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.

VIII

Westward

A sleety rain was retarding the March dawn and obscuring the Middle
Western farmstead landscape when the lights were turned off in the
through-train smoking-car. A glance at the railroad time-table which
had been given me with my ticket proved that the train was well past
the boundaries of my home State, and suddenly the vile atmosphere of
the crowded, night-fouled car seemed shot through with the life-giving
ozone of freedom.

Before long, however, the reaction set in. True, I was free at last,
but it was the freedom only of the escaped convict--of the fugiti