GUARDS on the raised platforms at either end of the room, guards circulating amongst the striped figures that toiled over the work benches, guards watching everywhere. They aroused a new and sullen fury in Dave Henderson's soul. They seemed to express and exemplify to-day in a sort of hideous clearness what Barjan had told him last night that he might expect in all the days to follow.

His number was up on the board!

He had not slept well last night. Barjan did not know it, but Barjan had struck a blow that had, in a mental way, sent him groggy to the ropes. He was groggy yet. His mind was in confusion. It reached out in this direction—and faltered, not quite sure of itself; it groped out in another direction—and faltered. It seemed to have lost its equilibrium and its poise. He had never expected that the whole world would turn its back while he walked from the penitentiary to Mrs. Tooler's pigeon-cote and tucked that package of a hundred thousand dollars under his arm. In that sense Barjan had told him nothing new. But nevertheless Barjan had struck home. He could not tell just where in the conversation, at just precisely what point, Barjan had done this, nor could he tell in any concrete way just what new difficulties and obstacles Barjan had reared up. He had always expected that it was up to him to outwit the police when he got away from these cursed guards. But his mind was haggard this afternoon. He had lashed it, driven it too hard through the night and through the morning. It had lost tenacity; it would not define. The only thing that held and clung there, and would not be dislodged, was the unreal, a snatch of nightmare out of the little sleep, fitful and troubled, that he had had. He was swimming across a dark, wide pool whose banks were all steep and impassable except at one spot which was very narrow, and here a figure worked feverishly with a pile of huge stones, building up a wall against him. He swam frantically, like a madman; but for every stroke he took, the figure added another stone to the wall; and when he reached the edge of the bank the wall was massive and high, and Barjan was perched on the top of the wall grinning at him.

He raised his hand, and drew it across his eyes. The clatter and clamor in the carpenter shop here around him was unendurable. The thud of a hammer jarred upon him, jangling his nerves; the screech of the bandsaw, a little way down the shop, was like the insane raving of some devil, with a devil's perverted sense of humor, running up and down a devil's scale. There were sixty-two days left.

His eyes fell upon old Tony Lomazzi a few benches away. Showing under Tony's cap, the hair, what there was of it, was silver—more nearly silver than it had somehow ever seemed to be before. Perhaps the prison barber had been a little late in getting around to the old man this time, perhaps it was because it was a little longer, perhaps that was it. It was strange though, rather queer! His eyes, arrested now, held on the other, and he seemed to be noticing little details that had never attracted his attention before. His own hands, that mechanically retained their grip upon the plane he had been using, were idle now. Certainly those old shoulders over there were more bowed and bent than he had ever seen them before. And the striped form was very frail; the clothes hung on it as clothes hang on a scarecrow. There was only the old fellow's side face in view, for the other's back was partially turned, but it appeared to possess quite a new and startling unfamiliarity. It wasn't the gray-white, unhealthy pallor—old Tony wasn't the only one who had that, for no one had ever claimed that there was any analogy between a penitentiary and a health resort—but the jowl was most curiously gaunt, and drawn inward as though the man were sucking in his cheeks, and yet the skin seemed to be stretched tight and hard as a drum-head. Very curious! It must be because he couldn't see the sharp little black eyes, full of fire, that put life and soul into that scarecrow frame.

Old Tony turned, and their eyes met. The old man lifted his hand as though to wipe his mouth—and there was a little flirt of the fingers in Dave Henderson's direction. It was the old, intimate, little signal that had passed between them unnumbered times in the thousand years that they had spent together here in the penitentiary's carpenter shop—but he had been quite wrong about the eyes. Something seemed to have filmed across them, veiling their luster. And suddenly Dave Henderson swallowed hard. Sixty-two days! Old Tony hadn't much more than that. Perhaps another year at the outside, and the old lifer would be free, too.

Dave Henderson's mind reverted to Lieutenant Joe Barjan, of the plain-clothes squad. It was perfectly true that playing a lone hand against the police of all America was a desperate game—desperate in the sense that success was in jeopardy. That was what made his brain confused and chaotic now. He was afraid—not of Barjan, not of all the police in the United States in a physical way, he had never hedged a bet, and the five years that he had now paid would goad him on more than ever to face any physical risk, take any physical chance—but he was afraid now, sick with fear, because his mind would not respond and show him clearly, definitely the way to knock Barjan and his triumphant grin from off that nightmare wall, and——

A guard's voice snapped sharply at his elbow.

Yes, of course! He had been standing idle for a few seconds—perhaps an hour. Automatically he bent over the bench, and automatically his plane drew a neat, clean shaving from the work in front of him.

The guard's voice snapped again.

“You're wanted!” said the guard curtly. “There's a visitor to see you.”

Dave Henderson turned away from the bench, and followed the guard; but the act was purely mechanical, born out of the years of discipline and obedience. A visitor—for him! There was no one in the outside world, not a soul, who cared for him; not many even, to whom his existence was of enough interest to cause a second thought—except Barjan. And Barjan had visited him yesterday. Another visitor—to-day! Well, whoever it was, the visitor had been in no hurry about it! The little attention was certainly belated! His lips thinned bitterly. Whoever it was had waited almost five years. He had never had a visitor before—except the police. It was an event! The bitterness grew deeper, and rankled. He had asked for no human touch, or thought, or consideration; he had asked for none, and he had given none; he had made his own bed, and he had not whined because it had proved to be a rack of torture. He was not whining now, and he had no desire to change the rules of the game that he himself had elected to play. This was no visitor—it was an intruder!

But curiosity, as he crossed the prison yard and entered the main building, tempered the sullen antagonism that had flared up in his soul. Who was it that was waiting for him there along the corridor in the wire-netted visitor's room, where, like some beast with its keeper pacing up and down in front of the cage, he was to be placed on exhibition? He searched his brain for an answer that would be even plausible. Not Square John Kelly. Kelly might have come if Kelly had been left to himself, but Kelly was the one man he had warned off from the beginning—there was that matter of three thousand dollars, and caution had prompted him to avoid any sign of intimacy between them. There was no one else. Even Kelly, perhaps, wasn't a friend any more. Kelly would, perhaps, simply play square, turn over the three thousand dollars—and then turn his back. It wouldn't be Tooler. The only thing that interested Tooler was to see that he collected his room rent regularly—and there would be some one else paying rent now for that front room at Tooler's! No, there was no one else. Leaving a very keen regard for old Tony Lomazzi aside, he had only one friend that he knew of whom he could really call a friend, only one man that he could trust—and that man was a convict too! It was ironical, wasn't it?—to trust a convict! Well, he could trust Millman—only it wouldn't be fair to Millman.

He lagged a little behind the guard as they approached the visitor's room, a sudden possibility dawning upon him. Perhaps it was Millman! Millman's time was up to-morrow, and to-morrow Millman was going away. He and Millman had arranged to say good-by to one another at the library hour to-day after work was over; but perhaps, as a sort of special dispensation, Millman had obtained permission to come here.

Dave Henderson shrugged his shoulders, impatient with himself, as the guard opened a door and motioned him to enter. It was absurd, ridiculous! Who had ever heard of one prisoner visiting another in this fashion! There wouldn't have been any satisfaction in it anyhow, with a guard pacing up and down between them! Well, then, who was it?

The door closed behind him—he was subconsciously aware that the door had closed, and that the guard had left him to himself. He was also subconsciously aware that his hands had reached out in front of him and that his fingers were fiercely laced in the interstices of the heavy steel-wire netting of the enclosure in which he stood, and that faced another row of steel-wire netting, separated from his own only by the space that was required to permit the guard to pace up and down between the two—only the guard hadn't come in yet from the corridor to take up his station there. There was only a face peering at him from behind that other row of netting—a fat face—the face was supposed to be smiling, but it was like the hideous grin of a gargoyle. It was the same face, the same face with its rolls of fat propped up on its short, stumpy neck. There wasn't any change in it, except that the red-rimmed gray eyes were more shifty. That was the only change in five years—the eyes were more shifty. He found that his mouth was dry, curiously dry. The blood wasn't running through his veins, because his fingers on the wire felt cold—and yet he was burning, the soul of him suddenly like some flaming furnace, and a mad, passionate fury had him in its grip, and a lust was upon him to reach that stumpy neck where the throat was, and—and—— He had been waiting five years for that—and he was simply smiling, just as that other face was smiling. Why shouldn't he smile! That fat face was Bookie Skarvan's face.

“I guess you weren't looking to see me, Dave?” said Skarvan, nodding his head in a sort of absurd cordiality. “Maybe you thought I was sore on you, and there's no use saying I wasn't. That was a nasty crack you handed me. If Tydeman hadn't come across with another bunch of coin on the jump, those pikers down at the track would have pulled me to pieces. But I didn't feel sore long, Dave—that ain't in me. And that ain't why I kept away.”

The man was quite safe, of course, on account of these wire gratings, and on account of the guard who was somewhere out there in the corridor. It was very peculiar that the guard was not pacing up and down even now in this little open space between Bookie Skarvan and himself—very peculiar! Bookie was magnanimous—not to be sore! He wanted to laugh out in a sort of maniacal hysteria, only he would be a fool to do that because there were sixty-two days left before he could get his fingers around that greasy, fat throat, and he must not scare the man off now. He had a debt to pay—five years of prison, those days and nights and hours of torment when he had been a wounded thing hounded almost to his death. Certainly, he owed all that to this man here! The man had cunningly planned to have him disappear by the murder route, hadn't he? And he owed Bookie Skarvan for that too! If it hadn't been for that he would have got away with the money, and there wouldn't have been five years of prison, or those hours of physical torment, or——

He lifted his hand and brushed it heavily across his forehead. He was quite cool now, perfectly in control of himself. The man didn't have even a suspicion that he, Dave Henderson, knew these things. He mustn't put the other on his guard—there were still sixty-two days during which these prison walls held him impotent, and during which another, warned, could get very far out of reach. Yes, he was quite cool now. He was even still smiling, wasn't he? He could even play the man like a hooked fish. It wasn't time to land the other yet. But it was strange that Bookie Skarvan should have come here at all. Bookie wasn't a fool; he hadn't come here for nothing. What was it the man wanted?

“Ain't you glad to see me, Dave?” demanded Bookie Skarvan quite jocularly. “'Cause, if you ain't now, you will be before I go.”

“What do you mean?” inquired Dave Henderson coolly.

“Notice anything queer about what's doing here right at this minute?” Bookie's left eye closed in a significant wink. “Sure, you do! There ain't any guard butting in, Dave. Get me? Well, I fixed it like that.”

Dave Henderson relapsed into the old vernacular.

“Spill it!” he invited. “I'm listening.”

“Attaboy!” Bookie grinned. “You bet you're listening! We ain't forgotten those years you and me spent together, have we, Dave? You know me, and I know you. I kept away from here until now, 'cause I didn't want 'em to get the right dope on the betting—didn't want 'em to think there was any chance of us playing up to each other.”

“You mean you didn't want them to get wise that you were a crook, too,” suggested Dave Henderson imperturbably.

Bookie Skarvan had no false modesty—his left eyelid drooped for the second time.

“You got the idea, Dave,” he grinned again. “They've got to figure I'm straight—that's the play. That's the play I've been making in waiting five years—so's they'd be sure there wasn't nothing between us. Now you listen hard, Dave. All you've handed the police is a frozen face, and that's the right stuff; but I got a dead straight tip they're going to keep their eyes on you till hell's a skating pond. They're going to get that money—or else you ain't! See? Well, that's where I stepped in. I goes to the right source, and I says: 'Look here, you can't do nothing with Dave. Let me have a try. Maybe I can handle him. He worked for me a good many years, and I know him better than his mother would if he had one. He's stubborn, stubborn as hell, and threats ain't any good, nor promises neither; but he's a good boy, for all that. You let me have a chance to talk to him privately, and maybe I can make him come across and cough up that money. Anyway, it won't do any harm to try. I always liked Dave, and I don't want to see him dodging the police all his life. Tydeman's dead, and, though it was really Tydeman's money, I was a partner of Tydeman's, and if anybody on earth can get under Dave's shell I can.'” Bookie put his face closer to his own particular stretch of wire netting. He lowered his voice. “That's the reason I'm here, and that's the reason the guard—ain't!”

There was almost awe and admiration in Dave Henderson's voice.

“You've got your nerve with you!” he said softly.

Bookie Skarvan chuckled in his wheezy way.

“Sure!” he said complacently. “And that's why we win. You get the lay, don't you?” He was whispering now. “You can't get that cash alone, Dave. I'm telling you straight they won't let you. But they won't watch me! You know me, Dave. I'll make it a fair split—fifty-fifty. Tell me where the money is, and I'll get it, and be waiting for you anywhere you say when you come out; and I'll fix it to hand over your share so's they'll never know you got it—I got to make sure it's fixed like that for my own sake, you can see that. Get me, Dave? And I go out of here now and tell the warden it ain't any good, that I can't get you to talk. I guess that looks nifty enough, don't it, Dave?” #

There was a fly climbing up the wire netting. It zigzagged its course over the little squares. It was a good gamble whether, on reaching the next strand, it would turn to the right or left, or continue straight ahead. Dave Henderson watched it. The creature did no one of those things. It paused and frictioned its front legs together in a leisurely fashion. After that it appeared to be quite satisfied with its position—and it stayed there.

“Poor Bookie!” murmured Dave Henderson. “Sad, too! I guess it must be softening of the brain!”

Bookie Skarvan's face blotched suddenly red—but he pressed his face still more earnestly against the wire barrier.

“You don't get it!” he breathed hoarsely. “I'm giving you a straight tip. Barjan's waiting for you. The police are waiting for you. You haven't got a hope. I tell you, you can't get that money alone, no matter where you put it.”

“I heard you,” said Dave Henderson indifferently.

There was silence for a moment.

A sort of anxious exasperation spread over Skarvan's face, then perplexity, and then a flare of rage.

“You're a fool!” he snarled. “You won't believe me! You think I'm trying to work you for half of that money. Well, so I am, in a way—or I wouldn't have come here. But I'm earning it. Look at the risk I'm taking—five years, the same as you got. You crazy fool! Do you think I'm bluffing? I tell you again, I know what I'm talking about. The police'll never give you a look-in. You got to have help. Who else is there but me? It's better to split with me than lose the whole of it, ain't it?”

“You haven't changed a bit in five years, Bookie.” There was studied insolence in Dave Henderson's voice now. “Not a damned bit! Run along now—beat it!”

“You mean that?” Bookie Skarvan's eyes were puckered into slits now. “You mean you're going to turn me down?”

“Yes!” said Dave Henderson.

“I'll give you one more chance,” whispered Skarvan. “No!”

Bookie Skarvan's fat fingers squirmed around inside his collar as though it choked him.

“All right!” His lips were twitching angrily. “All right!” he repeated ominously. “Then, by God, you'll never get the money—even if you beat the police! Understand? I'll see to that! I made you a fair, straight offer. You'll find now that there'll be some one else besides you and Barjan out for that coin—and when the showdown comes it won't be either you or Barjan that gets it! And maybe you think that's a bluff, too!”

“I never said I knew where the money was,” said Dave Henderson—and smiled—and shrugged his shoulders. “Therefore you ought to stand just as good a chance as Barjan—or I. After I got wounded I kind of lost track of things, you know.”

“You lie!” said Skarvan fiercely. “I—I———” He checked himself, biting at his lips. “I'll give you one more chance again. What's your last word?”

“You've got it, Bookie,” said Dave Henderson evenly.

“Then take mine!” Skarvan rasped. “I'll go now and tell the warden you wouldn't say anything. If you try to put a crimp in me by reporting my offer, I'll say you lied. I don't mind taking chances on my word being believed against the word of a convict and a thief who is known to be playing tricky! You get that? And after that—God help you!”

The man was gone....

Presently, Dave Henderson found himself back in the carpenter shop. The band-saw was shrieking, screeching insanely again. He had smiled in there in the visitor's room at Bookie Skarvan; he had even been debonair and facetious—he wasn't that way now. He could mask his face from others; he couldn't mask his soul from himself. It seemed as though his courage were being drained away from him, and in its place were coming a sense of final, crushing defeat. Barjan's blow of last night had sent him groggy to the ropes; but the blow Bookie Skarvan had just dealt had smashed in under his guard and had landed on an even more vital spot.

Skarvan's veiled threat hadn't veiled anything. The veil was only too transparent! “God help you!” meant a lot. It meant that, far more dangerous to face, even more difficult to outwit than the police, there was now to be aligned against him the criminal element of San Francisco. It meant Baldy Vickers and Runty Mott, and Baldy Vickers' gang. It meant the men who had already attempted to murder him, and who would be eager enough to repeat that attempt for the same stake—one hundred thousand dollars. With the police it would have been, more than anything else, the simple thrust and parry of wits; now, added to that, was a physical, brutish force whose danger only a fool would strive to minimize. There were dives and dens in the underworld there, as he knew well enough, where a man would disappear from the light of day forever, and where tortures that would put the devil's ingenuity to shame could be applied to make a man open his lips. He was not exaggerating! It was literally true. And if he were once trapped he could expect no less than that. They had already tried to murder him once! Naturally, they had entered into his calculations before while he had been here in prison; but they had not seemed to be a very vital factor. He had never figured on Bookie Skarvan setting that machinery in motion again—he had only figured on getting his own hands on Bookie Skarvan himself. But he saw it now; and he realized that, once started again, they would stop at nothing to get that money. Whether Bookie Skarvan would have abided by his offer, on the basis that he would get more out of it for himself that way, or whether it was simply a play to discover the whereabouts of the money and then divide up with his old accomplices, did not matter; it was certain now that Bookie Skarvan would be content with less rather than with none, and that the underworld would be unleashed on his, Dave Henderson's, trail. The police—and now the underworld! It was like a pack of wolves and a pack of hounds in chase from converging directions after the same quarry; the wolves and the hounds might clash together, and fall upon one another—but the quarry would be mangled and crushed in the mÊlÉe.

The afternoon wore on. At times Dave Henderson's hands clenched over his tools until it seemed the tendons must snap and break with the strain; at times the sweat of agony oozed out in drops upon his forehead. Bookie Skarvan was right. He could not get that money alone. No! No, that was wrong! He could get it alone, and he would get it, and then fight for it, and go under for it, all hell would not hold him back from that, and Bookie Skarvan and some of the others would go under too—but he could not get away with the money alone. And that meant that these five years of prison, five years of degradation, of memories that nauseated him, five years that he had wagered out of his life, had gone for nothing! God, if he could only turn to some one for help! But there was no one, not a soul on earth, not a friend in the world who could aid him—except Millman.

And he couldn't ask Millman—because it wouldn't be fair to Millman.

His face must have grown haggard, perhaps he was acting strangely. Old Tony over there had been casting anxious glances in his direction. He took a grip upon himself, and smiled at the old bomb-thrower. The old Italian looked pretty bad himself—that pasty whiteness about the old fellow's face had a nasty appearance.

His mind went back to Millman, working in queer, disconnected snatches of thought. He was going to lose Millman, too... Millman was going out tomorrow.... It had always been a relief to talk to Millman.... He had never told Millman where the money was, of course, but Millman knew what he, Dave Henderson, was “in” for.... The library hour wasn't far off, and it would help to talk to Millman now.... Only Millman was going out to-morrow—? and he was to bid Millman good-by.

This seemed somehow the crowning jeer of mockery that fate was flinging at him—that to-morrow even Millman would be gone. It seemed to bring a snarl into his soul, the snarl as of some gaunt, starving beast at bay, the snarl of desperation flung out in bitter, reckless defiance.

He put his hands to his face, and beneath them his jaws clamped and locked. They would never beat him, he would go under first, but—but——

Time passed. The routine of the prison life went on like the turning of some great, ponderous wheel that moved very slowly, but at the same time with a sort of smooth, oiled immutability. It seemed that way to Dave Henderson. He was conscious of no definite details that marked or occupied the passage of time. The library hour had come. He was on his way to the library now—with permission to get a book. He did not want a book. He was going to see Millman, and, God knew, he did not want to see Millman—to say good-by.

Mind, body and soul were sick—sick with the struggle of the afternoon, sick with the ceaseless mental torment that made his temples throb and brought excruciating pain, and with the pain brought almost physical nausea; sick with the realization that his recompense for the five years of freedom he had sacrificed was only—wreckage, ruin and disaster.

He entered the little room. A guard lounged negligently against the wall. One of the two convict librarians was already busy with another convict—but it wasn't Millman who was busy. He met Millman's cool, steady, gray eyes, read a sudden, startled something in them, and moved down to the end of the sort of wooden counter away from the guard—and handed in his book to be exchanged.

“What's the matter, Dave?” Millman, across the counter, back half turned to the guard, spoke in a low, hurried voice, as he pretended to examine the book. “I never saw you look like this before! Are you sick?”

“Yes,” said Dave Henderson between his teeth. “Sick—as hell! I'm up against it, Charlie! And I guess it's all over except for one last little fight.”

“What book do you want?” said Millman's voice coolly; but Millman's clean-cut face with its strong jaw tightening a little, and Millman's clear gray eyes with a touch of steel creeping into them, said: “Go on!”

“The police!” Dave Henderson spoke through the corner of his mouth without motion of the lips. “Barjan was here last night. And I got another tip to-day. The screws are going on—to a finish.”

“You mean they're going to see that you don't get that money?”

Dave Henderson nodded curtly.

“Why not give it up then, Dave, and start a clean sheet?” asked Millman softly.

“Give it up!” The red had come into Dave Henderson's face, there was a savage tightening of his lips across his teeth. “I'll never give it up! D'ye think I've rotted here five years only to crawl at the end? By God! No! I'll get it—if they get me doing it!” His hoarse whisper caught and choked suddenly. “But it's hell, Charlie—hell! Hell to go under like that, just because there isn't a soul on God's wide earth I can trust to get it for me while they're watching me!” Millman turned away, and walked to the racks of books at the rear of the room.

Dave Henderson watched the other in a numbed sort of way. It was a curious kind of good-by he was saying to Millman. He wasn't quite sure, for that matter, just what he had said. He was soul sick, and body sick. Millman was taking a long while over the selection of a book—and he hadn't even asked for a book, let alone for any particular one. What did it matter! He didn't want anything to read. Reading wasn't any good to him any more! Barjan and Bookie Skarvan had——

Millman was leaning over the counter again, a book in his hand.

“Would you trust me, Dave?” he asked quietly.

“You!” The blood seemed to quicken, and rush in a mad, swirling tide through Dave Henderson's veins. “Do you mean that, Charlie? Do you mean you'll help me?”

“Yes,” said Millman. “If you want to trust me, I'll get that money for you. I'm going out to-morrow. But talk quickly! The guard's watching us and getting fidgety. Where is it?”

Dave Henderson rubbed his upper lip with the side of his forefinger as though it itched; the remaining fingers, spread out fanlike, screened his mouth.

“In the old pigeon-cote—shed back of Tooler's house where I used to live—you can get into the shed from the lane.”

Millman laid the book on the counter—and pushed it toward Dave Henderson.

“All right,” he said. “They won't be looking for it in New York. You've two months more here. Make it the twenty-fourth of June. That'll give you time enough. I'll be registered at the St. Lucian Hotel—New York—eight o'clock in the evening—June twenty-fourth. I'll hand the money over to you there, and——”

“You there, Five-Fifty”—the guard was moving toward them from across the room—“you got your book, ain't you?”

Dave Henderson picked up the book, and turned toward the door.

“Good-by!” he flung over his shoulder.

“Good-by!” Millman answered.