"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.