w-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