en supposed, because it was
hard for an ex-convict to get an honest job after he got out. "Damned
near impossible, unless he has mighty good friends," the official added
feelingly.

Was not that a reflection on the system? Well, the Warden wasn't there
to pass on that--the Prison Association had undertaken to handle the
question, but he couldn't see that they'd done much with it.

But the innocent men--the men who were afterwards acquitted--they would
be--they were not ex-convicts? No, the Warden guessed they were all
right. And the pardoned ones? The Warden smiled.

"I'm not very strong on pardons myself," he admitted. "I'd about as soon
employ an out-and-outer. Too much politics in pardons for me. Moreover,
sometimes they're not appreciated. We had a queer fellow here once who
served five years, and was a model prisoner too. Well, when he was
discharged someone met him at the station with a pardon from the
Governor. 'You cur,' he shouted at the man who handed it to him, 'get
pardons for those who need them!' With that he tore the paper into bits,
threw the pieces in the man's face and gave him a terrible thrashing. We
never learned what the trouble was, though the fellow served two more
years for the assault. But some of us thought he must have been innocent
all the time. However, when he came out again nobody offered him another
pardon."

The next day Mr. Constable visited the prison without the escort of the
Warden. In the work-rooms the silence of the workers oppressed him, but
it was better than the language of some of the under-keepers which
fairly sickened him. He had heard foul-mouthed men hurl epithets and
profanity back and forth often enough, but never before had he seen the
frightful answers which human beings can make without the utterance of a
syllable. Many times that day he saw murder done with the eyes--the
foulest, fiercest, most glutting murder of which the human heart is
capable. In every regulation he saw manhood debased, individuality
destroyed, education neglected, reformation defeated, and glancing from
the faces of the convicts to those of the keepers, he could not say
which this "splendid system" had most brutalised.

Then Mr. Constable returned to his cheerless room at the hotel and
locking himself in, lay down on the sofa, only to offer his body as a
pavement for files of close-cropped and shaven men who passed over him
with the steady tramp-tramp, tramp-tramp of the lock-step, stamping