The other prisoners played poker all day in the yard on blankets, and occasionally a game of baseball, when they could get up enough ambition. The food was fair. There was no discipline. Prisoners were expected to appear at their cells at evening to be locked in, and to stay in them till they were let out in the morning. They didn’t always do that. In prison parlance, the place was a “playhouse.”

The first man to speak to me in the yard was Shorty, the safe expert we had visited. He came directly up to me and put out his hand. “Kid, that was tough about Smiler. I wanted to see you both and apologize. I thought you put me in the hole for some coin, but I found out that the people lost just what you both said. I couldn’t imagine a gambling house with a six-hundred-dollar bankroll.”

Shorty was one of the patricians of the prison, a box man doing time for bank burglary. “I’ll put you in with the right people, kid. You’re folks yourself or you wouldn’t have been with Smiler.”