hey murdered men for ten cents, mixing
myself up with the worst people in low bar-rooms and dance-houses, and
they saw I had money in my pocket, too, and yet nobody touched me, or
offered to lay a finger on me. Do you know why? They understood that I
wanted to get drunk, and couldn't. The Indians won't harm an idiot, or
lunatic, you know. Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile.
They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of, to break his
heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then to fling him on a
dunghill to die like a dog. They believe in God, those people. They're
the only ones who do, it seems to me. And they wouldn't interfere when
they saw what He was doing to me. But I tell you I wasn't drunk. I
haven't been drunk. I'm only heart-broken, and crushed out of shape
and life--that's all. And I've crawled here just to have a friend by me
when--when I come to the end."

"You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either, Theron Ware,"
remarked his companion. "It's cowardly to give way to notions like
that."

"Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that," he remonstrated wearily.
"If there is a Judgment, it has hit me as hard as it can already. There
can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through. Here I am talking
about hell," he continued, with a pained contraction of the muscles
about his mouth--a stillborn, malformed smile--"as if I believed in one!
I've got way through all my beliefs, you know. I tell you that frankly."

"It's none of my business," she reassured him. "I'm not your Bishop, or
your confessor. I'm just your friend, your pal, that's all."

"Look here!" he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of
glance and voice. "If I was going to live, I'd have some funny things to
tell. Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to
others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience.
I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor,
Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we
were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really
were happy; and I--I really was a good man. Here's the kind of joke God
plays! You see me here six months after. Look at me! I haven't got an
honest hair in my head. I'm a bad man through and through, that's what
I am. I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere
of the good man I used to be. And, mind you, I neve