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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Prisoners on
Prison Films
Jamie Bennett · Victoria Knight
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Series Editors
Michelle Brown
Department of Sociology
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA

Eamonn Carrabine
Department of Sociology
University of Essex
Colchester, UK
This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for
research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and
punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing recog-
nition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascendant
power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break down
the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of mainstream crim-
inology, media and communication studies, and cultural studies. In a late
modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop cars and carceral
spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffering, teenagers post
‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bullying and ‘justice
for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and insurrectionist groups
compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circulation on the Internet,
it is clear that images of crime and control play a powerful role in shaping
social practices. It is vital then that we become versed in the diverse ways
that crime and punishment are represented in an era of global intercon-
nectedness, not least since the very reach of global media networks is now
unparalleled.
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to
rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and crimi-
nology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale of
images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and new
theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools, as
well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, culture,
and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows, the
counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance of
the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class in
cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and culture nexus.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15057
 Jamie Bennett · Victoria Knight

Prisoners on Prison
Films
Jamie Bennett Victoria Knight
Security, Order and Counter Applied Social Sciences
Terrorism De Montfort University
Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Leicester, UK
Ser
London, UK

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

ISBN 978-3-030-60948-1 ISBN 978-3-030-60949-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60949-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
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 Foreword

It is hardly surprising that for most of the last century, the commercial
success of prison film has grown in line with incarceration rates. The
popularity of movies set in prisons is indisputable, and no one would be
surprised to find the “classics” of the genre in any “Best Prisons Film”
list of the kind so beloved of television production companies and men’s
lifestyle/culture magazines—perhaps featuring stalwarts from the past
such as The Birdman of Alcatraz, Midnight Express, Scum, The Green Mile
and, inevitably, The Shawshank Redemption which, nearly three decades
after its original release in 1994, still tops many viewers’ polls of their
favourite films of all time. Most prison films deal with universal human
themes that we all can identify with, including life, death, love, loss and
survival, which partially explains their popularity. But their longevity is
likely due to the fact that they deal with a hidden element of society that
fascinates and intrigues, a world that is unknown and unknowable to most
ordinary viewers.
What is exciting about Prisoners on Prison Films is that the researchers,
Jamie Bennett and Victoria Knight, focus on five films from the fairly
recent past (2008–2014) chosen largely because they speak to many of
the themes that underpin the experience of imprisonment, as faithfully
uncovered and recorded in some of the best examples of academic prisons
scholarship, which Bennett has skilfully drawn on to illuminate the argu-
ments and analyses in each chapter. The movies selected for the study
are very much about the contemporary prison, and three of them are
loosely based on real people living or working in the system. But more

v
vi FOREWORD

importantly, and refreshingly, the book explores the issues raised by the
five films in question through the voices of long-term prisoners viewing
them from within the walls of a prison.
The researchers are really interested in finding out whether people in
prison decode the meanings and messages of prison movies differently to
the rest of us. Of course, to some extent they are bound to, because they
are consuming these texts in relation to their personal identities, experi-
ence and sense of place—both in life generally and within the context of
the vertical and horizontal power relations that animate a prison. Thus,
we hear what the men make of common cinematic tropes including card-
board cut-out and clichéd portrayals of prisoners as cartoonish, brutal,
violent thugs, prison officers as lazy, stupid or corrupt, and prison insti-
tutions as woefully ineffective at reforming convicted offenders. But we
also learn how the participants relate what they see in the films to their
particular circumstances—their experience of the claustrophobia and fear
of incarceration, their understandings of drug dependency and mental
illness, their familiarity with conscious and unconscious racism, and their
roles as men who struggle with their own complex family backgrounds
while often having to acknowledge the pressure that their conviction has
put on their loved ones.
The research study that underpins the book is in many senses a classic
audience ethnography of the kind that first inspired me to study and
write about media consumption in prisons as a young academic moving
from media studies into criminology (Jewkes 2002). The audience-
focused “reception analysis” approach adopted by Bennett and Knight
allows them to uncover the complex ways in which viewers in prison
engage with cinematic texts through a sophisticated and first-hand under-
standing of the interplay between broad social structures such as class,
race, gender, economic disadvantage, political marginalisation and power.
But more revealingly still, it brings to light the fine-grained detail of
life in a prison institution—the competing tensions of compliance and
resistance, the salience of domesticity in prison relationships, prisoners’
ambivalence about attempts to rehabilitate and reform them, the moral
complexity of giving people in custody “hope”, the shifting sands of sexu-
ality and masculinity, the requirement that fatherhood and family must be
performed through the instrument of the prison, and the sheer fatigue and
loneliness that come with being the partner of someone who is inside.
It perhaps goes without saying that prison films are made by and are
principally about men. All the directors whose work is represented here
are male and the films are largely portrayals of what it means to be a man—
or at least the kind of man who can survive in prison. The participants in
 FOREWORD vii

the research study were all men serving long prison sentences, who will
be well versed in acceptable and unacceptable readings of masculinity at
the deep end of custody. Because prison masculinities have long been a
research interest of mine, I was especially fascinated by the men’s read-
ings of the cinematic portrayals that show the tricky navigations of legit-
imate and illegitimate ways of “doing” masculinity and the competing
and frequently conflicting demands that imprisonment places on their
gendered identities. I would love to see a follow-up study that explores
broader dimensions of gender, both in terms of the media portrayals and
the research participants.
The study described in this book incontrovertibly achieves its primary
aim of showing people in prison to be sophisticated, insightful and
discerning consumers of media. They are, after all, the experts, and they
have much to tell us about their experience as interpreted through the lens
of prison cinema. This alone makes it an intriguing and rewarding read.
Jamie Bennett’s commentaries inflected with insights from the academic
prisons’ literature add further depth and interest to this ground-breaking
study. It is also a very personal book. Those of us who have been fortu-
nate to know Jamie for many years understand him to be a wise scholar,
principled researcher, shrewd film critic and, above all, a passionate prison
reformist. Here he brings all these facets of his life together and the
book says as much about his commitment to humanising the people who
get sent to prison as it does his enthusiasm for innovation in media-
criminology scholarship. Prisoners on Prison Films is testimony to the fact
that prison film is still thriving, and that it is a significant source of infor-
mation about imprisonment, its practices, and its effects, as judged by the
people whose opinions matter most.

Yvonne Jewkes
Professor of Criminology
University of Bath
Bath, UK

Reference
Jewkes, Y. (2002). Captive audience: Media, masculinity and power in prisons.
Cullompton: Willan.
 Acknowledgements

This book has been something of a labour of love. I was first seduced
by cinema almost 30 years ago. As a teenager, scouring magazines from
the local video store, one of the films advertised that caught my eye was
Taxi Driver. The movie poster showed Robert De Niro, as Travis Bickle,
walking alone past the sleazy cinemas and peepshows of Manhattan’s 42nd
Street, hands in pockets and head bowed. It was an intriguing image, with
a dark sense of alienation seeping through. It as an image that haunted
me for many years. Getting access to films was more difficult in those
days and it was only in the early 1990s that I finally got hold of a copy,
taped from a satellite TV broadcast. I watched it in the early hours of the
morning, transfixed by such a daring and disturbing film, so different from
anything I had seen before. The ending left me in shock but also revealed
the potential of cinema to present alternative perspectives and challenge
my worldview. This started a long and ongoing education in film through
countless hours of watching.
When I started work in prisons in 1996, I combined my new career
and my interest in cinema, and began writing about prison films. Over
two decades my interest has grown and matured. This has not been solely
because of my love of cinema, but also because I have witnessed and
felt the power of the media to influence public attitudes, to reframe and
distort experiences that I have been directly involved in, and because of
the ways in which media permeates into all parts of society, including
prison life. This book is the product not of my own readings of films,

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

but draws upon audience research. It is an attempt to understand the

relationship between media representation and lived experience.
The text was written in late 2019 through to the middle of 2020, a
period in which the world faced a pandemic and daily life significantly
changed across the UK, including in prisons. I continued to work in
prisons during this time often spending protracted periods away from my
family. Drafting the text gave a welcome sense of normality and continuity
in the limited time I had away from my duties.
There are many people to thank for enabling this research to be
conducted and helping this book to come to fruition.
Firstly, I would like to thank Victoria Knight for her contribution to
this project. Although Victoria has not been actively involved in the data
analysis and drafting of this book, she was an equal partner in the design
of the study and the fieldwork. It is for these significant contributions that
she warrants an author credit.
The men who participated in this study were insightful, imaginative,
challenging and good-humoured. It was a privilege to work with them
during the screenings, discussion groups and interviews. Their contribu-
tions have made this book what it is. I will forever be grateful to them
and I wish them all the very best for their futures.
The study was supported by the prison governors, Ali Barker and
Michael Wood, who gave generously of their resources to facilitate the
project. The research was also kindly supported by De Montfort Univer-
sity, Leicester who provided funding for the transcription of focus groups
and interviews.
The text benefited from thoughtful and encouraging feedback from
some of the best minds in the business, including Yvonne Jewkes, Michael
Fiddler, David Wilson and Ben Crewe. The production and editorial team
at Palgrave MacMillan, particularly Josie Taylor, were amazingly calm and
supportive. Nothing was a crisis for them and their confidence in the
project gave stability in some challenging times.
As ever, I thank the three people who make life the joy it is—Susan, Ben
and Elizah. I was fortunate that Susan saw some potential all those years
ago and set to work trying to make me into a half-decent human being.
Your creativity, values and constant hard work are awe-inspiring. Our chil-
dren, Ben and Elizah are a joy (mostly) and it is one of the wonders of
life to watch them grow and flourish.
The final acknowledgement is for the person who gave me that old
VHS copy of Taxi Driver, taped from the television—Lesley Bruce, my
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi

Mum. Lesley has had to face injustice in her life. Her talents and ambitions
should have taken her to university, but class and gender barriers meant
that she was refused such opportunities. In early adulthood, she was a
single mother with two sons, and later a daughter, and faced life with
few material resources. Despite the challenges, she offered a stable and
supportive home and successfully guided all three children to adulthood,
including the first in the family to go on to higher education. She has
also had her own career success, while always being at the centre of an
extended family. It is only after becoming a parent myself that I can fully
appreciate how demanding it must have been for her in those early years
and what an incredible achievement it was to get through. In my teenage
years, my Step-Father, Colin Bruce, gave up single life for the woman he
loved, despite the three children that came with the package. This choice
was typical of such a kind and gentle man. More than thirty years later
they are still together and I love and admire them more than ever. This
book is dedicated to them.

Jamie Bennett
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Bronson: Power and Resistance 23

3 Starred Up: Prison Cultures and Personal Change 39

4 We Are Monster: Race in Prison 57

5 Screwed: Prison Work and Prison Officer Cultures 79

6 Everyday: Families of Prisoners and the Collateral

Harms of Imprisonment 97

7 Conclusion 117

Index 133

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract Media representation plays a significant role in shaping how

the public understand the penal system. It is less understood how people
serving sentences in prison respond to media representations. This book
draws upon an exploratory study in which five contemporary British
prison films were screened to an audience of men serving long sentences
deep inside the English prison system. Audience studies of prisons and
the media have largely focussed at a macro-level, considering how this
shapes public attitudes and values, and situating this within the broader
political economy. By focussing on people in prison, this study also seeks
to explore the role of the media at a micro-level, intersecting with indi-
vidual identity and sense of self. Further, the study is concerned with the
role of media consumption at a meso-level, including the interplay with
institutional cultures, such as the inmate culture. The research adopted
an audience ethnography approach, qualitative in nature and recognising
audiencehood as an active process in which viewers engage in struggles
over meaning rather than passively consuming media texts. The essential
concern is the relationship between prison film and the lived experience
of the participants.

Keywords Prisons · Prisons and media · Media effects · Prison films ·

Audience research

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

J. Bennett and V. Knight, Prisoners on Prison Films, Palgrave Studies in Crime,
Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60949-8_1
2 J. BENNETT AND V. KNIGHT

Prisons have long been a deep source of fascination for the public and
the media. Whether in news, literature, social media, film or television,
crime and punishment are a persistent and vivid presence, generating
competing visions of what prisons are for, how they operate and who
inhabits them. In reality, most people have no direct experience of impris-
onment. Although England and Wales are high users of imprisonment
by Western European standards, the rate of imprisonment is around 174
people per 100,000 of the population (Sturge 2019), so less than 0.2%
of the population are imprisoned at any time. Exposure to imprison-
ment for most people is not through personal experience but instead
through representation in the media. What is less well understood is the
significance of media representation of prisons to people in prisons.
This book explores the significance of media representation, specifically
through dramatic films, not for the public, but for prisoners themselves. It
is the first substantial empirical examination of the contemporary relation-
ship between cinema representation and the lived reality of prison. The
research project reported in this book involved screening recent British
prison films (i.e. films wholly or mainly set in a prison or take impris-
onment and its consequences as a primary theme) to an audience of men
serving long sentences deep inside the English prison system. The study is
concerned with how the context of imprisonment shapes media consump-
tion. The audience discussion, interpretation and insights into the films,
their lives and the relationship between representation and reality were
profound and revealing. Films have been chosen as the medium partly
because of our personal interest, but also because films retain a particular
significance in the media landscape. Dawn Cecil (2015) has argued that
the importance of prison films has declined to the extent that: “For the
most part, these films have become relics of the past” (p. 47), but this
book will illustrate that such an assessment is too gloomy. Although none
of the films in this study were major commercial successes, largely being
independent productions, they have generally attracted critical attention
and been broadcast on television, made available on streaming services,
as well as having been screened in cinemas. The persistence of prison film
production suggests that there remains a viable market and consumer
interest. Films also remain an important source of information about
imprisonment, its practice and values. Although much media production
and consumption today is instantaneous, prison films are often viewed in
a more considered way with greater attention and for a more substantial
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

running time; they have a prestige that means they carry weight and cred-
ibility with viewers; they also have a wide geographical reach, and; they
remain in circulation for a longer period than other media forms. Films do
not, therefore, entirely conform to the model of disposable consumption
and retain a significance with viewers and in relation to wider society.
The audience in this study—men serving long sentences in an English
prison—are people who are deserving of a voice, and whose experiences
merit public attention, particularly as sentence lengths are increasing and
more people are receiving indefinite or life sentences (Crewe et al. 2019).
This study also specifically addresses a significant gap in the current
burgeoning academic scrutiny being directed to the relationship between
media representation and criminal justice realities. To date, academic
study has largely been directed to the relationship between the media,
political culture and public attitudes. This has often highlighted that
media representation is inaccurate and distorts public perceptions, and
that the voices of people in prison are excluded from the media (Foss
2018). This study seeks to close these gaps by exploring the relation-
ship between media representation and people in prison, in other words
the very subjects of that representation. They are the people who can
bring particular expertise to decoding and making meaning of media
representation; they are the people who are least heard directly and
in an unmediated way, and; they are the people most affected by the
consequences of representation. This study is therefore concerned with
understanding and confronting media, power and inequality. The study,
however, gives attention not only to the wider political economy, but also
to the penal realities to which those people in prison are subjected. In this
way, the study offers a bridge between detailed ethnographic research that
reveals the everyday processes and experiences of prison life, and media
studies with its focus on media products, their significance and effects.
This opening chapter will set out some of the ways in which
prison films have been analysed previously and explain how this study
expands and builds upon these foundations. The methodology will also
be described, setting out how the research was conducted. The aim
throughout this book is to encourage curiosity, questioning and critical
examination of the practice of imprisonment and the significance of the
media in contemporary society.
4 J. BENNETT AND V. KNIGHT

Historical Readings of Prison Films

There have been attempts to connect film representation to shifting penal
ideologies. Such analysis is based upon an assumption of a symbiotic
relationship between film and society.
In America, Cheatwood (1998) has argued that prison films: “display
a responsiveness to the realities of theory, practice and public percep-
tions and interests, a responsiveness clearly visible in the characteristics
of the central figures and structural conditions within the films” (p. 215).
He continued to say that: “…prison films tell us a great deal about the
nature of our society, our prisons, and our theorization about prisons at
any point in time” (p. 227). He, further, asserted that: “Movies represent
the broad feeling of the era and put into layman’s language those ideas
that scholars are attempting to formulate and practitioners are attempting
to carry out” (p. 227). On this basis, Cheatwood set out a historical and
cultural journey of the prison film genre. This started with the morality
plays of the 1930s Depression era, through rehabilitation orientation in
the 1940s and 1950s, to emphasis on the dynamics of power and confine-
ment during the Sixties and Seventies, to a modern depiction that was
more diverse and ambiguous about the role, function and operation of
prisons.
Similarly in the UK, Wilson and O’Sullivan (2004) have suggested that
films are coded with the values of the period in which they are produced
and: “…act as a kind of social barometer, registering the concerns of
their era and may have played a role in disseminating ideas and under-
standings about the state of penal institutions and where they might be
heading” (p. 55). Such taxonomies have been criticised by Paul Mason
(2006) as oversimplified, and instead he argued that genre conventions
(the commonly represented aspects of imprisonment, storylines, charac-
ters and scenarios) offer a discursive practice that produces knowledge and
meaning at a particular time, but this itself is contested and the meaning
changes in different contexts and at different times. We see merits in both
arguments. Films and other media texts clearly have coded within them
values that reflect the broader social context in which they are produced.
It is, however, also right to recognise that those values are contested so
that different films may conflict in the way they envision imprisonment,
that different viewers read those texts in different ways, and that such
readings are open to reassessment over time. Films are a broad but imper-
fect indication of dominant penal values, but their meaning is dynamic
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

and deeply contested, as is the meaning of punishment, prisons and justice

in society.
In setting the context for this study, it worth considering a brief history
of British prison films and their context. Staring in the 1930s, popular
comedian Will Hay enjoyed success with Convict 99 (dir. Marcel Varnel
1938), in which Hay is mistakenly appointed as a prison governor and in
his own benignly incompetent way ameliorates the most punitive aspects
of the prison and creates a more humane and collegiate institution. This
was produced at a time when prison populations had been consistently
falling for over two decades and there was support for more therapeutic
approaches to prison management (Shuker 2010), but concern was rising
regarding prison conditions and the influence of serious organised crime,
particularly following the mutiny at Dartmoor prison in 1932 (Brown
2013). The film at least in part, through the different management
regimes depicted, echoes some of the debates about the role and function
of prisons. In the post-war years, there was a progressive reconstruc-
tion of society through the creation of the welfare state. The Criminal
Justice Act of 1948 abolished hard labour and most corporal punishment,
while also promoting more rehabilitative approaches in youth custody
and adult prisons. The ambitions of such reforms were reflected in films
including Boys in Brown (dir. Montgomery Tully 1949) in which borstal
detention leads to the moral redemption of a young prisoner.
In the 60s a more realistic and critical edge emerged, with films such
as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (dir. Tony Richardson
1962) in which Colin Smith played by Tom Courtney resists the paternal
authority of the welfarist borstal and the wider class structure it reinforces,
and in The Hill (dir. Sidney Lumet 1965), Sean Connery battles the
morally corrupt, brutal military prison. In addition, attention was turned
towards the impact of imprisonment on the partners and children left
behind in Poor Cow (dir. Ken Loach 1967), exposing the social stigma,
as well as the emotional and economic strain they experience. These films
not only reflect criticisms of prisons but also wider society in which a new
generation led calls for liberalisation and the redrawing of social hierar-
chies, posing a set of challenges that spilled into bitterly contested street
protests and culture conflicts. The 1960s was also a period in which the
English and Welsh prison population was growing and high profile crimes
including the notorious Great Train Robbery of 1963, and the subse-
quent escape of one of the robbers, Ronnie Biggs, in 1965 gave rise to
concerns about the capacity of the criminal justice system to deal with
6 J. BENNETT AND V. KNIGHT

the development of organised crime. A review of the prison system by

Lord Mountbatten (1966) led to the creation of a security classification
system and specialist prisons for those who presented the highest risk.
The emergence of a new breed of organised gangs can be seen in The
Criminal (dir. Joseph Losey 1960) in which Johnny Bannion (Stanley
Baker), a well-connected member of the mob underworld is imprisoned,
but breaks out, helped by others who hope to follow him to the hidden
haul from his last heist. The film shows the prison as being in the control
of criminal gangs, able to send messages, move contraband around, run
their organisations from behind bars, and pull off a sophisticated escape.
The 1970s were a turbulent time characterised by industrial unrest,
economic and political instability in the UK and across the Western world.
The prison films of the era, in particular A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley
Kubrick 1971) and Scum (dir. Alan Clarke 1979) with their violent
anti-heroes subjected to excessive state responses, reflect an ambivalent
position between both concerns about perceived social disorder and
distrust of corrupt, illegitimate authority. The production of Scum is itself
an illustration of the tensions of the decade. It was originally made as a
television play for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1977,
but they decided not to broadcast it due to the controversial nature of the
material, depicting the violence of the borstal system for young offenders
(Kelly 1998). Most of the production team and actors later remade Scum
as a feature film, releasing it to acclaim and it has become one of the best
known British prison films. The production is therefore itself, a turbulent
tale of power, authoritarianism and resistance. In the 1980s, there was a
struggle for the emergence of the neoliberal state as Margaret Thatcher’s
economic and social reforms curtailed the welfare state, deregulated the
market and nurtured mass consumerism. The romantic individualism of
armed robber and prison escapee McVicar (dir. Tom Clegg 1980) can
be seen as embodying the spirit of a buccaneering, free-market age. In
the midst of this, a brace of films, Sense of Freedom (dir. John Mackenzie
1981) and Silent Scream (dir. David Hayman 1990) examined the brutal
lives and experiences of long-term prisoners in Scotland and the hope
offered by the therapeutic unit at Barlinnie. The two films can be seen as
presenting an alternative critique advocating more progressive approaches
in an era of increasingly punitive political rhetoric and deteriorating prison
conditions. The poor state of prisons and their lack of legitimacy were
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

spectacularly exposed by the widespread riots of 1990 and the subse-

quent official report, which called for extensive reform (Woolf and Tumim
1991).
By the turn of the century the prison population had grown dramati-
cally in England and Wales, ultimately more than doubling over the two
decades from 1993. Despite this, many of the films made in the early
part of the twenty-first century offered some reassurance to viewers. A
small glut of films suggested that prisons could be places of redemption,
through activities such as gardening, in Greenfingers (dir. Joel Hershman
2000), musical theatre, in Lucky Break (dir. Peter Cattaneo 2001) and
opera, in Tomorrow La Scala! (dir. Francesca Joseph 2002). By repre-
senting prisons as productive, these films acted to legitimise carceral
expansion. There were a few films that contested this view, focussing on
brutality, corruption and hopelessness, such as Boy A (dir. John Crowley
2007) and The Escapist (dir. Rupert Wyatt 2007), both about people
who simply cannot find redemption in prison or after release. Such films
highlighted the potential harms of prison and punitiveness.
This brief overview of British prison films has suggested that there
is some loose connection between the penal climate of a particular era
and the films produced at that time. This relationship is, however vari-
able, inconsistent and it does not offer comprehensive commentary. The
relevance to this study is that by focussing on prison films released
between 2008 and 2015 we will consider how films reflect and encode
contemporary penal values. In particular during an age that has seen
prison populations sustained at historically high levels, increasing sentence
lengths, greater use of indeterminate sentencing, and latterly a deterio-
ration in conditions and safety during a period of austerity where the
financial resources available to public services have been reduced. This
study also differs from previous historical analyses which have largely
attempted to situate film texts within the macro-level of political economy
and dominant penal values. By considering the readings of serving pris-
oners, we will also attempt to elicit how those films relate to the realities
of contemporary prison life at the meso-level of organisational and
community practices, and the micro-level of individual experience.
8 J. BENNETT AND V. KNIGHT

Prison Films and Their Effects

An important strand of the existing research focusses on the debate about
the effects of media representation, in particular how this can shape
perceptions, attitudes and responses. This “social construction” approach
asserts that in the absence of direct experience and with high levels of
exposure to media representation, public perceptions can be shaped by
these images (Surette 1997). What is presented in the media contains
embedded perceptions and judgements about social life, it is, as Hall
(2013) has described, encoded with values and assumptions. These codes
include beliefs about the role and practice of imprisonment (Rafter 2000).
These values are the product not only of individual choice by those who
produce media content, but are the outcome of a commercial process that
is located within a particular set of regulatory, economic, institutional and
creative contexts (Lam 2014).
Media representation can offer a façade, which projects an idealised
vision of the prison (Fiddler 2007). These depictions play an ideolog-
ical function in explaining crime, framing the problems and guiding
emotional responses (Rafter 2000). It is not being suggested that any
single film in itself shapes or transforms an individual’s perceptions of
prison, but instead, the dominant values repeated across different media
and over time, can serve to have a cumulative effect that legitimises
and normalises particular values and perspectives (Carrabine 2008). From
this vantage point, media representations can be understood as a “power
resource” (Ericson et al. 1991, p. 11), which can: “provide people with
preferred versions and visions of social order, on the basis of which they
will take action” (p. 4).
As has already been described, penal values are contested; different
people hold different ideas about what prison is or should be. It is widely
acknowledged that the dominant media discourse is one that empha-
sises prisoners as dangerous and violent, and prisons often ineffective in
meaningfully reforming people. Such depictions encourage regressive and
punitive responses (Lee 2007; Nellis 2005), suggesting that people in
prison are too dangerous to be on the street and there is little that can be
done other than contain them away from society. Such representations,
it has been argued, are remote from the everyday realities of pain and
suffering in prisons (Brown 2009). These depictions are concerned with
order and the maintenance of existing social systems including populist
punitiveness, which supports greater use of imprisonment and harsher
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

conditions (Ericson et al. 1991; Surette 1997; Brown 2009). In contrast,

it has been suggested that there is an “alternative tradition” in prison films
(Rafter 2000) and that the media may play a reform function (Wilson and
O’Sullivan 2004). It has been described that depictions of criminal justice
can shape views more progressively by: providing an insight into a world
that the general public know little about and have little direct experience
of; providing a benchmark for acceptable treatment; translating academic
and political concerns into digestible narratives; exposing perspectives
that are often at odds with media and official descriptions and; creating
empathy with offenders, victims and staff (Wilson and O’Sullivan 2004).
From this perspective, popular culture is an important resource for chal-
lenging received wisdom, encouraging reflection and engagement with
debate. It has even been argued that some representations promote a
radical critique drawing upon critical criminology, which reveals the harms
caused by the criminal justice system and the underpinning power inter-
ests that are served (Bennett 2014). In the different visions of the prison
represented in films, the contested nature of criminal justice is played out
as a form of “popular criminology” (Rafter and Brown 2011), offering a
medium for public discourse about crime and punishment.
None of the proceeding discussion is intended to suggest that there
is a definitive way of understanding or reading particular films or that
viewers are passive recipients of media messages. Viewers bring with
them pre-existing attitudes or values and are situated within a partic-
ular social context including gender, class and ethnicity (Morley 1980;
Moores 1993; Jewkes 2006; Carrabine 2008). They use these resources
both to choose from the wide variety of media products on offer to them,
but also draw upon this in the ways that they interpret, understand and
respond to what they consume. Moreover, the context of consumption,
such as where and with whom it is consumed, shapes how audiences
interact with the text (Morley 1980; Moores 1993). Consumption goes
beyond taste but is part of the ways in which people construct and sustain
their self-identity and individual subjectivity (King and Maruna 2006). As
Hall (2013) has described, texts are encoded with particular meanings
and ideology, but viewers decode these in particular ways, so that there
are “cultural struggles over meaning” (Moores 1993, p. 7), which deploy
the relative power of text and reader.
Together, these analyses suggest that media production, representation
and consumption are not mere entertainment, but are deeply impli-
cated in the power dynamics of social life. Production and representation
10 J. BENNETT AND V. KNIGHT

are fields in which the battle of ideas and values about penal policy
are enacted. Individual viewers also explore, construct and express their
identity through consumption.
Rather than being concerned with the general public, constructing
a mediated vision of reality, this book is instead concerned with the
response of prisoners themselves to representation of prisons. They are a
group who have significant expertise and investment. They are immersed
in the experience of imprisonment, and are the subject of the media
representation. This book therefore seeks to explore how they decode
and respond to the embedded values in prisons films. This study in part
addresses the prisoner audience’s readings of the films within the macro-
level of social and penal values. What do these films say about the purpose
and function of prisons and how does that compare to their experiences?
The study also, however seeks to go further by considering the relation-
ship between these representations and the social world of imprisonment.
How do these films represent the realities of everyday prison experi-
ences and how does that relate to the reality? This question is aimed at
the meso-level of institutional and cultural practice, in other words the
daily operation of the prison and the group cultures that exist with its
walls. Further, how do these films relate to how individuals understand
themselves and their own personal experiences? In other words, consid-
ering the micro-level dynamics of consumption. Together, these questions
expand the current range of inquiry, which has focussed on the impact of
media consumption on general public who have no direct experience or
personal investment in prison. Instead, attention will be directed towards
the effects of the media upon those with the greatest expertise in the
realities of prison life; prisoners themselves.

Prisons, Prisoners and Media Consumption

In-cell televisions were introduced widely in English and Welsh prisons
in the late 1990s as an earned incentive for the most compliant pris-
oners, but in the present day they are available to the vast majority of
prisoners, unless it is removed due to poor behaviour. Media consump-
tion has therefore become normalised and is now a more significant part
of the everyday prison experience. There have been two important studies
of media and television in English prisons (Jewkes 2002; Knight 2016),
which have sought to illuminate the ways in which media is consumed and
how this is related to identity formation, institutional culture and broader
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

social structures. Although these studies focussed on general television

consumption rather than the readings of specific prison-related texts, their
analysis is salient to the present study.
In her work, Yvonne Jewkes (2002) described how viewing could be
used in varied ways to navigate emotions, construct or maintain prosocial
identities, revisit memories, connect with family and wider community,
and to a limited extent transcend the confines of the prison. Jewkes
described that although television consumption was also sometimes a
means of inactivity, or killing time, it could also be engaged within
complex ways that offered a “primary site of meaning and identity
construction in the reflexive project of the self” (Jewkes 2002, p. 128).
Knight (2016) also described that television offered a “quasi therapeutic
tool” (p. 198) through which prisoners can manage their emotions and
nurture more prosocial identities.
Prisons have particular cultures, which will vary from place to place
and over time, but men’s prisons have often been characterised as having
a distinctive inmate culture. Features of this include hypermasculinity,
contained emotional self-management, entrepreneurial individualism, a
willingness to resort to violence, as well as an “us and them” separation
between staff and prisoners. Jewkes (2002) described how media choices
could be used to reinforce criminal and prison identities. For example,
some men watched and discussed crime programmes, violent films or
competitive sports, developing a “cultural repertoire [that] is dominated
by the imperatives of an enforced and somewhat extreme masculine code”
(Jewkes 2002, p. 144). Others, however, used the opportunity of in-cell
media to physically and socially retreat from the prison world, and as was
mentioned previously, consumed media that reinforced more prosocial
identities. Individuals were not fixed in their identities, nor their patterns
of consumption, but as they journeyed through the life course of a prison
sentence, they shifted in their perception of self and this could be reflected
in media choices.
Media consumption in prisons has also been viewed through a macro-
level lens. Jewkes (2002) has described how concern about the unhealthy
influence of media on prisoners has led to a reticence about access. Access,
albeit restricted, to televisions has nevertheless been officially allowed in
part because it has become a normalised aspect of everyday life, no longer
seen as an indulgent luxury that should be denied to people in prison.
It has also been recognised that media can be a means to secure pris-
oner compliance by making access conditional upon good behaviour or
12 J. BENNETT AND V. KNIGHT

removing it as a consequence of bad behaviour (Jewkes 2002; Knight

2016). Further, the potential for television to offer a means of occu-
pation, emotional regulation and pacification, give it the qualities of
a “package of care” (Knight 2016, p. 195) that is a vehicle for self-
regulation and personal development. From these perspectives, access to
media in prisons, and media representation more generally, is conditioned
and shaped by prevailing penal philosophies and practices.
In the present study, we are not focussing on general media consump-
tion, but are instead concentrating on specific contemporary films about
prisons. It is these detailed readings by prisoners that raises some distinct
questions. We argue that they are an informed audience whose lived expe-
rience and the context of their lives will shape their responses. As Girling
et al. (2000) described, this is a search for media consumption and its
relation to a sense of place:

…that is, of both the place they inhabit (its histories, divisions, trajecto-
ries and so forth), and of their place within a wider world of hierarchies,
troubles, opportunities and insecurities. (p. 17, emphasis in original)

In other words, what role do these representations play in reflecting and

enabling the audience understanding of the prison as a socially structured
institution, and their place as prisoners within that context?

Methodology
The study is intended to be multilayered, giving attention to the macro-,
meso- and micro-levels of analysis. At the macro-level, what are the penal
values that are encoded in the films and how are these decoded by the
audience? How does this relate to the lived experience of the participants
and the contested values at play in crime and punishment? At the meso-
level, how are the readings of the films shaped by the context in which
they are consumed? In other words, what is the relationship between the
readings of the films and prison cultures? Finally, at the micro-level, what
role do individuals’ own personal experiences and identities play in their
readings, and how do they use the films as resources in the process of
identity construction?
Our research approach took inspiration from Moores’ (1993) “audi-
ence ethnography” (p. 1), which he contrasted with industry quantitative
audience research that seeks to commodify consumption. Instead, Moores
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

proposed an approach that “conceptualises media audiencehood as a

lived experience…attending to the media’s multiple significances in varied
contexts of reception” (p. 3). Due to the domestic nature of much
media consumption, ethnographic approaches in audience research do
not generally involve the long-term observation of classical ethnography,
but are often conducted using relatively short interviews and conversa-
tions. Yet, they share ethnography’s intentions of understanding practice
as embedded within a broader social context: “attending to the mean-
ings produced by social subjects and to the daily activities they perform
[in order to] explain those significances and practices by locating them
in relation to broader frameworks of interpretation and to the structures
of power and inequality” (Moores 1993, p. 4–5). So here our intention
is to understand the meaning of media consumption in relation to the
particular structures of contemporary prisons and penal practice.
While contemporary audience ethnography attempts to observe within
the normal site of consumption, usually the home, this was not possible
with our research. People in prison watch films and television in their
cells. This was not a space that we could reasonably access in order to
watch the films. We had also selected the films we intended to screen as
part of this project and therefore there was a need to organise and stage
the screenings. Our research process was therefore more closely informed
by Morley’s seminal Nationwide audience research (Morley 1980). In
this work, Morley screened the then popular news and current affairs
programme Nationwide to a series of viewer groups. This study revealed
the complex audience engagement with texts, decoding their meanings
and reading them in ways that could not be crudely categorised through
social structures such as class and gender, but instead involving an inter-
play between individual agency and social structures. In common with
the Nationwide study, our approach is to screen predetermined texts
to a selected audience in an environment that is different from their
normal viewing experience. Rather than individual cells watching alone,
the films were collectively viewed in an off-wing group room. There are
of course obvious limitations with adopting such an approach, so different
from everyday consumption. We nevertheless concluded that it was prac-
tical necessity and despite the limitations, this approach could still yield
valuable data, just as the Nationwide study had done.
Where we deviate from the approach of the Nationwide study
is in the interpretive lens we bring to bear. That study typified
what has been described as the “incorporation/reistance” paradigm
14 J. BENNETT AND V. KNIGHT

(Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998), in which the audience are under-

stood to be socially structured (by class, gender, race etc.) and their
readings of texts are framed in relation to contested ideology, so that
audience members are incorporated into or resist dominant ideas. This
approach is certainly relevant to our readings. Prisons, after all are
seeped in power dynamics and are deeply reflective of social inequality.
We nevertheless also drew upon the “spectacle/performance” paradigm
(Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998), in which the media is seen as one
part of the aestheticisation of everyday life. In this context, individuals and
their identity became entangled in a mediascape where people are enticed
to perform. Such performance can be seen in body image, clothing, inter-
actional style and other everyday experiences. From this perspective, we
were interested to understand how the audience for these films used
media resources in order to understand their own social world and how
it influenced their identity and lived experience. Our approach attempts
to encompass both approaches and is therefore multilayered, concerned
with social power at a macro-level, prison culture at the meso-level and
individual identity at the micro-level.
The films used for the screenings were contemporary British films
about imprisonment and its consequences. These were Bronson (dir.
Nicolas Winding Refn 2008), Screwed (dir. Reg Traviss 2011), Everyday
(dir. Michael Winterbottom 2012), Starred up (dir. David Mackenzie
2013) and We are Monster (dir. Antony Petrou 2014). None of these
films were major commercial successes and largely had limited theatrical
releases, although some attracted critical appreciation and all have been
broadcast on television channels and been available on streaming services.
The films address a range of different themes, including power and
resistance; the experience of prison staff; the experience of the families
of prisoners; the illicit economy in prisons; rehabilitation programmes;
corruption and abuse of power; mental health, and; race and racism. The
selection of these films offered an opportunity to explore a wide spec-
trum of issues relating to contemporary imprisonment. All of the films
also assert some “truth claims”, for example Bronson and We are monster
are based upon real people and events; Starred up and Screwed were both
written by people who had worked in prisons, and; Everyday had a novel
production process, shot sporadically over a five year period so that the
characters aged and the children visibly grew up during the film. These
“truth claims” are contestable, for example in reviewing Bronson, David
Wilson a criminologist and former prison governor who worked on a
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

special unit where Charles Bronson was held, described the depiction of
people, places, events and practices in the film as “nearly always imag-
ined and partial” (Wilson 2009). The production of Bronson itself was
characterised by creative tensions between the director, Nicolas Winding
Refn, who was disinterested in a conventional character study and made
no effort to meet the real Charles Bronson, and lead actor, Tom Hardy,
who met Bronson on several occasions and studiously attempted to craft
a realistic characterisation (Lim 2009). Authenticity is therefore contested
in production and through viewership. The films screened in this project,
nevertheless, in one way or another assert a degree of authenticity, and
such claims are part of the attraction of prison films to general audiences
(Rafter 2000).
The screenings took place in a prison that exclusively holds men serving
indeterminate and life sentences. The number of people serving life and
indeterminate sentences has grown rapidly over recent decades, so that
by 2019, there were over 9000 people serving indeterminate sentences
in England and Wales, more than 10% of the prison population (Ministry
of Justice 2019). These people must serve a minimum amount of time in
prison, which is set by the court (the tariff), and thereafter will continue
to be held in custody until such time as the independent Parole Board
assess that it is safe for them to be released. Even after they are released,
they will continue to be on “licence” and may be subject to supervision or
have conditions set by the Probation Service. Should they breach those
conditions or it is judged that they present an immediate or unaccept-
able risk to the public they may be recalled to prison, without necessarily
having committed a further offence.
This population was selected for a number of reasons. Some of those
reasons were pragmatic, specifically that this was a site that was accessible
to us as researchers. It was also, however, because this is the deep end of
the prison system. The men we encountered had usually spent significant
parts of their life in prison and were well versed in the cultures. They were
insightful and knowledgeable, expert participants. We also considered that
the voice and experience of these men were particularly important, as we
were aware of the growing length of sentences and the increasing use
of indeterminate sentencing (see also Crewe et al. 2019). We sought to
engage with and illuminate aspects of the experiences of people serving
long sentences in prison.
The participants in the study were volunteers who had responded to
a notice published around the prison advertising the study. They were
16 J. BENNETT AND V. KNIGHT

then allocated places by the prison based on whether they could be made
available from their normal commitments such as employment or educa-
tion. They described different motivations, including that it was a novel
activity, some had an interest in arts and others saw it as a learning oppor-
tunity, while for some it was simply a means to alleviate boredom and
get additional time in a constructive out-of-cell activity. During the week
of screenings, we had a shifting cast of participants, with some people
pulling out at the last minute, others deciding not to continue partici-
pation and others attending intermittently. In the end, we did have ten
regular and consistent participants who formed the core of the study.
These men ranged in ages from late twenties to late sixties, although most
were in their thirties or forties. Four were Black, Asian or a member of
a minority ethnic community, while the other six were white. They had
all served substantial periods in prison and were all serving indeterminate
sentences. Some had seen the more popular films, particularly Starred
up and Bronson, usually having watched them on Film4 channel through
their in-cell television, but the other films were new to the audience
members.
The data was collected over a two week period in April 2018. The
first week included screenings of the films and group discussion, with
individual interviews taking place in the second week. The process we
followed during the first week was to screen the film in the morning,
immediately followed by a short group discussion. There would then be
a lunch break, after which there would be an extended group discussion
in the afternoon session. Notes were taken during the screenings and the
discussions were facilitated and recorded. The screenings often started in
a disorganised way, with administrative and operational problems meaning
that participants arrived late. The screenings themselves were relaxed, with
participants apparently watching attentively, albeit occasionally scenes
provoked comments, laughter, and other observable or audible responses.
The immediate group discussions following the films were helpful in elic-
iting initial responses and generating themes to be followed up in more
detail. The longer group discussions drew upon semi-structured ques-
tions, but they often evolved organically, occasionally in an unruly way
with people talking over one another and the discussion veering from
topic to topic before being fully developed. There was a careful balance
needed between structuring the conversation and systematically exploring
issues, without stifling the authentic concerns and views of the audience
members and enabling them to have some control over the flow of the
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

group. During the second week, we conducted individual interviews with

the ten core participants, generally lasting between an hour and an hour
and a half. We drew upon a semi-structured interview schedule but as with
the groups, we enabled the discussion to evolve organically and partici-
pants to express their own concerns and perspectives. The interviews also
enabled further exploration of individual perspectives, allowing areas of
consensus with and divergence from other group members to emerge.
There were film scenes and subsequent discussions that explored
painful experiences and elicited strong emotional reactions from audi-
ence members. Scenes in the films included violence and other traumatic
events, which were also part of the life histories and lived experience
of the participants. In general, the audience were able to engage with
these issues positively and in an environment where there was a degree of
trust and mutual respect among group members. There were, however,
times when the emotional strain became overwhelming. In particular,
during the screening of We are monster, two men left the room during a
scene that depicted violent domestic abuse by a parent towards a child.
Following the screening, we went to see both men in order to be assured
that they were safe. Both men returned to the group in the afternoon
and discussed the reasons they had left. One man had left because the
images reminded him of his own childhood experiences, while the second
left largely following the first, although he did find the racist language
used in the film uncomfortable. We discussed with the whole group how
we could ensure that the screenings were safe for them and that the
emotional impact of the material was psychologically manageable. The
men were well aware of support available to them in the prison gener-
ally and simply asked that there was a summary of the films given before
the screening with notice of any material that may be distressing. This
process was incorporated into the remaining screenings. The same man
who had left the screening of We are monster due to the images of child-
hood abuse, also left the screening of Everyday during the first scene of
a family visit taking place in a prison. Again, we went to see this man
after the screening and he again returned to the discussion group and
shared the reasons why he left. In these cases, the material was upset-
ting and emotionally challenging for the viewers. It was also difficult for
us as researchers, feeling that we had unintentionally provoked an over-
whelming emotional reaction. We discussed our own feelings with the
group. Our experience, however, was that the individuals and the audi-
ence group as a whole, were able to openly and safely explore the issues
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 A Jewel of Great Price

Every single member of the Spooner family with the exception of

Jonah Bean, who declared he didn't have no time to waste a-
pleasurin', were going to Emerald, to spend the day with Cousin
Hannah Pratt and take part in the Harvest Home festival.
Cousin Hannah, having heard of the new phaeton, declared that
now Mrs. Spooner didn't have an earthly thing to prevent her coming
to town, and she had sent such urgent entreaties by Roy, that at last
the mistress of the ranch was prevailed upon to accept the
invitation.
"But I can only spend the day," she declared, "we can't all be
spared at once; Jonah is just able to be about, we mustn't leave him
too much work to do. The Babe and I will come back in the
afternoon, and the girls can stay--and you, Roy?"
There was a little note of interrogation in her voice as she laid
her hand affectionately upon the boy's shoulder. She was almost
sure that he wouldn't want to go to a party that his grief was too
recent.
Roy patted her hand, smiling a little sadly as he shook his head.
"I don't feel equal to parties yet," he said.
"And as to both Ruth and me staying, that's out of the
question," decided Elizabeth. "There'll be a hundred and one things
to do, and you'll try to do them every one. Ruth's going to stay all
night because it's her turn--Mary and I went last year. So that's
settled, mother."
After some argument, Ruth--who really did want to stay very
much, yielded. If Elizabeth wouldn't stay, why she would, and be
glad to.
"And you may carry my fan," said Elizabeth generously,
"nobody--not even Maudie, will have such a beautiful one. And you
shall wear my pink girdle, too, it's newer than your sash."
The Babe sighed. She was having a mental struggle as to
whether she could practise self-denial enough to lend her sister the
string of coral beads that were the delight of her heart. The situation
finally resulted in a compromise.
"And I'll lend you my beads--after I've wore 'em all day. But you
mustn't forget to feel every now and then for the catch, to see if it's
fastened," she warned.
"Thank you, Babe, I will," laughed Ruth, "and I'll take good care
of your fan, too, Elizabeth. Dear me, won't I be fine! Pink coral, and
pink girdle, a Spanish fan and my drawn-work handkerchief!"
"I don't approve of girls borrowing things from each other," said
Mrs. Spooner, doubtfully. "I've known serious trouble to result from
such practices. There's always danger of losing or injuring the
things, you know. But, if you sisters want to lend, I won't object.
Only be very careful, because you couldn't replace them if they were
lost."
"I'll be careful as care, mother--don't you worry." And Ruth ran
happily away, to pack her suit-case and get together her simple
finery.
There were various attractions to be at the celebration. A brass
band from a big town would play in the public square, between
speeches by noted members of the State Grange. Pony-races by
cowboys from the neighboring ranches, the inevitable roping match,
a big open-air dinner for the public, and, to wind up with a dance at
night in the town-hall, where the various exhibits from the farms--
the grain, fruits and vegetables--were displayed.
As the Spooners desired to see all these spectacles, they started
out bright and early; Mrs. Spooner, the Babe and Ruth's suitcase in
the phaeton, the girls and Roy riding their ponies.
Cousin Hannah, whose husband--a mild little man, quite
overshadowed by his big, bustling wife--was a rancher without a
ranch, spending most of his time taking cattle to the fattening
ranges above, or to market in other states, lived in a big, flimsily
built frame house in the little prairie town of Emerald. Mrs. Pratt
boarded the station-agent, the telegraph operator, the school-
teacher, and nearly all of what might be termed the floating
population of the town.
Maudie, the Pratt's only child, was a girl about Elizabeth's age,
rather pretty and very much spoiled by her mother and her
grandmother, who lived in another state, and who often had Maudie
come and visit her.
Mr. Pratt, who happened to be at home for the festival, with his
wife, came out to meet their guests, welcoming them with much
hospitality.
"The sight of you's sure good for sore eyes, Jennie," exclaimed
Cousin Hannah, as she folded Mrs. Spooner in her ample embrace.
"I'm tickled to death to see you! And ain't that buggy a sight. It
looks 'most as good as new, I declare!"
"It's not a buggy, Cousin Hannah--it's a phantom," said the
Babe, with dignity.
Almost as good as new, indeed! Where were Cousin Hannah's
eyes? Very few phaetons looked so new and delightful, to the Babe's
vision, anyway, as this vehicle, in whose loving rejuvenation every
one of them had been allowed to have a hand.
"A phantom, is it?" laughed Cousin Hannah. "Well, you come in
here to the dining-room and find out whether these cookies are
phantoms. The big girls want to go up to Maudie's room, I know.
Run along, honies, I'll take care of your ma and the Babe, and Mr.
Pratt'll look after Roy. Maudie ain't come out, yet; she's feelin' poorly,
and wants to save up her strength for to-night. Maudie's right
delicate."
"Come in!" called out Maudie, when Elizabeth and Ruth, with
the suit-case between them, rapped at her door.
The young lady sat at her dresser, attired in a much trimmed
and flowered kimona, leisurely "doing" her nails with a silver-handled
polisher from an elaborate dressing-case spread open before her.
"Hello! If it ain't Elizabeth and Ruth!" she greeted, with
somewhat condescending cordiality. "You all come in to see the
country jays celebrate? Emerald's such a pokey little hole folks are
glad to see most anything, for a change."
"If you think Emerald's dull, Maudie, what would you do out on
our ranch?" asked Elizabeth, laughingly.
Maudie shuddered. "Horrors! Don't mention it--such a fate
would be too unspeakable!"
"Yet Elizabeth and I manage to stand it--and I reckon we're as
happy as most girls," protested Ruth, stoutly.
"O, that's because you don't know any better. You've never
enjoyed the advantages of city life, as I have," said Maudie
superiorly.
 "I suppose your grandmother gave you a heap of pretty things,
as usual," said Elizabeth, anxious to change the subject.
"O yes, a good many," carelessly replied Maudie. "How do you
like this diamond ring? She gave me this on my birthday."
She held out her hand, which was adorned with several rings,
one of them a small but showily set diamond.
Elizabeth and Ruth viewed the jewel with admiring amazement.
Neither one of them had ever seen a diamond before, and to their
untutored eyes it represented splendor indeed.
"Try it on," said Maudie affably, pleased with their exclamations
of delighted wonder. It was much too large for Elizabeth's slender
finger, but it fitted Ruth's plumper one pretty well.
Maudie replaced the ring on her own finger, and lifted out the
tray of her trunk. "What are you girls going to wear to-night?" she
asked carelessly.
"I'm not going to stay, but Ruth will wear her white dress," said
Elizabeth. Somehow Ruth felt as if she couldn't speak of her poor
little frock among all Maudie's radiant treasures.
"Oh," Maudie's eyebrows lifted slightly. "Let me show you what
I'm going to wear." And she unfolded and shook out the shimmering
breadths of a pale blue summer silk, lavishly trimmed with lace and
ribbon.
"O-o-o!" breathed Ruth, rapturously, "I never saw such a
perfectly beautiful dress, Maudie!"
And Elizabeth echoed, warmly, "A beautiful dress--and just the
color I'd like, if I ever had a party dress."
"It is rather pretty, I think," acknowledged Maudie, with the air
of a person to whom silks are a matter of course. She took out more
dresses, dazzling the eyes of her country cousins with the sight of so
much magnificence, and making poor Ruth feel very shabby indeed.
"My pink challis or blue mull would fit you exactly, Elizabeth--
you're tall as I am. Stay all night and I'll lend you either one of them
you want. I'd like to have you stay, too--the girls here are so
common."
Elizabeth's cheeks flushed redly. Evidently Cousin Hannah had
made no further disclosures. To Maudie, Elizabeth was still her
cousin, and a Spooner--the name that had once seemed so
commonplace and now so beautiful compared to that of the
despised movers.
"O, but really I can't stay, Maudie; it's good of you to want me,
and to offer to lend me your beautiful clothes, but mother can't
spare us both very well, and Mary and I came last year, you know!"
"O, well, if you won't you won't. But I should think you'd jump
at the chance of going to a party," said Maudie, who did not bother
over consideration for her own mother.
Just then Cousin Hannah poked her head in at the door.
"Maudie, honey," she asked, conciliatingly, "can't you just run in and
set the table when dinner's ready, so's I can stay up town with your
Cousin Jennie and the girls? And if the telegraph operator comes in
give him his dinner? You know he has to have it early."
"Why on earth can't the cook give him his dinner?" frowned
Maudie, petulantly. "I hate that old operator, anyway. Isn't the cook
hired to set the table? I ain't feeling well, and I don't want to overdo
so's I can't go to the hall to-night."
"O, well," said her mother, resignedly, "I reckon I'll hurry back
and 'tend to it myself, if you ain't feelin' well."
 But Ruth spoke up eagerly: "Let me do it, Cousin Hannah. I
don't care about going up town--and I'd love to do it for you."
"Bless your heart--you're a reg'lar little help-all!" beamed Cousin
Hannah, gratefully, and with Mrs. Spooner and Elizabeth, went on
her way in great content, knowing that everything would go on well
at home.
Maudie stayed in her room and spent her time deciding on her
party finery, while busy Ruth swept and dusted the big dining room,
that was always in a state of more or less disorder, laid the table
carefully and had the operator's dinner ready punctually.
"Have a good time, little daughter," Mrs. Spooner said to Ruth,
when at the close of a long day of sightseeing she and the Babe
were once more seated in the phaeton. And Ruth replied happily
that she would--she was certain of having a perfectly beautiful time.
That night she wiped the supper dishes for the cook, and, after
she had dressed, helped to button Cousin Hannah into her own tight
and unaccustomed dress-up clothes.
Maudie, who declared that she never liked to be among the first
because it was more genteel to be late, took a long time to dress but
really looked quite pretty in her pale blue frock; Ruth, with heartily
sincere appreciation, told her so.
"Thank you," acknowledged Maudie, languidly, eyeing Ruth's
laundered white dress and pink girdle with tolerant pity. Then her
eyes falling on Elizabeth's fan her expression changed to eager
covetousness.
"Where in the world did you get that fan?" she asked. "Do you--
do you really think it matches your dress? It seems to me a fan like
that is out of place with a wash dress. I haven't one. I lost mine
when I was at grandmother's."
"This is Elizabeth's; father sent it from Cuba."
Ruth spoke rather hesitatingly; she would have offered to lend
the ornament at once, if it had been her own, for she was a
generous little soul, but she did not feel like risking Elizabeth's
property.
"I say," spoke Maudie abruptly, "lend me the fan, Ruth, and I'll
let you wear my diamond ring."
"O, Maudie!" gasped Ruth, hesitation in her heart but delight in
her eyes, "I couldn't--I oughtn't to wear your ring. Something might
happen."
"Not a thing'll happen," declared Maudie impatiently. "Here, let
me put it on your finger. No it isn't too loose, either; my finger's just
as small as yours. I wish this fan was mine. It would have cost a lot
over here, but in Cuba it's different--or of course your father couldn't
have afforded it."
She had coolly appropriated Elizabeth's fan, waving it to and fro
with complacent admiration. All Emerald had seen the diamond, but
the fan was entirely new, and she realized that it would be greatly
admired.
Poor little Ruth, dazzled by the flashing ring, forgot her mother's
disapproval of borrowing, and went to the hall with a light heart.
The Spooner girls had gone to school in Emerald when their
father was at home, and they could be spared from the ranch, so
she knew all the boys and girls who were present, and was soon
having a very jolly and sociable time, while Maudie, as befitting a
person accustomed to city life, was moving about among the crowd
with a rather bored air, displaying her finery to the admiring eyes of
her neighbors, and waving Elizabeth's fan languidly.
Still, for all her indifferent air, Maudie felt aggrieved that Ruth, in
her shabby white lawn, should receive so much attention, while she
in her blue silk was comparatively neglected.
As she sat beside her mother and watched Ruth dancing merrily
to the music of the band, Maudie felt a growing rancor towards her
unoffending cousin, finally deciding that she would put an end to the
enjoyment she could not take part in.
"I want to go home, I'm tired of it all--it is so stupid," she
complained to her mother. "Besides, I don't feel very well. Call Ruth
and let's go right away."
"No use disturbing Ruth, she seems to be enjoying herself, if
you ain't," remarked Mr. Pratt, mildly. "Any of the young folks'll see
her home safe."
But Maudie flatly refused to go without Ruth, who was hastily
summoned from her dance by Cousin Hannah, and hustled
unceremoniously away from the hall.
"O, I did have such a good time!" said Ruth, radiantly. "I'm so
sorry we had to come away so soon, Maudie."
"It takes mighty little to give some folks a good time," said
Maudie, tartly. "I thought the crowd was awfully coarse and
common, even for Emerald. I hope you took good care of my ring,"
she continued, sharply, for Ruth uttering an exclamation, of fear, had
stopped and was groping wildly about in the sand at her feet.
"O, Maudie!" Ruth's voice quavered with fear, "O, Maudie--I've
lost it!"
 "Lost my diamond ring!" Maudie shrilled wrathfully, "O, why was
I such a goose as to lend it to you!"
"What's that? Your diamond ring that Grandma Pratt gave you?
O, my me! Was Ruth wearing it? How'd that come? Whatever made
you go and lose it, Ruth?" groaned Cousin Hannah, not waiting for a
reply to any of her questions.
"It--it was too large," faltered Ruth, "it must have slipped off my
finger. We'll find it in a minute. I know I had it on when we left the
hail; I kept feeling of it because it didn't fit me very well."
"Then you'd no business to borrow it," scolded Cousin Hannah.
"What made you wear it, if it was too loose?"
"Maudie wanted Elizabeth's fan," explained Ruth, miserably.
"And--and she lent me the ring in place of it. I told her then it was
too large."
"Yes, blame it all on me!" reproached Maudie, bitterly. "Here--
take your old fan! I reckon it didn't cost more than a few cents, but
at least I took care of it!"
"Think where you had it last, Ruth--think hard!" implored Cousin
Hannah, distractedly, "I'd hate so for that expensive ring to be lost--
just throwed away, you might say. I don't know what we could say
to Grandma Pratt."
"I had it in the hall, I'm certain," said Ruth, dull with woe. "Of
course I don't remember where or when it came off my finger."
"Then we'll go right back to the hall and search for it," decided
Mr. Pratt. "Come along. No use in making so much fuss, Maudie.
Wait till you're plumb certain it's gone for good."
Back to the still crowded hall they went, and poor Ruth, in bitter
mortification, had to listen to Maudie's shrill announcement to all
and sundry of the fact that Ruth had borrowed her diamond, and
then lost it. Which came, she explained loudly, of lending things to
people who weren't used to them, and couldn't understand their
value.
"O," thought poor Ruth, in her despairing heart, "if I'd only
listened to mother I never would have been in all this trouble--if I'd
only listened to mother!"
Mr. Pratt, going to the young men who had charge of the hall,
made known to them the loss, and there was much searching, but
all without result--Maudie's ring was indeed gone!
Downheartedly the party trailed along home; Maudie in tears,
sobbing wrathfully that she would never, never lend her things
again--no matter if people did beg and pray her to do it. No indeed,
she had learned a lesson!
And Cousin Hannah, with torturing insistence, kept asking over
and over again if Ruth couldn't remember where she had lost the
ring. She ought to try and remember, seeing that it was her own
fault. She oughtn't to have worn a ring she knew was too loose for
her finger.
To these questions Ruth could only answer, over and again, that
she didn't know--she didn't know! Indeed she was fast becoming
hysterical with fright and worry.
Then mild little Mr. Pratt astonished them all by speaking with
authority that commanded attention.
"That's quite enough, Hannah," he said sharply. "Maudie, don't
let's have any more noise from you! If your ring's gone it's gone,
that's all there is to it. I told mother, when she asked me about it,
that it was foolish to give you a diamond when you was so young. I
don't know if I ain't glad it's lost, if you want my opinion. Now
understand, I want an end to all this talk. No use in badgerin' poor
Ruth to death, either, Hannah."
"For pity's sake, Jim!" exclaimed Cousin Hannah, "I didn't aim to
badger the child. There, honey, don't cry over it--accidents will
happen. I didn't aim to hurt your feelin's, no mor'n you aimed to lose
the ring. I was jest sorter flustered-like." And she patted Ruth's hand
soothingly.
Maudie, though sniffing dolefully, said no more at the moment,
being warned by a certain unaccustomed note in her father's voice
that his commands must be obeyed. But in the privacy of their room
that night she turned the thumbscrews on poor Ruth with savage
pressure.
"Of course people who are just a little above paupers can lose
other people's property without worrying much about it," she
remarked sarcastically.
And Ruth, in a burst of indignation at such aspersions on her
family, answered spiritedly: "No such thing, Maudie Pratt! I intend to
pay you for your ring, of course."
"Pay me?" Maudie jeered, scornfully. "O yes, it's likely you'll ever
be able to pay me a hundred dollars for my diamond!"
Ruth gasped--the amount was so far above her calculation. But
her fighting blood was up, for the honor of her family was at stake.
"I haven't the money on hand, but I'll certainly pay you by next
Thanksgiving," she said, with proud resolution.
And the green cardboard box at home, containing all the money
she possessed in the world, held just thirty-five cents!
 CHAPTER V
The Silver Spur Bakery

"Elizabeth," whispered Ruth, tragically, "I have done something too

awful to tell--and I've got to tell it."
"I just knew you were dreadfully worried," whispered back
Elizabeth, sympathetically. "I knew it as soon as you came back this
morning. Mother thought you were just plain tired, but I felt in my
bones that there was worse. What is it?"
The two girls were in their room getting ready for bed, tiptoeing
and whispering to avoid waking Mrs. Spooner, who was sleeping in
the next room.
"It's this, Elizabeth--" Ruth's whisper was a wail of despair--"I've
lost Maudie Pratt's--diamond--ring: And I've promised to pay her for
it by Thanksgiving! Elizabeth, it cost--a hundred--dollars! And you
know I've got just thirty-five cents in all the world!"
Then, Elizabeth remaining dumb from astonishment, she went
on to tell the whole story.
"And, O, Elizabeth, how will I ever get the money?" she ended,
despairingly.
"You mustn't tell mother, Ruth," warned Elizabeth, with that
sweet, elder-sister air that had grown on her since Mary went away;
"she's got worries enough already with father away, and everybody
afraid it's going to be a dry year. I can't think just now of any way to
earn a hundred dollars quick. I'll sleep on it--maybe I'll dream of a
way. One thing's certain; you've got to keep your word, for the credit
of the family."
 "I was just sure you'd feel that way about it, Elizabeth. What on
earth would we do without you!" sighed Ruth, gratefully.
Secure in Elizabeth's ability to find a way, she nestled down
among her pillows and went peacefully to sleep. And indeed she
needed it sorely, after the miserably wakeful night she had spent
with Maudie Pratt.
Elizabeth did not dream at all. She lay awake so long trying to
think up some miraculous way by which Ruth and she might earn a
hundred dollars, that when she did fall asleep her slumber was
entirely too deep for dreams to enter--so deep indeed that it took
the warning rattle of the alarm-clock to wake her in time to get the
early breakfast necessary for Roy and Jonah.
"Did you think of anything, Elizabeth?" asked Ruth anxiously, as
she, too, sprang out of bed at the alarm-clock's warning. And
Elizabeth was obliged to confess that she hadn't yet.
"But don't you worry," she soothed, "I'll think of a way. Let's ask
Roy, as soon as we get a chance; somehow I feel sure he could
help."
It was evening before they found an opportunity to take Roy
into their confidence, down at the milk-pen. Milking had been one of
the girls' recognized duties before he came, since then he had
forbidden them to interfere with the chores, declaring them to be
men's work.
Roy set the foaming pails on the fence, turned out the little
bunch of milk-pen calves kept to lure home the cows from the open
range, and regarded the girls with a grave face.
"I should call that a tough proposition," he said thoughtfully,
"but not impossible. In fact it seems that 'most anything's possible if
you work hard enough for it. How about cooking, Ruth? You're a
dandy on 'pie'n things'. Every ranch round here would buy your truck
if it was properly advertised."
"That's just it!" jubilated Elizabeth, "advertise! Ruth, we'll put up
a sign-board at the road gate: 'Bread, Doughnuts and Pies for Sale.'
Every cowboy that passes will see it, and every single one will buy. I
never saw a boy or man that wasn't hungry."
"Elizabeth has a great head," nodded Roy, approvingly, "that's
the ticket, Ruth. I'll paint the sign-board to-night and to-morrow you
begin baking--money!"
Ruth breathed a sigh of relief. "I just can't thank you enough,
Roy," she declared gratefully. "I'll bake day and night if I can just pay
Maudie Pratt for that hateful ring!"
Mrs. Spooner was rather bewildered when her young folks--the
Babe excepted, begged earnestly for permission to make some
money by going into the bakery business.
"We can't tell you just now what it's for, mother," explained
Ruth. "Only that it's for something important. You'll know all about it
when the right time comes."
"It seems to me that every one of you does as much work as
possible, now," doubted Mrs. Spooner. "But as Ruth's heart seems to
be set upon this extra labor, I promise not to interfere. And I won't
ask any questions about it until you see fit to tell me of your own
accord."
The Babe, who had listened carefully to this conversation,
beamed hopefully upon them, seeing in the plan certain possibilities.
"I'll help you, Ruth," she volunteered magnanimously. "And
maybe if you make a whole heap of money, you might have enough
left over to buy a new Ivanhoe. Mine's got seven leaves lost out,
right at the most exciting part."
"Done!" agreed Roy heartily, "I promise that you shall have a
new Ivanhoe if you help. The bargain's between you and me, Baby.
We'll leave the girls out of it."
"Except to see that you earn your book," laughed Elizabeth.
That night when they were all gathered around the evening
lamp, Roy painted the sign on a smooth white board, with some of
the brown paint left over from the phaeton. Bread, he declared, was
Ruth's "long suit," but as cowboys would scarcely like dry bread, it
was cut out of the list. Pies, however, were always acceptable.
Custard being objected to as too "squshy," they decided on mince
and apple as being best for cooks and customers. Doughnuts, of
course, because everybody liked the little fried cakes, and they could
be conveniently handled. Completed, the sign read:

"HOME-MADE DOUGHNUTS.
APPLE PIES.
MINCE PIES.
FOR SALE AT
SILVER SPUR RANCH."

"Now," decided Roy, after all the family had duly admired his
handiwork, "I'm going to Emerald early in the morning, and I'll fetch
back all your necessary supplies, down to the paper bags to hold
'em, by noon. The McGregor ranch is shipping cattle--they'll pass
here Thursday, one of their punchers told me; that'll be day after to-
morrow. You can spend the afternoon baking and be ready for them,
for I'm certain they'll buy you out. Their range-cook's quit, and
Chunky Bill's cooking for the outfit, so they're about starved for
something good to eat."
"We'll be obliged to have the first groceries charged to you,
mother," apologized Ruth, "but we promise to pay for them
ourselves."
"Very well--only don't buy too much at a time," warned Mrs.
Spooner, who was doubtful of the success of the enterprise, "until
you are sure of making sales."
"We'll succeed all right, never you fear, mumsy," asserted Roy,
with cheerful confidence. "I'll drum up trade, and Ruth's good
cooking'll do the rest."
Fuel in that woodless country was quite an item; Roy, realizing
this, brought home the next day a load of coke along with the other
supplies, all, it was agreed, to be paid for out of the proceeds of the
sales.
Also he brought good news from Emerald, where he had met
one of the cowboys from the McGregor ranch, who not only
confirmed the report of the cattle passing next day, but told him that
the ranch cook had quit out there, as well as the man hired to go
with the shipping outfit. He offered to get Ruth the job of baking for
the ranch until a new cook could be procured.
"Of course I said Ruth would take the job, so he's to bring along
the order in the morning. How's that for a beginning for The Silver
Spur Bakery?"
"I see land ahead!" exulted Elizabeth, joyfully waving her big
cook-apron. "Allow me to invest you with your uniform,
Mademoiselle Chef: You will now proceed to mix the magic potions,
while the Babe kindles the fire on the Altar of Cookery known to
mere mortals as the kitchen range, and I complete the rites by
rolling out the crust and filling the tins. Know all men by these
greetings, the Silver Spur Bakery is ready for business, and Roy may
go tack up the sign."
Inspired by the hope of reward, they made a frolic of the baking
working with such zeal and enthusiasm that when evening came and
the chief cook doffed her floury apron with a sigh of weary content,
there were shelves full of pies and pans full of doughnuts as a result
of their labors. Delicate pies, with crisply melting covers and
toothsome "inwards," and doughnuts that were deliciously tender
and flavory.
"Just for this once we'll let everybody have a treat," decided
Ruth, generously. "We'll just make a big pot of coffee and have
doughnuts and pie for supper. I want Roy and Jonah to have a taste;
they'll relish sweets for a change."
"And I think we'd better let them fix the price, too," suggested
Elizabeth. "Men always know more about such things than we do."
Roy and Jonah were most appreciative judges, declaring that
twenty-five cents apiece was dirt-cheap for the apple, and--
mincemeat costing so much more than dried apples--fifty cents for
the mince pies. The doughnuts, being superlatively excellent, were
valued at five cents apiece, or fifty cents a dozen.
The Babe could not be kept off the porch next morning,
hovering there to watch for the McGregor outfit. Soon, like
Bluebeard's sister-in-law, she reported a cloud of dust rising--the
customers were coming!
 Far ahead of the herd rode a single horseman who turned in at
the gate and came galloping up to the house. The futile chuck-
wagon, with its incompetent cook, slid past unnoticed while the
message from Mrs. McGregor was delivered. She had sent a tin
bread-box of ample size, and she wanted it filled with so much
bread, cake and pie, that the Silver Spur Bakery was rather startled.
She thought the amount she specified might last them for half the
week, the messenger said, and at the end of that time she would
return the empty tin box to be refilled. And the Spooner girls were to
put their own prices on their wares.
While these things were being settled two other riders from the
shipping herd came up for sample orders, and hurried into the
kitchen with the Babe and Mrs. Spooner, eager to buy something to
satisfy the pangs of hunger to which Chunky Bill's cooking had
delivered them.
The stocky little Englishman who had brought Mrs. McGregor's
note, and said he would be back from Emerald on his return trip
next morning for the box, if they would have it ready for him,
paused at the edge of the porch and negotiated a more personal
errand.
"And I've a little order of my own, Miss," grinned he cowboy
genially. "You see, I'm from the old country, myself, and I'm fairly
longing for a taste of plum-pudding once more. Think you're equal
to making one? I'm willing to pay your own price."
There was a note of wistful eagerness in his voice that touched
Ruth's sympathies, but a plum-pudding was, she feared, beyond her
powers. Elizabeth, seeing her hesitation, spoke promptly. "Certainly,
we'll be pleased to fill your order," she said, with business like
briskness. "And if it isn't as good as any you ever ate in England you
needn't pay for it."
"I'm sure it'll be rippin' good pudding, if you make it, miss,"
politely assured the cowboy, and, with a sweeping bow, he mounted
his pony and galloped away to join the approaching herd.
As the hundreds of cattle tramped slowly by, one after another
of the attending punchers turned in at the Spooner's gate, a
purchaser to the full extent of his pocketbook.
Doughnuts and pies fairly melted away; Mrs. Spooner and the
Babe filling the bags in the kitchen while Ruth and Elizabeth
delivered the goods and received the money.
And, when they counted up the receipts that night, they found
that, deducting all expenses, there would be five dollars profit!
"And the McGregor ranch to bake for!" crowed Elizabeth,
joyously. "Ruth, I plainly see land ahead!"
"I'm so relieved!" sighed Ruth, "But Elizabeth, are you sure you
can manage the pudding?"
"'In the bright lexicon of youth there's no such word as fail',
little sister," laughed Elizabeth. "Of course I can bake--or boil--or
steam a pudding as well as a born Britisher! In fact, being an
American citizen, I don't see why I can't make even a better one. Let
me take a look at that old cook-book of mother's."
All the next day they baked for the McGregor ranch, besides
boiling the pudding for the Englishman. Elizabeth declared she
wanted him to try it before he paid for it, but after one glance and a
hearty sniff, he decided to pay in advance the two dollars and fifty
cents which Elizabeth had figured out as a fair price.
 That it was satisfactory was fully proven when he returned for
the next baking, with orders for half-dozen more.
"I poured brandy over it and set it afire, like they do in
England," he said. "And every bloomin' puncher that tasted it is wild
for more! They call it 'The Perishin' Martyr Pie.' O, it's made a hit, all
right."
After that there was quite a run on puddings, and hardly a day
passed that the girls did not make a "Perishin' Martyr Pie"--a name
that tickled them immensely. Even the Babe learned to mix the
batter, and Roy declared he was quite an expert at boiling martyrs.
Money flowed into the little green pasteboard box, so that now
there was plenty of company for the lonely thirty-five cents it had
originally contained, when Ruth rashly decided she would pay
Maudie Pratt for the lost diamond ring. It must be admitted that as
the money tide rose Ruth's spirits fell.
"O, it would be so lovely if we were earning it for ourselves,"
she lamented. "Think of the things we could buy: If we could only
give it to mother to help with the living I should be perfectly
satisfied--but to go and hand it over to Maudie Pratt for a ring she
just made me put on--"
"Now, Ruth," Elizabeth interrupted, laying a loving arm across
her junior's shoulder, "we're all getting lots of fun out of the work. I
think the whole family is finding that it is really play to earn money.
Maybe we'll get into the habit and keep it up after Maudie's ring's
paid for. Don't you worry. If we do the best we can, and do it every
day, we are going to arrive at delectable places."
Ruth looked at her sister fondly. What would they do without
Elizabeth's strong heart and capable head for planning? It was
Elizabeth who hunted up a Mexican boy sufficiently reliable to be
trusted with a lard-can full of the 'pies 'n things' which found a good
market at the round-ups. This was not the season for them, but
there is always something of the sort taking place in the cattle
country, and Juan was willing to drive an absurd number of miles for
a modest share in their profits. Never a cowboy passed the
Spooners' attractive sign without galloping up for a purchase, and
the early receipts from the bakery were astonishingly good.
But after awhile the McGregors secured a cook, and there were
no more round-ups in reach; the cowboys had all become surfeited
with a rich excess of "Perishin' Martyrs," so that orders declined and
finally fell off altogether on that commodity. The grocer was paid,
there was nearly a barrel of flour on hand, and part of a large tin of
lard, but there was only seventy-nine dollars earned. Thanksgiving
was approaching, and the hearts of the girls began to sink, thinking
of its nearness and of the insufficient money in the green box.
And then, the very day before Thanksgiving, the unexpected
happened, when Mrs. McGregor rode over, bright and early, from her
ranch with a most unusual and imperative order for pumpkin-pies!
It seemed that a lot of unexpected guests had arrived from the
east to spend Thanksgiving at the ranch, and, to celebrate the
occasion properly, the McGregors had decided to join forces with a
neighboring ranch and have a big barbecue and picnic-dinner in the
open, to which all the neighbors were invited. The other ranch was
to furnish all the meat for the feast--fat mutton and beef and shotes,
to be barbecued deliciously over pits of glowing coals, while Mrs.
McGregor was to provide the bread, pies and vegetables.
 "Of course you should have been notified days ago," said the
pleasant little lady, with deprecating hands outspread, "only I didn't
know myself 'till last night! Now my cook can manage the bread and
vegetables, and you, my dears, must furnish the pumpkin-pies or
I'm a forsworn woman: I've calculated and re-calculated, and I find
that, allowing five pieces to a pie, it will take a hundred and six pies
to give everybody plenty--you know how men eat! Now dears--" she
put a persuasive arm around each girl--"can you bake them?"
Ruth gasped. "How in the world can we--in one day? Of course
we have plenty of pumpkins--Jonah raised a big patch of them for
cow-feed, and there's a barrel of flour and plenty of lard and sugar
and things. But in one day--"
"We'll do it, Mrs. McGregor," interrupted Elizabeth, smilingly.
"We'll fill your order, and thank you very much. Jonah Bean shall
deliver them early in the morning."
"My dear girl, you've simply saved my life--I can never thank
you enough!" Mrs. McGregor rose, fumbling in her pretty silver wrist-
bag. "Twenty-six dollars and fifty cents, I believe. Here's your
money--and thank you very, very much: And don't you forget that
every single member of your family is expected at our Thanksgiving
dinner."
"Why did you take her order, Elizabeth?" wondered Ruth, when
their guest was gone, "it will work us to death!"
"Not a bit of it, dear child. Listen, Ruth Spooner, there's just
seventy-nine dollars in your green box. Twenty-six added makes a
hundred and five. Five dollars is a great plenty for expenses, seeing
that we have the pumpkins already. The odd fifty cents will buy a
little present for the Babe, and leave you your full hundred to pay
Maudie Pratt for her ring. 'Rah, 'rah, 'rah for the girls of the Silver
Spur! Our debt's paid!"
"Glory!" Ruth's shouts suddenly wavered, the apron she waved
aloft was thrown over her face as she burst into tears.
"O, Elizabeth--shut the door--I don't want anybody else to see
me cry. I'm a wretch--and you're a genius--but--but--I can't help
thinking about us all working so hard and Maudie Pratt getting all
our money!"
"I know, honey," said Elizabeth, understandingly, "if I stop to
think I feel that way myself. Let's not stop to think."
Ruth choked down her tears, bathed her eyes and turned a
resolute face from the washstand.
"I'm all right," she said in a determinedly cheerful voice.
Elizabeth threw open the bedroom door and ran out among
their helpers.
"Kindle a fire, Babe, while we get the pumpkins. Isn't it a mercy
that Roy and Jonah are off the range to-day and can stay.
Everybody'll have to get to work cutting up pumpkins--even mother."
All day they baked. The stove in the house, the brick oven in the
yard which had scarcely been allowed to get cold since Ruth began
her enterprise, were both kept filled. The baked pies were lifted out
of their tins as soon as cool enough and dropped into paper plates.
But even so they could not get enough tins to keep the baking up to
the volume required for getting out the hundred pies in that length
of time. At last Ruth announced in tones of dismay:
"There isn't a single tin left. What shall we do?"
"H'm, let me work my giant brain a moment," pondered
Elizabeth. "How about tin shingles? There're a lot of new ones, you
know, nice and clean. And plenty of lard-cans. Roy can cut rings
from the cans, and lay them on the shingles. They'll be extra large
pies, but they'll hold the dough all right."
It was a good idea, and it worked out very well, with a little care
in handling the bulky "tins," so that there was no more time lost in
waiting for cooling pies.
Jonah, who kept the fires going, became cheerfully loquacious
under the influence of the strong coffee Mrs. Spooner insisted on
making, to keep the workers awake at their tasks. He regaled them
with thrilling stories of the war, and Munchausen deeds of bravery
performed by himself while in service. Tales which served the
twofold purpose of inspiring Jonah and amusing his hearers.
The girls insisted upon their mother and the Babe going to bed,
so as to be rested for the barbecue, which they determined to
attend, as the ranch lay only a little way beyond Emerald. But they,
with Roy and Jonah as able assistants, kept on baking till the last pie
of the hundred and six was cooling on the shelf, and the voice of the
oldest and most experienced rooster warned them of the coming
dawn.
However, every Spooner was up and dressed in time next
morning, with the pies safely packed in the wagon, which Jonah was
to drive, Roy and the girls acting as Mrs. Spooner's escort.
When they started Ruth rode ahead. Nobody but Elizabeth knew
what was behind her resolutely smiling face. Pinned in the pocket of
her jacket there was a roll of bills--a hundred dollars. The thought of
Maudie's exultation over its receipt pinched Elizabeth almost as
much as giving up the money. She lagged behind a little and talked
of it with Roy. They agreed that the money-earning fever had got
into their blood, and that nothing less than a new enterprise to
companion this old one, which they agreed must be carried forward,
would satisfy either of them.
They had reached Emerald when Ruth, trotting briskly along its
one street, suddenly felt her pony go lame, and quickly dismounted
to examine its hoof for a possible pebble or ball of clay.
Suddenly, with a curious little choking cry, she sprang into the
saddle and raced ahead, the pony now going quite easily.
Roy and Elizabeth exchanged indignant glances. Evidently Ruth
was overcome because she had to give up her precious money so
soon.
"I guess it's got on her nerves," whispered Elizabeth. "I feel
pretty much like crying, myself."
"Ruth must be going ahead to let Cousin Hannah know we are
coming," remarked her mother, placidly. "I hope it'll be so that they
can all go. I haven't seen any of them since the Harvest Home
festival."
But Ruth had stopped a little way ahead, waving impatiently for
her family to catch up, and hastening on they all arrived at the Pratt
home together.
Mr. Pratt and his wife came out, Maudie, very much dressed up,
followed languidly.
"Have you got my money, Ruth?" she called in her high, shrill
voice. "I bet anything you haven't--and I was depending on it to go
to Chicago and study music."
"No," answered Ruth, with emphatic clearness, "I'm never going
to pay you for that ring. I want to keep the money for myself, and
mother and Elizabeth, and the Babe. O, what lovely things we'll have
out of a whole--hundred--dollars!"
The Pratts stared, mystified by this mad speech. Elizabeth
gasped--it did sound shocking. Mrs. Spooner was so little informed
that she supposed there was a joke on hand, and laughed with
motherly complaisance. Only Roy, pulling back close to Elizabeth's
shoulder, muttered in an undertone.
"Ruth's got something up her sleeve. Hold on, don't make up
your mind too quick about it."
"What in time was Ruthie goin' to pay you a hundred dollars
for?" Cousin Hannah demanded, at last.
"For my diamond ring," cried Maudie, "my lovely diamond ring
that Grandma gave me, and that I wouldn't have lost for a thousand
dollars."
"It never cost to exceed twenty-five," snorted Mr. Pratt.
"Ruthie's just right not to pay you more'n that--or half as much. It
was partly your fault for lending the ring."
"I'm not going to pay her a cent," repeated Ruth, with dancing
eyes. "I've got the money--a hundred dollars--see here," and she
flourished a sheaf of bills that made them gasp again.
"I guess I can make you pay," stormed Maudie, "you promised,
and you've got to keep your word."
"Well, you did lose Maudie's diamond, you know. Ain't you goin'
to replace it, Ruth?" asked Cousin Hannah, a little wistfully.
"You must do the right thing, daughter," cautioned Mrs.
Spooner, taking a part in the conversation for the first time.
"I will, mother," said Ruth, suddenly sobered; and she went
toward Maudie Pratt with the sheaf of greenbacks in one hand, and
something which nobody could see clasped tightly in the other.

CHAPTER VI
The Shiny Black Box

The thing was like a scene in a play, almost. Maudie stood, half
abashed, half eager, and wholly frightened. Ruth came forward with
a confident, buoyant step that reassured her mother. A girl who was
going to do something impudently wrong would never act that way.
"There," said the plump, smiling Spooner girl, dropping into
Maudie's outstretched palm a little lump of adobe clay that looked
considerably like a rough pebble. "I picked that out of my pony's
hoof, right in the path where I'd lost your ring."
"Wha--what is it?" faltered Maudie, afraid to look.
"Turn it over," prompted Elizabeth impatiently.
"O, Maudie's almost a paynim, or a caitiff," breathed the Babe,
hiding a too sympathetic countenance against her mother's knee.
The Pratt girl turned the little lump of clay in trembling fingers.
Something glittered on one side of it; the clay parted and a circlet
with a wee, shining setting lay in her palm.
"My diamond ring!" she gasped.
Then before them all she flung it from her, so that it tinkled and
skipped on the porch floor. This done she sat down on the step and
burst into a tempest of wrathful tears.
"I always hated it," she sobbed. "It's such a miserable little
diamond. I wanted that hundred dollars to go to Chicago and study
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