coming on
him, and knowing he couldn't live, finished himself off with his own
revolver.

It was just the way I expected he would make an ending. He couldn't do
much all alone in his line. The reward was a big one, and there would be
always some one ready to earn it. Jim and Starlight were gone, and I
was as good as dead. There wasn't much of a call for him to keep alive.
Anyhow, he died game, and paid up all scores, as he said himself.

. . . . .

I don't know that there's much more for me to say. Here I am boxed up,
like a scrubber in a pound, year after year--and years after that--for I
don't know how long. However, O my God! how ever shall I stand it? Here
I lie, half my time in a place where the sun never shines, locked up at
five o'clock in my cell, and the same door with never a move in it till
six o'clock next morning. A few hours' walk in a prison yard, with
a warder on the wall with a gun in his hand overhead. Then locked up
again, Sundays and week-days, no difference. Sometimes I think they'd
better have hanged me right off. If I feel all these things now I've
only been a few months doing my sentence, how about next year, and the
year after that, and so on, and so on? Why, it seems as if it would
mount up to more than a man's life--to ten lives--and then to think how
easy it might all have been saved.

There's only one thing keeps me alive; only for that I'd have starved to
death for want of having the heart to eat or drink either, or else have
knocked my brains out against the wall when one of them low fits came
over me. That one thing's the thought of Gracey Storefield.

She couldn't come to me, she wrote, just yet, but she'd come within the
month, and I wasn't to fret about her, because whether it was ten years
or twenty years if she was alive she'd meet me the day after I was free,
let who will see her. I must be brave and keep up my spirits for her
sake and Aileen's, who, though she was dead to the world, would hear of
my being out, and would always put my name in her prayers. Neither
she nor I would be so very old, and we might have many years of life
reasonably happy yet in spite of all that had happened. So the less I
gave way and made myself miserable, the younger I should look and feel
when I came out. She was sure I repented truly of what I had done wrong
in the past; and she for one, and George--good, old, kind George--had
said he would go bail that I would be one of the squarest