hop for us, that girl had been dreaming of a home decent and honest, and a husband who was square. Women are all beyond understanding, but she was the strangest and the rightest of them all. For say what you will, being right, is after all, living up to what your heart tells you you ought to do. Dayton, Tom, raved and stormed. He swore he'd rather see her dead than the wife of a square man. Tom loved his girl, and he loved his business, and he didn't believe a man could be a man unless he was a thief, and a good one. Why this rube husband of yours will turn you out in the street when he finds out your the daughter of a thief brought up in a hop joint, and serve you right, too, he screamed.

2:28:24You surely didn't suppose I hadn't told him, she answered. We'll know all about me, and is satisfied as long as I go out to Denver with him and give up all this sort of thing forever. And dad, because I know I'm doing right, I've agreed, and I'm going to do it. Oh, daddy, wish me happiness, please, please, as I wish it to you. We have to separate. Don't let it be with anger between us. I slipped on my overcoat, shook her by the hand, and told her what I wished her. Then I left the two there together, both crying. She went west that night, and Dayton, Tom, was never the same man afterward. Two years passed before I landed in Denver, I was traveling with Red Martin's mob. That always was a hudu town for me, and sure enough we hadn't been there two weeks till I was inside looking out through the bars. They didn't have the goods on me, and the mob had plenty of fall, though, money for lawyers, so I didn't worry. I knew it was only a matter of lying in the county jail a couple of months.

2:29:28I had neither seen or heard of Mary Harris, since that night out at Old Tom's flat back in Chicago. One day, when they took me over to court to continue my case, the sheriff brought in a girl and put her in the prisoner's dock with me. I didn't turn around to look at her, for it's tough enough for a woman to be in a place like that without having a lot of nearer convicts staring at her. It wasn't what a minute till she leaned forward and whispered to me. Don't you remember me, Blackie? She asked. Or are you trying to cut me? I turned around surprised, for I didn't know a woman in the town, and there sat Mary Harris trying hard to smile. She was as pretty as ever, but one look was enough to show how things had been going with her, disappointment, and unhappiness, and something else I didn't understand then, were written in every line of her face. We commenced to talk in the old silent lip language her father had taught her. What's wrong, Mary, I asked? I wouldn't have been surprised to see you up at the brown palace, but you sure look out a place here.

2:30:35Haven't you seen the papers, Blackie? She asked. If you haven't, you're about the only person in Denver who don't know the story. They don't let us have the papers in the jail. What's the rap, I queried? They say I stole $5,000 from the safe of a real estate office where my husband, where Mr. Harris works. She answered. I saw her lips tremble. She could scarcely form the words. It's a wrong stare, you didn't do it, of course, I returned, but why don't that man of yours get busy and bail you out? I've admitted to stealing the money, Blackie, and there isn't any chance for me to get out. I'm bound for the penitentiary. I'll be just a number, and another week. What? I cried, speaking out loud in my surprise. You don't mean to say you've turned crooked after all. I'm awfully sorry, Mary. Why didn't you let some of us know? Any of the old Wentworth Avenue gang would have put you in right with a mob strong enough to protect you from this sort of thing.

2:31:40I'm not a thief, Blackie. She said so slowly I thought she was going to make every word her last. I'm as straight as I was that night I parted from Dad in Chicago. I've been square, and I've made as hard a fight as a woman can for the sort of a home I always dreamed about. But fate is too strong. I'm beaten. I'm the daughter of a thief. Branded now a thief myself, and bound for the penitentiary. Everything I ever hoped for is impossible, forever. Dad always used to tell the boys to be game when trouble came. I guess that's about all there is left for me to do. But sometimes life seems very, very difficult and unjust. For Blackie, I did try so hard to make those dreams come true. You've admitted stealing the coin and her bound for the stir, but yet you're innocent, I repeated, stupid with astonishment.

2:32:41Is that right on the square? Her case went over till the next day just then, and before she could answer the deputy came for her. She dropped her veil over her face, and nodded a yes to me. There were tears on her cheeks as she passed. As soon as I got back to the jail, I slipped a guard, a dollar bill, and told him to get me a paper with a story of the Harris case in it. When it came, I found what I was looking for, spread all over the first page with Mary's picture in the center. Five thousand dollars have been taken from the cash drawer in charge of Willard Harris, who handled the firm's collections. Detectives and a member of the firm confronted Harris at his home. He was livid with fear and seemed to show every evidence of guilt, so they were about to take him to the city prison when his wife interrupted proceedings and prevented a terrible mistake. Will, she said, according to the paper, you have taunted me with being the daughter of a thief and of an opium smoker. Well, I am. Now, I'm going to show you what the daughter of a thief can do. She turned to the detectives. I stole that money. He is innocent.

2:33:52I took it from the safe in his office while he was busy in another part of the room. Now, take me to prison. She's got the five thousand dollars in the planter's bank, said her husband. I've tried to make her give me the money, but she refuses. The girl turned on him like a flash, the paper said, steering at the trembling man. You couldn't wait for me to tell him. Could you, you poor pitiful jellyfish, she cried, and I once thought you were a man. I was brought up among thieves, as you have so often told me, but you're not fit to wash their clothes. The money is not in the bank. I drew it out and sent it away yesterday so you couldn't get your dirty hands on it. The paper went on to give Mary a terrible roast. He talked about her reddity and how Harris had taken the girl from the gutter, given her a good home, and tried to make an honest decent woman of her only to have her rob his employers and then abuse him, vile. The captain of detectives called her the most brazen and cold-blooded criminal he had ever seen. She flatly refused to tell what she had done with the money, which really had been drawn from the bank, as she said, and when told she was sure to go to the penitentiary, she said she hoped it would be soon, for then she wouldn't ever have to see her husband again.

2:35:06The police had not been able to get the slightest trace of the missing money, after it had been given to her by the paying teller. The whole business was like a cocaine dream to me. I couldn't figure it out. I knew Mary was innocent, where she had said so, and she wasn't the kind to lie to her father's pal, and yet she admitted her guilt, and she really did draw the money from the bank. I'll bet that she and her husband planned the job together, and then when the rumble came, the man backed out and let her shoulder all the blame. Said cushions, as Blackie paused to smoke a pill. You'll have to guess again, continued Blackie. Have you forgotten that Mary said she was not a thief? I puzzled her with the business all night, and ended just where I began. Next day she was in court again. I've seen the papers, Mary. Explain this Chinese puzzle, and maybe there will be a way out. If money will help any, you're welcome to my role. Thanks, Blackie. What you can't aid me? No one can, she told me. But I want you to do me a favor. As soon as you get out, get into communication with Dad, and tell him I sent a package with $5,000 in bills in it to his address and bute.

2:36:19I couldn't register it for fear they would trace it. Be sure he gets that package. Then you can tell him what I'll tell you now. I want him to know that I've been right with everybody. It will be some comfort to me to know that he knows the truth while I'm doing my time, as the boys used to say. The man I married is a gambler. One of the kind that always gets plucked. I knew I'd made a mistake before we had been married six months. But like the old California Squam annuist to say, I stuck by what I'd done. I tried to be a good wife. I tried to make a home for us. I tried to stifle my heartache and disappointment as one by one my dreams turned to ashes. I was determined not to let our marriage fail, but the fight was hopeless. Will gamble the way his salary, and often we scarcely had enough to eat, for I would not run into debt. I economized in every possible way, with the more I saved, the more he gambled.

2:37:19I tried to turn him away from cards, but he only taunted me with being a gutter girl and said he didn't need any lectures from a convict's daughter, and that I would be doing time myself if he had not protected me by giving me his name, which was too good for me. That was the way things stood two months ago when Dad went through here. Yes, I saw him, but I didn't let him know what a wreck I'd made of my life. I didn't tell him that after all I had married a thief at heart, but one who didn't have the nerve to steal. Dad was on his way to Butte, and he left the mobs fall doe with me. He asked me to bank it and hold it subject to his order in case of any of his men got into trouble. I couldn't refuse, and I didn't see any harm in it anyway. There wasn't any until one night Will came back from the races after losing a whole months' pay. He was in a nasty mood, and I was half crazy with worry, not knowing what we were going to live on. In rummaging around in my desk, he found the bank book showing the deposit of $5,000 in my name. He came to me with it, his eyes ablaze with hope. I hadn't told him about it before, for I knew he would try to get it to gamble on.

2:38:31I told him the money was my father's, and explained what it was for, that fall doe was sacred among thieves, except in case of trouble. I told him that if we were mine, I would give it to him gladly, but I said that we would be worse than the thieves. He was always taunting me about if we used their money, which might save them from the penitentiary. He wouldn't listen to me. He pleaded for the money, like a child, and even threatened me. He had a tip for the next day, and if I would only give him $1,000, we could put it back in 24 hours and have the winnings for ourselves. I knew he was in the hands of a gang of touts, and told him so. Then he cursed me and stormed out of the house, saying he would get the money whether I liked it or not. I was afraid he might try to forge my name to a check, so I went down in the morning, and drew out the money after waiting all night in vain for him to return. The next night I sent the package to my father with an excuse. I had an intuition that in doing so, I was saving myself from a great temptation.

2:39:34I didn't see Will for three days. Not until the night I branded myself a thief. He came slinking into the house like a whipped dog. His face was so haggard and his eyes so bloodshot, I feared he was sick. He threw down his coat and hat and caught me by the shoulders. His nails cut till the blood came, but he didn't know it. I've got to have that money now at once, he cried incorrectly. I'm ruined unless I get it before they count the cash at the office in the morning. I'm $5,000 short. I lost $1,000 the day after I left here. $2,000 more went yesterday, and the rest today. It's up to you to save me, see me go to jail. I can't give it to you Will, it's gone, I answered. I began to cry. You lie, he shouted at me. If you don't give it to me, I'll kill myself here now. I can't stand prison in the disgrace of everything that will be in the papers. You've got to save me, do you hear? You're a fine sort of wife to hesitate when your husband isn't a fix like this. Why did I ever marry a woman like you?

2:40:41I didn't know what to do or say. The blow was too much for me, and I broke down completely. If the money has still been in my possession, I might have yielded. I don't know what I would have done. But it was gone, and I dared not tell him so, where I really feared he would kill himself if he knew. He cursed and raved at me and accused me of wanting to see him in prison so that I would be rid of him and free to return to my old life and friends. I was wild with fear and anguish. I prayed for guidance for some way to save him. Then the doorbell rang. He wanted to hide upstairs, but I pushed him back into the parlor and opened the door. Inwalked his employer in the detectives. The shortage had been discovered. I tried to brace Will up by talking, but his face would have betrayed him anywhere. They accused him of the theft, and he only mumbled clumsy denials. He was scarcely able to talk. He was so unnerved. I could have saved him if I had kept that money of dads, and sending him away, I had taken on myself the burden of freeing him some other way. He was right when he said it was my duty to stick by him through this terrible calamity.

2:41:53Every moment made his guilt more evident, and I was half crazed with fear. And then, like an inspiration, came the answer to my prayer. I could confess myself the thief. My birth and bringing up made it plausible, and I had often been in his office with an easy access of his safe. Will was cunning, you see, even in his gambling crazed moments. He had taken only as much money as he believed I could replace if he lost it. The fact that I had drawn exactly the missing amount from the bank would be regarded as conclusive evidence. I was so unhappy anyway that I feared nothing worse, even in prison. He had always taunted me with being a thief's daughter. Well, now I would prove to him that thief's child though I was, I still was right and loyal. So I did it. I told him the eye, not he had taken the money. Before I could tell about the deposit in the bank, he did so himself. He was afraid they wouldn't believe me without some cooperating evidence, I guess.

2:42:55That's about all, Blackie, and the eyes of the whole world I'm worse than the worst of thieves. But I know I've been right and true, and you know it now, and dad will know it when you tell him. I have failed in trying to make life what I pictured it, but I have been honest, and I have lived up to my code, and dads, for now that I think it over, there isn't much difference between them. Both of us, an all-year-old crowd who used to come to the flat, believe in sacrificing oneself for the sake of those to whom we owe loyalty, even when it means prison stripes. I've done that, and I'll have that thought to comfort me while I'm doing Will's time. Dad won't be ashamed of his daughter anyway. It's not going to the penitentiary I dread so much. It's leaving it when I come out. God knows what will lie before me. That day she pled guilty to grand larceny, and in view of the particularly inexcusable nature of the crime, as he saw it, the judge sentenced her to from five to seven years.

2:43:59I've never seen her since. I never was able to deliver her message to old Tom, either. He died out in but of pneumonia before I was released. So he never knew what befell his little Mary. He would have killed that husband of hers if I had been able to tell him her story. He was that kind of a man. Didn't Harris do anything for her when she was in the stirr? As lose, usually the most untouched and silent one of the four. Yes, he divorced her, answered blacky. I've told you what she was. Cushions has told you what she is. Your boys who know what it is for a man to come back into the world with ex-convict stamped after his name can realize how much worse it is for a woman. And can imagine what sort of years have filled in the gap during which she has become Mary, the wine bomb. I intended to keep track of her after she came out, but I was doing a jolt myself when her time was up. Harris is still in Denver, I hear.

2:45:04I have never been there since. I don't want to become a murderer, and I might meet him if I were stopped overnight in the town. The telephone rang and blacky answered it. It's blacky himself who's talking, he said in response to the voice on the wire. Sure, he's here, smoking hop as fast as he can get it cooked. I'm obliged for your quick work, Bob, little man. And say, Bob, there's another little errand I want you to do. Send someone from your office down to the police court tomorrow morning, and take out a woman named Mary Harris. Drunk or vague is the charge. I want to put her on her feet. I'm going to leave Doe with you to fit her out with decent clothes in a decent room and have you pay her enough each week to live on. No, no name. Just say it's from one of Dayton Tom's old pals, who is coming back this way in a few months to see what the little girl used to know as Mary Harris looks like. I want to try to straighten her up, Bob. The thought that someone is her friend might do it. All right, I'll be there with a coin at noon tomorrow. Goodbye.

2:46:13Blacky hung up the telephone and dropped back to his place beside the other smokers. Well, grab the midnight ratler on the Alton for St. Louis tomorrow night, boys, he said. I want to take a look at that post office in New Athens. And anyway, he paused hesitating. I might meet Mary Harris here, and I don't want to see her yet. And of a thief's daughter. End of Boston Blacky stories around the opium lamp by Jack Boyle. Red by Winston Tharp.