“It was a little better for a while. We both had a scare and then when we talked of quittin’ I s’pose we thought more of each other. Anyhow we’d lived together so long that we’d kind of got in the habit of it. But still it didn’t last long; I don’t believe ‘twas right for us to stay together after all that had happened and the way we felt and had lived up to that time. If we’d only separated then—but we didn’t, and it’s no use talkin’ about it now. “It was just about this time that Jimmy Carroll was killed and she didn’t want me to work in the yards after that. She was ‘most as ‘fraid as I was so we made up our minds that I’d quit. It was then that I went to peddlin’; but wait a minute before I tell that, let’s go and speak to the guard.” The two men got up and went to the iron door and looked out through the bars at the shining electric lights in the corridors. The guard sat near the door talking with the prisoner in the next cell. He looked up and put two cigars through the grates. “Is there anything I can do for you, Jackson?” “No, I guess not. Nothin’ more has come from him, has there?” “No, but it’s early yet.” “Well, I guess it’s no use.” The men looked out a moment at the iron corridor and then lighted their cigars and sat down. Hank could hardly speak. Somehow this simple contact with his old friend had driven away all the feeling of the crime that he had brought with him to the jail. He no longer thought of him as Jackson, the wife-murderer, but as Jim, the boy he once knew and the man that had worked in the switch-yards and grown up by his side. Out in the street they heard a steady stream of carriages and the merry laugh of men and women passing by. Hank listened to the voices and asked who they were. “Oh, the people drivin’ past in their carriages to the theater. You know all the northside swells drive down Dearborn Avenue past the jail. I wonder if they ever think of us in here, or if they know what is goin’ to be done tomorrow. I s’pose if they do they think it’s all right. What a queer world it is. Do you s’pose one of them was ever in here? Well, I don’t believe I’d be either if only I’d had their chance.” The two men sat stripped almost to the skin; the putrid prison air soaked into Hank at every pore. The sweat ran from his face and he felt as if the great jail were a big oven filled with the damned and kept boiling hot by some infernal imps. Here and there along the big corridors they heard the echo of a half demoniac laugh, a few couplets of a ribald song, and the echoing sound of the heavy boots of a guard walking up and down the iron floor. Silently they smoked their cigars almost to the end and then Jim again took up his story. III