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 every convict there we implanted the ambition to become even as we and run a graft.  Saviours of society—­I guess yes.

Here was a hungry man without any tobacco.  Maybe he was a profligate and had used it all up on himself.  Very good; he had a pair of suspenders.  I exchanged half a dozen rations of bread for it—­or a dozen rations if the suspenders were very good.  Now I never wore suspenders, but that didn’t matter.  Around the corner lodged a long-timer, doing ten years for manslaughter.  He wore suspenders, and he wanted a pair.  I could trade them to him for some of his meat.  Meat was what I wanted.  Or perhaps he had a tattered, paper-covered novel.  That was treasure-trove.  I could read it and then trade it off to the bakers for cake, or to the cooks for meat and vegetables, or to the firemen for decent coffee, or to some one or other for the newspaper that occasionally filtered in, heaven alone knows how.  The cooks, bakers, and firemen were prisoners like myself, and they lodged in our hall in the first row of cells over us.

In short, a full-grown system of barter obtained in the Erie County Pen.  There was even money in circulation.  This money was sometimes smuggled in by the short-timers, more frequently came from the barber-shop graft, where the newcomers were mulcted, but most of all flowed from the cells of the long-timers—­though how they got it I don’t know.

What of his preeminent position, the First Hall-man was reputed to be quite wealthy.  In addition to his miscellaneous grafts, he grafted on us.  We farmed the general wretchedness, and the First Hall-man was Farmer-General over all of us.  We held our particular grafts by his permission, and we had to pay for that permission.  As I say, he was reputed to be wealthy; but we never saw his money, and he lived in a cell all to himself in solitary grandeur.