Capitalists and financiers -- Fiction; Psychological fiction
The jail in question, which was known locally as Moyamensing Prison,
was located at Tenth and Reed Streets, and from an architectural and
artistic point of view was not actually displeasing to the eye. It
consisted of a central portion—prison, residence for the sheriff or
what you will—three stories high, with a battlemented cornice and a
round battlemented tower about one-third as high as the central portion
itself, and two wings, each two stories high, with battlemented turrets
at either end, giving it a highly castellated and consequently, from
the American point of view, a very prison-like appearance. The facade
of the prison, which was not more than thirty-five feet high for the
central portion, nor more than twenty-five feet for the wings, was set
back at least a hundred feet from the street, and was continued at
either end, from the wings to the end of the street block, by a stone
wall all of twenty feet high. The structure was not severely
prison-like, for the central portion was pierced by rather large,
unbarred apertures hung on the two upper stories with curtains, and
giving the whole front a rather pleasant and residential air. The wing
to the right, as one stood looking in from the street, was the section
known as the county jail proper, and was devoted to the care of
prisoners serving short-term sentences on some judicial order. The wing
to the left was devoted exclusively to the care and control of untried
prisoners. The whole building was built of a smooth, light-colored
stone, which on a snowy night like this, with the few lamps that were
used in it glowing feebly in the dark, presented an eery, fantastic,
almost supernatural appearance.
It was a rough and blowy night when Cowperwood started for this
institution under duress. The wind was driving the snow before it in
curious, interesting whirls. Eddie Zanders, the sheriff’s deputy on
guard at the court of Quarter Sessions, accompanied him and his father
and Steger. Zanders was a little man, dark, with a short, stubby
mustache, and a shrewd though not highly intelligent eye. He was
anxious first to uphold his dignity as a deputy sheriff, which was a
very important position in his estimation, and next to turn an honest
penny if he could. He knew little save the details of his small world,
which consisted of accompanying prisoners to and from the courts and
the jails, and seeing that they did not get away. He was not unfriendly
to a particular type of prisoner—the well-to-do or moderately
prosperous—for he had long since learned that it paid to be so.
To-night he offered a few sociable suggestions—viz., that it was rather
rough, that the jail was not so far but that they could walk, and that
Sheriff Jaspers would, in all likelihood, be around or could be
aroused. Cowperwood scarcely heard. He was thinking of his mother and
his wife and of Aileen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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