g was
emptied, the other hall-man took my place with a full tray. And when
his was emptied, I took his place with a full tray. Thus the line
tramped steadily by, each man reaching with his right hand and taking
one ration of bread from the extended tray.

The task of the First Hall-man was different. He used a club. He stood
beside the tray and watched. The hungry wretches could never get over
the delusion that sometime they could manage to get two rations of
bread out of the tray. But in my experience that sometime never came.
The club of the First Hall-man had a way of flashing out--quick as the
stroke of a tiger's claw--to the hand that dared ambitiously. The
First Hall-man was a good judge of distance, and he had smashed so
many hands with that club that he had become infallible. He never
missed, and he usually punished the offending convict by taking his
one ration away from him and sending him to his cell to make his meal
off of hot water.

And at times, while all these men lay hungry in their cells, I have
seen a hundred or so extra rations of bread hidden away in the cells
of the hall-men. It would seem absurd, our retaining this bread. But
it was one of our grafts. We were economic masters inside our hall,
turning the trick in ways quite similar to the economic masters of
civilization. We controlled the food-supply of the population, and,
just like our brother bandits outside, we made the people pay through
the nose for it. We peddled the bread. Once a week, the men who worked
in the yard received a five-cent plug of chewing tobacco. This chewing
tobacco was the coin of the realm. Two or three rations of bread for a
plug was the way we exchanged, and they traded, not because they loved
tobacco less, but because they loved bread more. Oh, I know, it was
like taking candy from a baby, but what would you? We had to live. And
certainly there should be some reward for initiative and enterprise.
Besides, we but patterned ourselves after our betters outside the
walls, who, on a larger scale, and under the respectable disguise of
merchants, bankers, and captains of industry, did precisely what we
were doing. What awful things would have happened to those poor
wretches if it hadn't been for us, I can't imagine. Heaven knows we
put bread into circulation in the Erie County Pen. Ay, and we
encouraged frugality and thrift ... in the poor devils who forewent
their tobacco. And then there was our example. In the breast of