Imagine, if you will, two men handcuffed together, with one of them looking clean and well mannered, while the other one was ruffled and grumpy looking. If you were told one of them was a criminal, while the other was a marshal, which one will you choose? Most likely, you chose the grumpy looking one, unless you weren’t imagining hard enough. This the situation one Ms. Fairchild found herself looking at, in the short story Hearts and Hands. One theme found in this story is how looks can deceive, and to never assume on something based on them.
The story begins with Ms. Fairchild meeting her old friend Mr. Easton on a train, who is handcuffed to a rough looking stranger. The stranger tells her that Mr. Easton is a marshal, escorting him to prison for counterfeiting. Ms. Fairchild takes this in stride, and talk with Easton about old times. As she starts talking about how it would be nice to live in the west, the “prisoner” excuses him and Easton to go to the smoker car, with a fellow passenger talking to another saying, “Say–did you ever know an officer to handcuff a prisoner to his right hand?”, obviously hinting that Easton is the real prisoner.
In the story, the author cleverly fooled the reader into thinking that Mr. Easton’s captor was his prisoner, taking the reader along with Ms. Fairchild until the final reveal. This makes the reader conscious of their bias towards the marshal because of how he looks. Of course the marshal himself encouraged this bias by saying that he’s the prisoner, but nobody questioned it after he said it. Unless you were very observant and aware of how police are supposed to cuff their prisoners, you probably also took his words in stride like Ms. Fairchild did. In tricking the reader into making the same mistakes as the characters, the author drives his point of not judging a book by it’s cover.
A point the author is trying to say in Hearts and Hands is that first impressions shouldn’t be trusted. Because he was dirty and grumpy looking, the marshal had no problem making it seem like he was Mr. Easton’s prisoner. The author further demonstrates the reality of this by making the reader make the same error in judgement, only to realize they fell into the same trap as Ms. Fairchild.