United States or Portugal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It reached me, at last, that Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger, the snitcher, the coward, and the stool, was returned for a fresh forgery. It will be remembered that it was this Cecil Winwood who concocted the fairy story that I had changed the plant of the non-existent dynamite and who was responsible for the five years I had then spent in solitary. I decided to kill Cecil Winwood.
It was true that there had been no connection between them in years, but he remembered Jimmy's attitude toward the "snitcher," as well as toward the man who "held out" on his pals; and behind his cupidity was a lurking caution which was made manifest when he walked into the kitchen and found Mrs. Pennold with her shriveled arms immersed in the washtub.
I never heard of him turnin' a real trick himself, an' he never got caught at nothin' again, but he chummed in with the gang, an' he always seemed to have coin enough. I ain't seen him in more'n a year. The last I heard of him, he was workin' as a stool-pigeon an' snitcher for the worst scoundrel of the lot." "Who was that?" asked Morrow. Pennold hesitated and then replied with dogged reluctance.
"What's done's done," replied Jim. "I'm no snitcher, so you know you're safe. But I'm through with you." Sara turned to Uncle Denny, injured innocence in his face. "What is the matter with him, Mr. Dennis?" he exclaimed. "Still Jim, me boy, go down to the machine while I talk with Sara," said Dennis. "No, there is no use talking," insisted Jim.
But scarcely had he descended the steps of the ramshackle little porch when the voice of Mame Pennold reached him, pitched in a shrill key of emotional exultation. "Oh, Wally, Wally! Thank God you ain't a snitcher! Thank God you didn't tell!"
Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters. Listen, and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison, a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet. He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher.
Word Of The Day