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