Full Text Archive

Full Text Archive
https://www.fulltextarchive.com
To old Chapin the situation was more or less puzzling. This was the famous Frank A.
Cowperwood whom he had read about, the noted banker and treasury-looter. He and his co-
partner in crime, Stener, were destined to serve, as he had read, comparatively long terms here.
Five hundred thousand dollars was a large sum of money in those days, much more than five
million would have been forty years later. He was awed by the thought of what had become of
it--how Cowperwood managed to do all the things the papers had said he had done. He had a
little formula of questions which he usually went through with each new prisoner--asking him if
he was sorry now for the crime he had committed, if he meant to do better with a new chance, if
his father and mother were alive, etc.; and by the manner in which they answered these
questions--simply, regretfully, defiantly, or otherwise--he judged whether they were being
adequately punished or not. Yet he could not talk to Cowperwood as he now saw or as he
would to the average second-story burglar, store-looter, pickpocket, and plain cheap thief and
swindler. And yet he scarcely knew how else to talk.
"Well, now," he went on, "I don't suppose you ever thought you'd get to a place like this, did you,
Mr. Cowperwood?"
"I never did," replied Frank, simply. "I wouldn't have believed it a few months ago, Mr. Chapin. I
don't think I deserve to be here now, though of course there is no use of my telling you that."
He saw that old Chapin wanted to moralize a little, and he was only too glad to fall in with his
mood. He would soon be alone with no one to talk to perhaps, and if a sympathetic
understanding could be reached with this man now, so much the better. Any port in a storm; any
straw to a drowning man.
"Well, no doubt all of us makes mistakes," continued Mr. Chapin, superiorly, with an amusing
faith in his own value as a moral guide and reformer. "We can't just always tell how the plans we
think so fine are coming out, can we? You're here now, an' I suppose you're sorry certain things
didn't come out just as you thought; but if you had a chance I don't suppose you'd try to do just
as you did before, now would yuh?"
"No, Mr. Chapin, I wouldn't, exactly," said Cowperwood, truly enough, "though I believed I was
right in everything I did. I don't think legal justice has really been done me."
"Well, that's the way," continued Chapin, meditatively, scratching his grizzled head and looking
genially about. "Sometimes, as I allers says to some of these here young fellers that comes in
here, we don't know as much as we thinks we does. We forget that others are just as smart as
we are, and that there are allers people that are watchin' us all the time. These here courts and
jails and detectives--they're here all the time, and they get us. I gad"-- Chapin's moral version of
"by God"--"they do, if we don't behave."
"Yes," Cowperwood replied, "that's true enough, Mr. Chapin."
"Well," continued the old man after a time, after he had made a few more solemn, owl-like, and
yet well-intentioned remarks, "now here's your bed, and there's your chair, and there's your
wash-stand, and there's your water-closet. Now keep 'em all clean and use 'em right." (You
would have thought he was making Cowperwood a present of a fortune.) "You're the one's got
to make up your bed every mornin' and keep your floor swept and your toilet flushed and your
cell clean. There hain't anybody here'll do that for yuh. You want to do all them things the first
274 / 312

---