The Minister's Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker. William Dean Howells
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The girl was not of the sort whose tongues are paralysed by terror. “Oh, I'll be sure to appear, captain! Indeed I will, captain! You needn't lock me up, captain! Lock me up!” she broke off indignantly. “It would be a pretty idea if I was first to be robbed of my satchel and then put in prison for it overnight! A great kind of law that would be! Why, I never heard of such a thing! I think it's a perfect shame! I want to know if that's the way you do with poor things that you don't know about?”
“That's about the size of it,” said the captain, permitting himself a smile, in which the officer joined.
“Well, it's a shame!” cried the girl, now carried far beyond her personal interest in the matter.
The captain laughed outright. “It is pretty rough. But what you going to do?”
“Do? Why, I'd——” But here she stopped for want of science, and added from emotion, “I'd do anything before I'd do that.”
“Well,” said the captain, “then I understand you'll come round to the police court and give your testimony in the morning?”
“Yes,” said the girl, with a vague, compassionate glance at Lemuel, who had stood there dumb throughout the colloquy.
“If you don't, I shall have to send for you,” said the captain.
“Oh, I'll come,” replied the girl, in a sort of disgust, and her eyes still dwelt upon Lemuel.
“That's all,” returned the captain, and the girl, accepting her dismissal, went out.
Now that it was too late, Lemuel could break from his nightmare. “Oh, don't let her go! I ain't the one! I was running after a fellow that passed off a counterfeit ten-dollar bill on me in the Common yesterday. I never touched her satchel. I never saw her before——”
“What's that?” demanded the captain sharply.
“You've got the wrong one!” cried Lemuel. “I never did anything to the girl.”
“Why, you fool!” retorted the captain angrily; “why didn't you say that when she was here, instead of standing there like a dumb animal? Heigh?”
Lemuel's sudden flow of speech was stopped at its source again. His lips were locked; he could not answer a word.
The captain went on angrily. “If you'd spoke up in time, may be I might 'a' let you go. I don't want to do a man any harm if I can't do him some good. Next time, if you've got a tongue in your head, use it. I can't do anything for you now. I got to commit you.”
He paused between his sentences, as if to let Lemuel speak, but the boy said nothing. The captain pulled his book impatiently toward him, and took up his pen.
“What's your name?”
“Lemuel Barker.”
“I thought may be there was a mistake all the while,” said the captain to the officer, while he wrote down Lemuel's name. “But if a man hain't got sense enough to speak for himself, I can't put the words in his mouth. Age?” he demanded savagely of Lemuel.
“Twenty.”
“Weight?”
“A hundred and thirty.”
“I could see with half an eye that the girl wan't very sanguine about it. But what's the use? I couldn't tell her she was mistaken. Height?”
“Five feet six.”
“Occupation?”
“I help mother carry on the farm.”
“Just as I expected!” cried the captain. “Slow as a yoke of oxen. Residence?”
“Willoughby Pastures.”
The captain could not contain himself. “Well, Willoughby Pastures—or whatever your name is—you'll get yourself into the papers this time, sure. And I must say it serves you right. If you can't speak for yourself, who's going to speak for you, do you suppose? Might send round to the girl's house——No, she wouldn't be there, ten to one. You've got to go through now. Next time don't be such an infernal fool.”
The captain blotted his book and shut it.
“We'll have to lock him up here to-night,” he said to the policeman. “Last batch has gone round. Better go through him.” But Lemuel had been gone through before, and the officer's search of his pockets only revealed their emptiness. The captain struck a bell on his desk. “If it ain't all right, you can make it right with the judge in the morning,” he added to Lemuel.
Lemuel looked up at the policeman who had arrested him. He was an elderly man, with a kindly face, squarely fringed with a chin-beard. The boy tried to speak, but he could only repeat, “I never saw her before. I never touched her.”
The policeman looked at him and then at the captain.
“Too late now,” said the latter. “Got to go through the mill this time. But if it ain't right, you can make it right.”
Another officer had answered the bell, and the captain indicated with a comprehensive roll of his head that he was to take Lemuel away and lock him up.
“Oh, my!” moaned the boy. As they passed the door of a small room opening on an inner corridor, a smell of coffee gushed out of it; the officer stopped, and Lemuel caught sight of two gentlemen in the room with a policeman, who was saying——
“Get a cup of coffee here when we want it. Try one?” he suggested hospitably.
“No, thank you,” said one of the gentlemen, with the bland respectfulness of people being shown about an institution. “How many of you are attached to this station?”
“Eighty-one,” said the officer. “Largest station in town. Gang goes on at one in the morning, and another at eight, and another at six P.M.” He looked inquiringly at the officer in charge of Lemuel.
“Any matches?” asked this officer.
“Everything but money,” said the other, taking some matches out of his waistcoat pocket.
Lemuel's officer went ahead, lighting the gas along the corridor, and the boy followed, while the other officer brought up the rear with the visitor whom he was lecturing. They passed some neat rooms, each with two beds in it, and he answered some question: “Tramps? Not much! Give them a board when they're drunk; send 'em round to the Wayfarers' Lodge when they're sober. These officers' rooms.”
Lemuel followed his officer downstairs into a basement, where on either side of a white-walled, brilliantly lighted, specklessly clean corridor, there were numbers of cells, very clean, and smelling of fresh whitewash. Each had a broad low shelf in it, and a bench opposite, a little wider than a man's body. Lemuel suddenly felt himself pushed into one of them, and then a railed door of iron was locked upon him. He stood motionless in the breadth of light and lines of shade which the gas-light cast upon him through the door, and knew the gentlemen were looking at him as their guide talked.
“Well, fill up pretty well, Sunday nights. Most the arrests for drunkenness. But all the arrests before seven o'clock sent to the City Prison. Only keep them that come in afterwards.”
One of the gentlemen looked into the cell opposite Lemuel's. “There seems to be only one bunk. Do you ever put more into a cell?”
“Well, hardly ever, if they're men. Lot o' women brought in 'most always ask to be locked up together for company.”
“I don't see where they sleep,” said the visitor. “Do they lie on the floor?”
The officer laughed. “Sleep? They don't want to sleep. What they want to do is to set up all night, and talk it over.”
Both of the visitors laughed.
“Some