And therefore he was not guilty.
Yet Kraut and Slack were once more seizing him and escorting him to the cell.
Immediately thereafter his mother seating herself at a press table proceeded to explain to contiguous press representatives now curiously gathering about her:
“You mustn’t think too badly of me, you gentlemen of the papers.
I don’t know much about this but it is the only way I could think of to be with my boy. I couldn’t have come otherwise.”
And then one lanky correspondent stepping up to say:
“Don’t worry, mother.
Is there any way I can help you?
Want me to straighten out what you want to say?
I’ll be glad to.”
And then sitting down beside her and proceeding to help her arrange her impressions in the form in which he assumed her Denver paper might like them.
And others as well offering to do anything they could — and all greatly moved.
Two days later, the proper commitment papers having been prepared and his mother notified of the change but not permitted to accompany him, Clyde was removed to Auburn, the Western penitentiary of the State of New York, where in the “death house” or “Murderers’ Row,” as it was called — as gloomy and torturesome an inferno as one could imagine any human compelled to endure — a combination of some twenty- two cells on two separate levels — he was to be restrained until ordered retried or executed.
Yet as he traveled from Bridgeburg to this place, impressive crowds at every station — young and old — men, women and children — all seeking a glimpse of the astonishingly youthly slayer.
And girls and women, under the guise of kindly interest, but which, at best, spelled little more than a desire to achieve a facile intimacy with this daring and romantic, if unfortunate figure, throwing him a flower here and there and calling to him gayly and loudly as the train moved out from one station or another:
“Hello, Clyde!
Hope to see you soon again.
Don’t stay too long down there.”
“If you take an appeal, you’re sure to be acquitted.
We hope so, anyhow.”
And with Clyde not a little astonished and later even heartened by this seemingly favorable discrepancy between the attitude of the crowds in Bridgeburg and this sudden, morbid, feverish and even hectic curiosity here, bowing and smiling and even waving with his hand.
Yet thinking, none the less,
“I am on the way to the death house and they can be so friendly.
It is a wonder they dare.”
And with Kraut and Sissel, his guards, because of the distinction and notoriety of being both his captors and jailors, as well also because of these unusual attentions from passengers on the train and individuals in these throngs without being themselves flattered and ennobled.
But after this one brief colorful flight in the open since his arrest, past these waiting throngs and over winter sunlit fields and hills of snow that reminded him of Lycurgus, Sondra, Roberta, and all that he had so kaleidoscopically and fatally known in the twenty months just past, the gray and restraining walls of Auburn itself — with, once he was presented to a clerk in the warden’s office and his name and crime entered in the books — himself assigned to two assistants, who saw to it that he was given a prison bath and hair cut — all the wavy, black hair he so much admired cut away — a prison-striped uniform and hideous cap of the same material, prison underwear and heavy gray felt shoes to quiet the restless prison tread in which in time he might indulge, together with the number, 77221.
And so accoutered, immediately transferred to the death house proper, where in a cell on the ground floor he was now locked — a squarish light clean space, eight by ten feet in size and fitted with sanitary plumbing as well as a cot bed, a table, a chair and a small rack for books.
And here then, while he barely sensed that there were other cells about him — ranging up and down a wide hall — he first stood — and then seated himself — now no longer buoyed by the more intimate and sociable life of the jail at Bridgeburg — or those strange throngs and scenes that had punctuated his trip here.
The hectic tensity and misery of these hours!
That sentence to die; that trip with all those people calling to him; that cutting of his hair downstairs in that prison barber shop — and by a convict; the suit and underwear that was now his and that he now had on.
There was no mirror here — or anywhere — but no matter — he could feel how he looked.
This baggy coat and trousers and this striped cap.
He threw it hopelessly to the floor.
For but an hour before he had been clothed in a decent suit and shirt and tie and shoes, and his appearance had been neat and pleasing as he himself had thought as he left Bridgeburg.
But now — how must he look?
And to-morrow his mother would be coming — and later Jephson or Belknap, maybe.
God!
But worse — there, in that cell directly opposite him, a sallow and emaciated and sinister-looking Chinaman in a suit exactly like his own, who had come to the bars of his door and was looking at him out of inscrutable slant eyes, but as immediately turning and scratching himself — vermin, maybe, as Clyde immediately feared.
There had been bedbugs at Bridgeburg.
A Chinese murderer.
For was not this the death house?
But as good as himself here.
And with a garb like his own.
Thank God visitors were probably not many.
He had heard from his mother that scarcely any were allowed — that only she and Belknap and Jephson and any minister he chose might come once a week.
But now these hard, white-painted walls brightly lighted by wide unobstructed skylights by day and as he could see — by incandescent lamps in the hall without at night — yet all so different from Bridgeburg — so much more bright or harsh illuminatively.
For there, the jail being old, the walls were a gray-brown, and not very clean — the cells larger, the furnishings more numerous — a table with a cloth on it at times, books, papers, a chess — and checker-board — whereas here — here was nothing, these hard narrow walls — the iron bars rising to a heavy solid ceiling above — and that very, very heavy iron door which yet — like the one at Bridgeburg, had a small hole through which food would be passed, of course.
But just then a voice from somewhere:
“Hey! we got a new one wid us, fellers!
Ground tier, second cell, east.”