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 only because he was shrewd enough to appreciate the fact that he was bringing the day of release nearer by piling up "good-conduct" time. "Well, pinch me! Look who's here!" was his greeting when we met on the bridge. For a silent moment it was I who did the looking. Kellow had grown a pair of curling black mustaches since his release; he was well-dressed, erect and alert, and was smoking a cigar the fragrance of which made me sick and faint with an attack of the long-denied tobacco hunger. "You're out, too, are you?" I managed to say at last, shivering in the cold blast which came sweeping up the river. "Three months, and then some," he returned jauntily. "I'm collecting a little on the old debt now, and doing fairly well at it, thank you." "The old debt?" I queried. "Yep; the one that the little old round world owes every man: three squares, a tailor, a bed and a pocket-roll." "You look as if you had acquired all four," I agreed, setting my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. "Sure I have; and you look as if you hadn't," he countered. And then: "What's the matter? Just plain hard luck? Or is it the parole scare?" "Both," I admitted. He shot me a quick look. "I can put you onto a dead sure thing, if you're game for it. Let's hunt us a warm place and chew it over."