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The next is a lifer, and I've got to use the knife or a barker, if I run up against trouble, for I'll never wear the Queen's jewelry again! I've sworn it!" The man's eyes were gleaming now like burning coals, "I'll do the grand, and then, take off my beard and change my garb! I look twenty years older in a stubble chin. I can watch them from the public at Rozel Pier.
"Just so," said the other, nodding; "and it so happened that yours truly, Bob Balfour, was caught in the very act." "And what term of punishment do you expect for such a " "Such a misfortune as that?" answered Mr. Balfour, hastening to relieve Richard's embarrassment. "Well, if I had got the swag, I should considering the testimonials that will be handed in have been a lifer.
He is an old man, and his folks crossed the plains in the early days. I have talked with him, and he has verified the massacre in which Jesse Fancher was killed. When this old lifer was a child there was much talk in his family of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The children in the wagons, he said, were saved, because they were too young to tell tales. All of which I submit.
They voted him two donation parties a year as long as he lived, and elected the Higher Lifer as the permanent pastor of the church. Deacon Wiggleford suggested the pastor emeritus extra. He didn't quite know what it meant, but he'd heard it in Chicago, and it sounded pretty good, and as if it ought to be a heap of satisfaction to a fellow who was being fired.
The principal individual who caused most trouble in the prison was a "Lifer," I think, a most remarkably long, thin man, actually eel-like. He had escaped three times. The last hole he escaped by he made with a nail, and it had just been bricked up and plastered over.
In that day of questioning, I would rather take my chances with the man sitting in the chair in the prison tailor's shop for seven years, a "lifer"! Infinite mercy may find means to compensate him for what we robbed him of; but what can it do with us, the robbers? In the Federal prison there were a score or more of lifers, with some of whom it was my fortune to become acquainted.
He regarded his prisoner with the almost friendly interest taken in his quarry by the slayer of wild beasts to whose rifle has fallen some peculiarly rare and dangerous "specimen." He enlivened the road with anecdotes of famous criminals, and each story invariably concluded with a facetious reference to the "chair" or a "lifer."
He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed nothing of you?" "Not a ha'porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer." "And was that Honor! the only time you worked out, in this part of the country?" "The only time." "What might have been your opinion of the place?" "A most beastly place.
But the men to whose hands the "lifer" is entrusted found in it a means of making him more readily amenable to discipline by holding over him the threat of an adverse report should he prove intractable.
There were names historic and names mushroomic; names that the Conqueror might have called in his muster-roll; names that had been, clearly, tossed into the upper stratum of civilized lifer by a millwheel or a merchant-stool. Against them the baronet had written M. or Po. or Pr. signifying, Money, Position, Principles, favouring the latter with special brackets.
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