ong treatment for Jim Hall; but it was the treatment he
received. It was the treatment he had received from the time he was a
little pulpy boy in a San Francisco slum--soft clay in the hands of
society and ready to be formed into something.

It was during Jim Hall's third term in prison that he encountered a guard
that was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated him unfairly,
lied about him to the warden, lost his credits, persecuted him. The
difference between them was that the guard carried a bunch of keys and a
revolver. Jim Hall had only his naked hands and his teeth. But he
sprang upon the guard one day and used his teeth on the other's throat
just like any jungle animal.

After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived
there three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the roof.
He never left this cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine. Day was
a twilight and night was a black silence. He was in an iron tomb, buried
alive. He saw no human face, spoke to no human thing. When his food was
shoved in to him, he growled like a wild animal. He hated all things.
For days and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe. For weeks and
months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating his very soul.
He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of fear as ever
gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.

And then, one night, he escaped. The warders said it was impossible, but
nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half out of it lay the body
of a dead guard. Two other dead guards marked his trail through the
prison to the outer walls, and he had killed with his hands to avoid
noise.

He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards--a live arsenal that
fled through the hills pursued by the organised might of society. A
heavy price of gold was upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him
with shot-guns. His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to
college. Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles and went out
after him. A pack of bloodhounds followed the way of his bleeding feet.
And the sleuth-hounds of the law, the paid fighting animals of society,
with telephone, and telegraph, and special train, clung to his trail
night and day.

Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or stampeded
through barbed-wire fences to the delight of the commonwealth reading the
account at the breakfast table. It was