Slocum's Breakout - Jake Logan [3]
Once freed, he went into the room and saw a half-dozen guards, all with rifles trained on the prisoner now shorn of his irons.
“Git yer worthless clothes off and take a shower. Then put your uniform on,” the guard said to the prisoner. Clutching his coarse black-striped white canvas prison uniform, Slocum stripped naked, followed the other prisoner into what was closer to a sheep dip than a shower. He came out coughing and eyes watering. With the guards prodding him, he managed to get into the heavy prison garb.
He put up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, now directly overhead. He was in a yard with dozens of other prisoners.
“You new prisoners will be assigned your cells at the end of exercise. Try not to get killed ’fore then.” The guard speaking laughed harshly, making his real intentions known. If every one of the inmates died, he would be just fine with that.
Slocum stumbled around, getting his balance back after being chained for so long. He had been arrested down in San Francisco after Conchita turned him in as Jarvis. They had pored over wanted posters and found one for the wanted convict who had escaped before being sent to San Quentin, ensuring immediate transport to the prison. Best of all, there hadn’t been a sketch of Jasper Jarvis.
Slocum had agreed to assume the identity of Jarvis since his crime was relatively minor—he knew that by the twenty-dollar reward. No one was in a hurry to recapture Jarvis, and the ease with which he had been sent to San Quentin proved that. He was a minor annoyance, not a big clap of thunder to rile up everyone.
As he walked around, he got his bearings and studied the walls, the guards, and the security. He saw that Doc hadn’t been joking about how difficult it would be to escape unless a lot of money greased a guard’s palm. The ground was rocky and would be difficult to tunnel through. The walls were both sturdy and tall. While they might be scaled, it had to be at night. The guards in the towers at each corner of the penitentiary alertly watched their wards below in the yard. That might slack off with time; Slocum had no idea how long the guards had been on duty or if they might catch a few winks when the officers weren’t looking.
Chancing on a sleeping guard just as he intended to climb over the wall didn’t strike him as a good escape plan.
The sound of the wagon that had brought the prisoners rattling and clanking back out drew his attention.
“Ain’t gonna hide in that,” came a gruff voice. Slocum looked over, then up. He stood six feet tall. This giant with a bushy beard, tiny, deep-set eyes, and hair so wild it might have been a tuft of black prairie grass loomed above him.
“Didn’t want to be so obvious,” Slocum said.
“You just got in. All you fish are like that, thinkin’ you kin get outta here. You cain’t. Live with it. Let ’em release you . . . unless you’re in for life.”
Slocum’s jaw tightened at the idea that an escape attempt might just mean his life. Damn Conchita! Damn his own charity. She had assured him her brother had been locked up on bogus testimony. And then she had added—
“You’ll only git tossed into solitary, tryin’ to escape. Them guards got their eyes on you, the way you’re watchin’ the wagon and all.”
“Thanks,” Slocum said.
“You got a name?”
Slocum almost answered with his own, then caught himself in time and said, “Jarvis.”
“Hmph,” the giant said. “You got a brother named Jarvis?”
Slocum stepped back a half pace and looked at the mountain of a man.
“Nope,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“I got a bone to pick with Jasper Jarvis, that’s why. The sneaky li’l toad got me locked up in here for somethin’ he done down in San Francisco.” The convict squinted hard at Slocum. “You don’t look nuthin’ like ’im, so I reckon you ain’t kin.”
The heavy canvas prison garb turned into a furnace as Slocum