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When it came time to begin the services the Higher Lifer started to get up, but the Doc was already on his feet, and he whispered to him: "Set down, young man"; and the young man sat. The Doc had a way of talking that didn't need a gun to back it up.
Hanged if I wouldn't almost lief risk a lifer out at Botany Bay for the sake o' wringing my fine-feathered bird myself, but I daren't. If he was to see me in it, all 'ud be up. You must do it. Get along; you look uncommon respectable. If your coat-tails was a little longer, you might right and away be took for a parson."
"Yes, yes; but we'll put you in this one for the present," replied the gentleman, as he opened the door and ushered Baker within. The room was comfortably furnished, and this perplexed Baker more and more. "Hain't you got it wrong?" he persisted. "Lifer, you know. Hunder'd'n One lifer plays off crazy forty lashes every Monday. Don't you know?"
The men sit in a sort of rifle pit and weave on an upright hand-loom, and the patterns on great carpets or the finest of silk rugs grow out of their wicked brains only; there's no pattern in front of them to copy from; they do it by heart. You know a "Lifer" from a "Timer" by the colour of their skull caps; one is white, the other brown I think the brown is the "Lifer."
He sent word to the Higher Lifer by one of the Pillars that he reckoned he was counting on him to preach a farewell sermon the next Sunday, and the young man, who'd been keeping in the background till whatever was going to drop, dropped, came around to welcome him in person. But while the Doc had been doing a heap of praying for grace, he didn't propose to take any chances, and he didn't see him.
But he is I hope I may now say, he was; for he was to have been paroled the other day; he was a lifer, and a picturesque and wholly innocuous figure he was, then, permitted to pursue this industry, and visitors used to come and watch him do it; but he, too, was most useful to the prison press agent, and owed the indulgence to that functionary.
"They've got me, Mame!" "Got you? They'll never get you!" her startled scream rang out. "Wally, d'you know what the next term means? It's a lifer, on any count! I don't know what he means about any silver plate, but it's a bluff! Don't let him get your nerve!" "Is it a bluff, Pennold?" asked Morrow, with dominant insistence. The broken figure huddled in the chair shuddered uncontrollably.
"Look here," said he; "you keep up a good heart, and get as many V G's as you can. Then you'll get out on ticket-of-leave in fifteen years: it ain't as if you were a lifer." He meant it for consolation; but this unvarnished statement of the very best that could by possibility befall poor Richard seemed only to deepen his despondency.
But was he capable of no other employment? Might he not have been given the relief of a change? Maybe; but what would be the use? They couldn't be bothered finding him new stunts all the time, since he had learned how to do that one thing satisfactorily. He was a "lifer."
He'd make every other man here a lifer!" He laughed in the prison way silently, in his throat and went away, after warning us that it was near nine o'clock. Our watches had been taken away from us; no doubt, a prisoner might commit suicide by sticking his watch in his windpipe, or he could bribe a guard with it to bring him cigarette papers, or "dope."
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