in from the street, was the section known as the county jail proper, and was devoted to the care of prisoners serving short-term sentences on some judicial order.  The wing to the left was devoted exclusively to the care and control of untried prisoners.  The whole building was built of a smooth, light-colored stone, which on a snowy night like this, with the few lamps that were used in it glowing feebly in the dark, presented an eery, fantastic, almost supernatural appearance.

It was a rough and blowy night when Cowperwood started for this institution under duress.  The wind was driving the snow before it in curious, interesting whirls.  Eddie Zanders, the sheriff’s deputy on guard at the court of Quarter Sessions, accompanied him and his father and Steger.  Zanders was a little man, dark, with a short, stubby mustache, and a shrewd though not highly intelligent eye.  He was anxious first to uphold his dignity as a deputy sheriff, which was a very important position in his estimation, and next to turn an honest penny if he could.  He knew little save the details of his small world, which consisted of accompanying prisoners to and from the courts and the jails, and seeing that they did not get away.  He was not unfriendly to a particular type of prisoner—­the well-to-do or moderately prosperous—­for he had long since learned that it paid to be so.  To-night he offered a few sociable suggestions—­viz., that it was rather rough, that the jail was not so far but that they could walk, and that Sheriff Jaspers would, in all likelihood, be around or could be aroused.  Cowperwood scarcely heard.  He was thinking of his mother and his wife and of Aileen.

When the jail was reached he was led to the central portion, as it was here that the sheriff, Adlai Jaspers, had his private office.  Jaspers had recently been elected to office, and was inclined to conform to all outward appearances, in so far as the proper conduct of his office was concerned, without in reality inwardly conforming.  Thus it was generally known among the politicians that one way he had of fattening his rather lean salary was to rent private rooms and grant special privileges to prisoners who had the money to pay for the same.  Other sheriffs had done it before him.  In fact, when Jaspers was inducted into office, several prisoners were already enjoying these privileges, and it was not a part of his scheme of things to disturb them.  The rooms that he let to the “right parties,” as he invariably put it, were in the central portion of the jail, where were his own private living quarters.  They were unbarred, and not at all cell-like.  There was no particular danger of escape, for a guard stood always at his private door instructed “to keep an eye” on the general movements of all the inmates.  A prisoner so accommodated was in many respects quite a free person.  His meals were served to him in his room, if he wished.  He could read or play cards, or receive guests; and if he had any favorite musical instrument, that was not denied him.  There was just one rule that had to be complied with.  If he were a public character, and any newspaper men called, he had to be brought down-stairs into the private interviewing room in order that they might not know that he was not confined in a cell like any other prisoner.