This wild man, who had become a thing of terror with his hand against his fellows, would be sitting close to the bars, his glowing, uncomprehending eyes peering with a glance of cringing supplication for my coming.
He would take the biscuits from my hands and eat them before me. For fourteen years no one had ever seen the Prison Demon eat. His food would be shoved through the grating. He would not touch it. In the night he would drag it into his cell.
We would talk about the prison. Ira could answer intelligently. Then I would try to draw his history from him. I could hardly ever get more than three or four words. He couldn't remember. He would point to his head and press his hand against it.
We knew that Ira was in for murder, that he had choked a man to death. No one knew the circumstances leading to the crime. No one had ever cared. I thought I would send a letter to some friends if he had any. They might help him.
"Don't know. Head hurts," he would answer in a guttural indistinct voice. "Got a lick on the head once. Coal car hit me.
Night and night, after the most laborious pauses, he would give me the same answers. He wanted to remember. When he failed he would press his powerful hands together and turn to me in abject, appealing despair. But once he seemed to have a gleam of recollection.
I became absorbed in piecing together the solitary words he muttered. I must have been sitting there half an hour. A runner from the warden came shouting down the main corridor for me.
"Where in hell have you been serenading?" Darby thundered. On a quick impulse I told him of the demon and the apple.
"Ira's only a poor demented creature. He got a lick on the head once. He's harmless as an infant if you handle him right."
Darby looked at me as though I were mad.
"It's a fact. He eats out of my hand."
"If that's true then I'll take him out of there."
We went down the next morning to the cage. The warden ordered the door opened. I could see the dark outlines of Ira's figure. The guard was frightened. Darby took the key, turned the lock and stepped forward. If he had suddenly flung himself under a moving engine, death would not have seemed more certain. Ira drew back, hesitated, then leaped with all his mighty bulk toward Darby.
"Ira!" I shouted. The massive figure stiffened as though an electric voltage had suddenly gone through him. The Prison Demon dropped his arm to the ground and came creeping toward me.
"Be good, Ira," I whispered.
The warden braced himself. We went into the tiny cell room. The stench and filth of the hole came up like a sickening wave against us. "Come outside, Ira," the warden said. I nodded. "If I give you a good job, Ira, will you behave?"
It was the first time Ira had heard a kind word from a prison official. He looked about, his eyes narrowing distrustfully, and began to edge away from the warden.
"He'll treat you square, Ira."
The towering giant could have crushed me in his two hands. He was about a foot taller than I, but he shuffled along at my side, looking down at me with a meek docility that filled the guards with wonder.
The warden made straight for the hospital, ordered good food and skilled attention for the Demon. Three weeks later the Ohio penitentiary had a soft- tongued Hercules in the place of the insensate beast that had been Ira Maralatt. The doctors had found the skull pressing on the brain, operated and removed the "dent" that had sent Ira into his mad fits of murderous, unreasoning rage. Memory returned to him. Ira told a story, moving and compelling in its elemental tragedy.
He had been an iron puddler in the steel mills of Cleveland. Before a furnace, vast and roaring as a hell pit, the half -nude puddler works, stirring the molten iron. He breathes in a red hot, blasting hurricane. He moves in a bellowing clamor louder than the shout of a thousand engines. Only the strongest can withstand the deafening tumult, the scorching air of that bedlam. Ira Maralatt was one of these.
There came a strike in the mills. Ira went home to his wife. He had been married but a year. They had been paying down on a little home. Ira could get no work. The walkout dashed their hopes.
"I'm going to Canaltown, to the mines," he told the girl- wife one day. "I'll be back as soon as it's settled." She walked with him to the gate. He never saw her again. When Ira returned to the little home all that had been dear and sacred to him was gone.
In West Virginia Maralatt got a job in the coal mines. He was working near one of the pillars. A coal car shot along the tracks to the chutes to be filled. The car with its tonnage started down the grade.
Just at the pillar it should have switched. Instead, it came heading straight toward Ira. Further down the track twenty men were working. The car, with the tremendous speed of the runaway, would have crushed them to a pulp.
There was one chance of escape for them. Ira took it. The gigantic hands went out, caught the bolting car and with a smashing force sent the top-heavy four-wheeler sideways.
In the terrible impact Ira caromed against the wall of the mine. The lives of twenty men were saved. The mashed and unconscious form of the gigantic Maralatt was dragged out and sent to the hospital.
Without a thought of himself and his own life, Ira Maralatt had hurled himself across the path of the runaway coal car. If he had died his fellows would have exalted the memory of the man whose splendid courage had saved twenty lives. Ira lived but the sacrifice took a dearer thing than mere existence. It gave him not honor, but a shameful brand. He became the Prison Demon.
After the tragic disaster in the coal mine, Ira lay for months in the hospital. He was finally sent out as cured.
The strike at the steel mills had been settled. Back to Cleveland and the little home the iron puddler went.
There was a pathway, hedged with cowslips, leading up to the door. Ira walked quickly, meaning to surprise the wife who had not heard from him in the months he had been at the hospital.
There were new curtains at the window. A hand rustled muslin drapery aside. A strange face looked with doubtful question on the man at the hedge.
"Good morning, sir," the woman said.
"Good morning, indeed," Maralatt answered, mystified and startled.
"Who lives here?"
"What's that to you?" the woman snapped.
"This is my home and my wife's!" Suddenly excited and trembling, Ira turned upon the strange woman.
"Where is my wife?" Where is Dora Maralatt?"
"Oh, her! She's gone. I don't know where. Got put out. Are you the missing husband?" the woman sneered. "Well, there's your bag and baggage over in the lot there!" With a laughing shrug, she pushed the curtain to its place.
Over in the lot, dumped out like a rubbish heap, Maralatt found the remnants of his home. There was the chest with the wrought-steel corners he had given Dora for a birthday gift—there was the dining-room table and the six chairs that had been the pride of the girl's heart. There, too, was a thing Ira had never seen before—a clothes basket tied with pink stuff and ribbons.
Distracted, enraged, like one suddenly demented, he ran back to the cottage door and banged on the panel.
"Go away from here with your noise," the woman called. "I'll have you arrested!"
"Open the door," Maralatt stormed, "please, I'll not come in. Open it just a moment. My wife, did you see her go? Is she alive? Tell me just that. How long is she gone? Where can she be?"
The woman softened. "Don't get so excited and I'll tell you. She went out alive. But she was pretty well done in. She looked about gone. I don't know where she went. Maybe she's dead now."
"The baby—did it die, too?"