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.”

I had no friends in the place. But the fact that I had been with Smiler, that I had kept my mouth shut, and that Shorty had come forward to help me, gave me a certain fixed status in the prison that nothing could shake but some act of my own. I was naturally pleased to find myself taken up by the “best people,” as Shorty and his friends called themselves, and accepted as one of them.

Shorty now took me into the prison where we found the head trusty who was one of the “best people” himself, a thoroughgoing bum from the road. The term “bum” is not used here in any cheap or disparaging sense. In those days it meant any kind of a traveling thief. It has long since fallen into disuse. The yegg of today was the bum of twenty years ago.

“This party,” said Shorty, “is one of the ‘Johnson family.’ ” (The bums called themselves “Johnsons” probably because they were so numerous.) “He’s good people and I want to get him fixed up for a cell with the right folks.”