While he talked, I smoked on, luxuriating like a cat before a fire in
the comfortable lounging-chair, the cheerful surroundings, the stir and
bustle of the human ebb and flow, and the first half-hour of real
idleness I had enjoyed in many days.

It was after Carmody had been dragged away by some fellow hard-rock
enthusiast that I had my paralyzing shock. Sitting in a chair less
than a dozen feet distant, smoking quietly and reading a newspaper, was
a man whose face would have been familiar if I had seen it in the
golden streets of the New Jerusalem or in the deepest fire-chamber of
the other place; a face with boring black eyes, and with a cruel mouth
partly hidden by freshly crimped black mustaches: the face, namely, of
my sometime prison-mate, Kellow.

My shocked recognition of this man who tied me to my past annihilated
time and distance as if they had never been. In a flash I was back
again in a great stone building in the home State, working over the
prison books and glancing up now and then to the cracked mirror on the
opposite wall of the prison office which showed me the haggard features
and cropped hair of the convict Weyburn.

The memory shutter flicked, and I saw myself walking out through the
prison gates with the State's cheap suit of clothes on my back and the
State's five dollars in my pocket, a paroled man. Another click, and I
had dragged through the six months of degradation and misery, and saw
myself sitting opposite Kellow in the back room of a slum saloon in a
great city, shivering with the cold, wretched and hungry. Once again I
saw his sneer and heard him say, "It's all the same to you now, whether
you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you can 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."

It is a well-worn saying that life is full of paper walls. A look, a
turn of the head, the recognition which would follow, and once more I
should be facing a fate worse than death. Kellow knew that I had
broken my parole. He would trade upon the knowledge, and if he could
not use me he would betray me. I knew the man.

Five minutes earlier I had been facing the world a free man; free to go
and come as I pleased, free to sit and smoke with a friend in the most
public place in the camp. But now I slid from my chair with my hat
pulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every step
of the way, ready