United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
His sentence was thirty days in default of three hundred dollars, and
by two o'clock he was on the boat to the Island, and by three he had
discarded the blue shirt and red suspenders of an iceman for the gray
stiff cloth of a prisoner. He took the whole trouble terribly to
heart. He knew that if Old Man Casey, as he called him, heard of it
there would be no winning his daughter with his consent, and he feared
that the girl herself would have grave doubts concerning him. He was
especially cast down when he thought of the dance on Wednesday night,
and of how she would go off with Patsy Moffat. And what made it worse
was the thought that if he did not return he would lose his position
at the ice company's stable, and then marriage with Mary would be
quite impossible. He grieved over this all day, and speculated as to
what his family would think of him. His circle of friends was so well
known to other mutual friends that he did not dare to ask any of them
to bail him out, for this would have certainly come to Casey's ears.
He could do nothing but wait. And yet thirty days was a significant
number to his friends, and an absence of that duration would be hard
to explain. On Wednesday morning, two days after his arrest, he was
put to work with a gang of twenty men breaking stone on the roadway
that leads from the insane quarters to the penitentiary. It was a
warm, sunny day, and the city, lying just across the narrow channel,
never looked more beautiful. It seemed near enough for him to reach
out his hand and touch it. And the private yachts and big
excursion-boats that passed, banging out popular airs and alive with
bunting, made Hefty feel very bitter. He determined that when he got
back he would go look up the policeman who had assaulted him and break
his head with a brick in a stocking. This plan cheered him somewhat,
until he thought again of Mary Casey at the dance that night with
Patsy Moffat, and this excited him so that he determined madly to
break away and escape. His first impulse was to drop his crowbar and
jump into the river on the instant, but his cooler judgment decided
him to wait.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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