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 la