He was
given a job which procured him some indulgences, and was never punished.
But if a life sentence for a guilty man be intolerable, what shall be
said if he were guiltless? Think it over in your leisure moments.
I find my list is far too long to be dismissed in one chapter; and in
cases where the men are still in confinement, discussion of them might
prove injurious. There was a young fellow there who looked like a
slender boy of seventeen; he was really over thirty years of age. But he
had been imprisoned since his fifteenth year, and his face since then
had not developed or taken the contours of manhood; and his manner was
boyish. He was well educated in the grammar school sense, however,
though I believe he had picked up most of what he knew in prison. He had
a distinct, emphatic way of speaking, and believed, I fancy, that he was
quite a man of the world, though, of course, he was almost totally
devoid of other than prison experience. He would have been an
interesting study, had not the pathos of his condition, of which he was
himself unaware, made one shrink from probing it.
He had killed a man at the instigation of and under the influence of a
step-father, who wished the man removed for ends of his own, and forced
the child (he was nothing else) to take the job off his hands, and the
law of Indian Territory, which was the scene of the affair, condemned
him for life.
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