By the train which bore me away from Springville I went only far enough to put me safely beyond the possibility of stumbling upon any of the places where I had hitherto sought work; though as to that, I had little hope of escaping the relentless blacklister who had been set upon me.

About midnight I had a talk with the flagman in the smoking-car, calling myself a laborer looking for a job and asking about the prospects in the region through which we were passing. I was told that there were swamp lands in the next county, and that the contractors who were installing systems of under-draining had been advertising for men.

Accordingly, the next morning found me in the new field, with one set of difficulties outpaced for the moment only to make room for another. The first man I tackled was the foreman of a ditching crew, and he looked me over with a cold and contemptuous eye.

"Show yer hands!" he rasped, and when I held them out, palms upward: "On yer way, Misther Counter-hopper; 'tis wor-rkin'min we're hirin' here this day-not anny lily-fingered dudes!"

So it was, in a disheartening number of instances; on a railroad grading force in an adjoining county, on city buildings where I asked to be taken as an unskilled helper, with a sewer contractor in another city, as a shoveler in a village brick-yard. Finally I landed a job as a stacker in a lumberyard; and now I found another of the day-laborer difficulties lying in wait for me. At the time of my commitment for trial I was in good physical condition. But the three years in prison had made me soft and flabby, a handicap which liberty-with a string tied to it-had done little to remove; and four hard days of the stacking, in which two of us were handling two-by-ten eighteen-foot joists to the top of a pile twelve feet high, finished me.

The boss grinned understandingly when he gave me my time-check for the four days.

"I thought you wouldn't last very long at the stacking," he commented; "that's a man's job." Then: "Got any head for figures?"

I faced him fairly. "I can't take a job of that kind."

"Why can't you?"

He got the reason in a single sentence.

"Paroled man, hey? What was you in for?"

I named the charge, and did not add that it was an unjust one. I had pleaded the miscarriage of justice so many times, only to be called a liar, that it seemed useless to try to explain.

"Robbed a bank, did you? Well, I don't know as I think any worse of you for spittin' it right out. Tryin' to brace up?"

"I'm trying to earn an honest living."

"And havin' a mighty hard time of it, I reckon-'r you wouldn't be makin' a push at stackin' lumber with them blistered hands. Say, boy; I sort o' like your looks, and I'm goin' to give you a boost. They're needin' a log-scaler in the sawmill. If you know figures, you can catch on in half a day. Chase your feet down to the mill foreman and tell him I sent you."

I went gladly enough, secured the new job, learned how to do it acceptably, and was temerariously happy and light-hearted for two whole weeks. Then my Nemesis found me again. In the third week I chanced to get a glimpse of a short, heavy-set man talking to a bunch of my fellow laborers. Before I could cross the mill yard to identify the stranger he turned and walked quickly away; but the sixth sense of apprehension which develops so surely and quickly in the ex-convict told me that the heavy-set man was Abel Geddis's hired blacklister, and that I was once more on the toboggan slide.

Pay-day came at the end of the week, and when the envelopes had been given out the mill foreman took me aside.

"I'm sorry, Weyburn," he began curtly, "but I'm afraid you'll have to be moving on. Personally, I don't care, one way or the other, what you've been or where you hall from. You do your work well, and that's all I ask of any man. But your story has got out among the hands, and that settles it. They won't work with a convict."

When I took the long road again after this latest rebuff I knew that the fine resolution with which I had left the prison five months earlier was breaking down. The relentless pressure was doing its work, and I began to ask myself how long I could hold out as a law-abiding citizen and a victim of injustice against the belief of the world that I was neither.

The five months' wanderings had carried me the length and breadth of the State, and I had avoided only the large cities and my home neighborhood. But with the lumber company's money in my pocket I boarded a train for the State metropolis. At the end of the experiment I was doing what the released criminal usually does at the outset-seeking an opportunity to lose myself in the crowd.

Jobs were notably harder to find in the great city, though police headquarters, where I reported myself, placed no obstacles in my way so far as I know; took no note of me in any fashion, as I was afterward led to believe. That the hired traducer would follow and find me I made no doubt; but by this time I was becoming so inured to this peculiar hardship that I refused to cross bridges until I came to them, and was at times even able to forget, in the discouragements of other hardships, that I was a marked man.

In the search for means to keep body and soul together it was easy to forget. Day labor offered only now and then, and in my increasing physical unfitness I could not hold my own against the trained muscles of seasoned roustabouts, porters and freight-handlers. Worse still, the physical deterrent grew by what it fed upon-or by the lack of feeding. Part of the time I couldn't get enough to eat; and there were cold and blustering nights when I had not the few cents which would have given me a bed in a cheap lodging-house.

It was in this deepest abyss in the valley of disheartenment that I met a former prison-mate named Kellow; a forger whose time of release from the penitentiary coincided nearly with my own. The meeting was wholly by chance. I was crossing one of the city bridges at night, pointing for one of the river warehouses where I hoped to find a tramp's lodging and shelter from the bitter wind, when I walked blindly into a man coming in the opposite direction. The recognition was instant and mutual.

Like myself, Kellow had been a "trusty," and under certain relaxations of the rule of silence in the prison we had talked and an acquaintance of a sort had slowly grown and ripened. In this intimacy, which I had striven to hold at arm's length, I had come to know the forger as a criminal of the most dangerous breed; a man of parts and of some education, but wholly lacking in the moral sense; a rule-keeper in prison only because he was shrewd enough to appreciate the fact that he was bringing the day of release nearer by piling up "good-conduct" time.

"Well, pinch me! Look who's here!" was his greeting when we met on the bridge.

For a silent moment it was I who did the looking. Kellow had grown a pair of curling black mustaches since his release; he was well-dressed, erect and alert, and was smoking a cigar the fragrance of which made me sick and faint with an attack of the long-denied tobacco hunger.

"You're out, too, are you?" I managed to say at last, shivering in the cold blast which came sweeping up the river.

"Three months, and then some," he returned jauntily. "I'm collecting a little on the old debt now, and doing fairly well at it, thank you."

"The old debt?" I queried.

"Yep; the one that the little old round world owes every man: three squares, a tailor, a bed and a pocket-roll."

"You look as if you had acquired all four," I agreed, setting my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

"Sure I have; and you look as if you hadn't," he countered. And then: "What's the matter? Just plain hard luck? Or is it the parole scare?"

"Both," I admitted.

He shot me a quick look.

"I can put you onto a dead sure thing, if you're game for it. Let's hunt us a warm place and chew it over."

The place was the back room of an all-night saloon in the slum quarter beyond the bridge. It was warm, stiflingly warm and close, after the outdoor blast and chill, and it reeked like a sty. Kellow kicked out a chair for me and drew up one for himself on the opposite side of the small round card-table over which a single gas-jet hissed and sizzled, lighting the tiny box of a place with a sickly yellow glare.

"What'll it be?" he asked, when the waiter came in.

"A piece of bread and meat from the lunch counter, if you don't mind," I said; and then, in an apology for which I instantly despised myself: "Liquor doesn't agree with me lately; it-it would gag me."

Kellow ordered whiskey for himself, and after the waiter was gone he stared at me contemptuously.

"So it's come to that, has it?" he derided. "You're so damned hungry you're afraid to put a drop of bug-juice under your belt. You're a fool, Weyburn. I know what you've been doing, just as well as if you'd told me the whole story. Also, I'll believe now what I didn't believe while we were in 'stir'; you were pinched for something you didn't do."

"Well?" I said, neither affirming nor denying. The free lunch had come and I was falling upon it like a famished wolf. I hadn't a penny in my pockets, and the bread and meat stood for breakfast, dinner and supper combined.

Kellow swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and stood the empty glass bottom upward on the table.

"Been trying the honest lay, I suppose-handing in your name and number wherever you went?" he suggested.

I nodded, adding that there was nothing else to be done, as I saw it.

He laughed scornfully. "A minute ago I said you were a fool, but you're worse than that-you're an infant! Why, good hell, Weyburn, there are a dozen ways to beat the parole game! Look at me: I'm here, ain't I? And the warden knows all about it, does he? Not on your life! Every four weeks he gets a letter from me telling him what a fine time I'm having on Dad's farm down in Wayne, and how I'm all to the good and thanking him every day for all he did for me. What?"

"Somebody mails those letters for you in Wayne?" I asked.

"Sure! And a little split for the marshal in the nearest town does the rest. Bimeby, when I've collected enough of the debt I spoke of, I'll shake the dust and disappear."

"They'll find you and bring you back."

"Not without a fine-tooth comb, they won't. This old world is plenty good and wide when you learn how to use it."

"I suppose I haven't learned yet; and I don't want to learn-in your way, Kellow."

Again he gave me the sneering laugh.

"You may as well begin, and have it over with. It's all the same to you, now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you can live square and live the prison-smell down, but you can't. It'll stick to you like your skin. Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."

Though I had devoured the bar hand-out to the final crumb, I was still half-famished; and hunger is but a poor ally in any battle. What he was saying was truth of the truth, so far as the blunt facts were concerned. Every failure I had made in the six weary months confirmed it. There was little room in the world of the well-behaved for the man who was honest enough-or foolish enough-to confess himself an ex-convict; less still for a man who had been made the object of a persecuting conspiracy. None the less, I had resolution, or obstinacy, enough to say:

"I don't believe it."

"That's what makes me say you're a fool!" he snapped back. "You've got the name, and you may as well have the game. The world is dead easy, if you take it on its blind side; easy living, easy money. Listen, Weyburn, and I'll show you how you can climb into the bandwagon."

I listened because I could not well help it, being the man's wretched beneficiary, in a sense. As he talked I felt the ground of good resolutions slipping from beneath my feet. He was staging the old and time-honored swindle-the gold-brick game-and he needed a confederate. The fish was almost as good as landed, and with a little coaching I could step in and clinch the robbery. Kellow proposed to stake me for the clothes and the needful stage properties; and my knowledge of banking and finance, limited as it was, would do the rest. It was a cinch, he averred, and when it was pulled off we could divide the spoils and vanish.

It was hardly a temptation. That word calls up a mental picture of stern virtues assailed on every side and standing like a rock in a storm. But, stripped of their poetic glamor, the virtues-and the vices, for that matter,-are purely human; they can rise no higher or sink no lower than the flesh-and-blood medium through which they find their expression. The six months of hardship and humiliation which had brought me to a pass at which I could eat a saloon luncheon at the expense of a thief were pushing me over the brink. Kellow sat back in his chair, smoking quietly, but I could feel his black eyes boring into my brain. When he judged that the time was fully ripe, he drew a fat roll of bank-notes from his pocket, stripped ten ten-dollar bills from it and tossed them across the table to me.

"There's the stake, and here's the lay," said he, tersely. "Your name's Smollett; you've struck it rich, and you're on your way home to New York, we'll say, from your mine in Colorado. You're stopping at the Marlborough, and we'll run across you accidentally-I and the come-on-to-morrow forenoon in the hotel lobby. Get that?"

"I hear what you are saying."

"All right. Now for the preliminaries. Any all-night pawnbroker can fit you out with a couple of grips and some clothes that will let you dress the part-or at least let you into the hotel. Then, to-morrow morning bright and early you can hit the ready-made tailors and blossom out right as the honest miner spending some of his money for the glad rags. I'm at the Marlborough myself-J. T. Jewett, Room 706-but, of course, I won't know you; you'll just butt in as a stranger to both of us. When we get together I'll give you the cues as we go along."

During all this talk the hundred dollars had lain on the table between us. It didn't look like money to me; it stood for food and decent clothing and a bath-but chiefly for food. Slowly I took it up and fingered it, almost reverently, straightening out the crumpled corners of the bills and smoothing them down....

I scarcely know how I got away from Kellow, nor do I know why he chose to stay on there in the back room of that miserable doggery, drinking whiskey sours alone and smoking his high-priced cigars. But I do know that I was up against the fight of my life when I went out to face the bitter night wind in the streets.

It was a singular thing that helped me to win the fight, temporarily, at least. By all accounts it ought to have been those three heart-warming days spent with Whitley a month earlier, and his farewell words of helpfulness and cheer spoken as I was boarding the outgoing train at the Springville station. But though Whitley's sturdy faith in me came to do its part, it was another and much longer leap of memory that made me hesitate and draw back; a flash carrying me back to my school-days in Glendale ... to a certain afternoon when a plain-faced little girl, the daughter of our physics and chemistry teacher, had told me, with her brown eyes ablaze, what she thought of dishonesty in general, and in particular of the dishonesty of a boy in her class who was lying and stealing his way past his examinations.

I don't know to this day why I should have recalled Polly Everton and her flaming little diatribe against thievery and hypocrisy at that desperate moment. She, and her quiet college-professor father who had seemed so out of place teaching in a Glendale school, had dropped out of my life years before. But the fact remained, and at the memory, Kellow's bribe, gripped pocket-deep in my hand, burnt me like a coal of fire. With a gasp I realized that I was over the brink at last, stumbling and falling into the pit which has no bottom. With a single dollar of the thief's money spent and gone beyond recall, I should be lost.

With that memory of little Polly Everton to drive me, I went doggedly back to the riverside slum and sought for Kellow where I had left him. He was gone, but the newly aroused resolution, the outworn swimmer's stubborn steeling of the nerves and muscles to make one more stroke before he drowns, persisted. Footsore and half-frozen, I tramped the dozen squares to the great hotel in the business district. The night clerk sized me up for precisely what I was, listening with only half an ear to my stammering question. But he deigned to answer it, nevertheless. Yes; Mr. Jewett was the gentleman who had Number 706, but he was not in. His key was still in the box.

There were writing-desks in the lobby, a number of them, and I went to the first that offered. Some guest had left a few sheets of the hotel paper and an envelope. Without a written word to go with it, I slipped the unbroken bribe into the envelope, sealed the flap hurriedly and went back to the clerk.

"Put this in Mr. Jewett's key-box, if you please," I requested; and when I had seen the thing done, and had verified the number of the box with my own eyes, I headed once more for the inhospitable streets.

It was on the icy sidewalk, directly in front of the revolving doors of the big hotel, that my miracle was wrought. While I hesitated, not knowing which way to turn for shelter for the remainder of the night, a cab drove up and a man, muffled to the ears in a fur-lined overcoat, got out. He was apparently an arrival from one of the night trains; while he was slamming the cab door a bell-hop from the Marlborough skated across the sidewalk, snatched a couple of grips from the front seat of the cab and disappeared with them.

Humped and shivering, I was almost at the traveler's elbow when he turned and felt in his pockets for the money to pay the cab driver. I was so busy envying him the possession of that warm, fur-lined coat that I didn't pay much attention to what he was doing, but it was evident that he had forgotten in which pocket he carried his change, since he was feeling first in one and then in another.

Suddenly my heart skipped a beat and then fell to hammering a fierce tattoo as a gust of the highwayman's madness swept over me. The man had taken out a huge pocket roll of bank-notes and was running the bills over to see if there were one small enough to serve the cab-paying purpose. Obviously there was not, and with a grunt of impatience he searched again, this time unearthing a handful of silver. Dropping the proper coin into the cabman's outstretched hand, he turned and disappeared through the revolving doors, and at the same instant the cabby whipped up his horse and drove away. Then I saw it lying almost at my feet; a small black pocketbook which the traveler had let fall in his fumbling search for change.

Judged by any code of ethics-my own, for that matter-what followed was entirely indefensible. The grab for the treasure, its swift hiding, the breathless dash into the shadows of the nearest cross street; all these named me for what I was at the moment-a half-starved, half-frozen, despair-hounded thief. When I had made sure that there was no policeman in sight I examined my prize by the light of a crossing electric. The black pocketbook contained sixty-three dollars in bills and a single half-dollar in silver. And a hasty search revealed nothing by which the loser could be identified; there were no papers, no cards, nothing but the money.

Though a desperate disregard for anything like property rights had prompted the sudden snatch and the thief-like dash for cover, I am glad to be able to say that common honesty, or some shadowy simulacrum of it, revived presently and sent me back to the hotel, though not without terrible foot-draggings, you may be sure. And as I went, many-tongued temptation clamored riotously for a hearing: the man had so much-he would never miss this carelessly spilt driblet; I had no means of identifying him, and with the fur-lined coat removed I should probably fail to recognize him; if I should try to describe him, the hotel clerk, he of the detached and superior manner, would doubtless take the pocketbook in charge and that would be the last I should ever hear of it.

Giving these arguments their just weight, I hope I may take some small credit for the perseverance which finally drove me through the swinging doors and up to the clerk's counter. For the second time that night I sought speech with the bediamonded chief lackey, and got it grudgingly. No; no one had registered within the past few minutes, and no man answering my exceedingly incomplete description had presented himself at the counter. Conscious that I must do, there and then, all that ever could be done, I persisted.

"The gentleman I speak of came in a cab and he had two hand-bags; they were brought in by one of the bell-boys," I said, thinking that this might afford the clue.

The clerk looked afar over my head. "Some guest who already has his room and had gone to fetch his grips." Then, with the contemptuous lip-curl that I had encountered too often not to recognize it at sight: "Who are you, anyway?-a plain-clothes man looking for crooks? You'll not find them in the Marlborough. We don't keep that kind of a house."

I turned away, gripping the precious treasure-trove in my pocket. For a full half-year I had kept faith with the prison authorities and the law, living the life of a hunted animal and coming at last to the choice between starvation and a deliberate plunge into the underworld. Through it all I had obeyed the requirements of my parole in letter and in spirit. But now--

The black pocketbook was warm in my hand. It was mine, if not by the finder's right, at least by the right of possession, and it contained the price of freedom. Before I had reached the corner, of the first street my determination was taken, and there had been but one instant of hesitation. This had come in a frenzied burst of red rage when I remembered that, when all was said, I owed this last downward step, as well as all that had gone before, to two old men who ... I stopped short in my shuffling race to the railroad station. I had money; enough to take me to Glendale-and far beyond when the deed should be done. Years before I had sworn to kill them, and since that time they had doubly earned their blotting-out.

I don't know to this day whether it was some remaining shreds of the conventional conscience, or a broken man's inability to screw retaliatory determination to the murder point, that sent me onward to the westbound station and framed my reply to the ticket agent's curt question, "Where to?" when I thrust my money through his wicket. Be that as it may, a short half-hour later I had boarded a through westbound train and was crouching in the corner of a seat in the overheated smoking-car with a ticket to Denver in my pocket. Though I was not on my way to commit a double murder, I was none the less an outlaw. I had broken my parole.