"All right. Now for the preliminaries. Any all-night pawnbroker can fit you out with a couple of grips and some clothes that will let you dress the part--or at least let you into the hotel. Then, to-morrow morning bright and early you can hit the ready-made tailors and blossom out right as the honest miner spending some of his money for the glad rags. I'm at the Marlborough myself--J. T. Jewett, Room 706--but, of course, I won't know you; you'll just butt in as a stranger to both of us. When we get together I'll give you the cues as we go along." During all this talk the hundred dollars had lain on the table between us. It didn't look like money to me; it stood for food and decent clothing and a bath--but chiefly for food. Slowly I took it up and fingered it, almost reverently, straightening out the crumpled corners of the bills and smoothing them down. . . . I scarcely know how I got away from Kellow, nor do I know why he chose to stay on there in the back room of that miserable doggery, drinking whiskey sours alone and smoking his high-priced cigars. But I do know that I was up against the fight of my life when I went out to face the bitter night wind in the streets. It was a singular thing that helped me to win the fight, temporarily, at least. By all accounts it ought to have been those three heart-warming days spent with Whitley a month earlier, and his farewell words of helpfulness and cheer spoken as I was boarding the outgoing train at the Springville station. But though Whitley's sturdy faith in me came to do its part, it was another and much longer leap of memory that made me hesitate and draw back; a flash carrying me back to my school-days in Glendale . . . to a certain afternoon when a plain-faced little girl, the daughter of our physics and chemistry teacher, had told me, with her brown eyes ablaze, what she thought of dishonesty in general, and in particular of the dishonesty of a boy in her class who was lying and stealing his way past his examinations. I don't know to this day why I should have recalled Polly Everton and her flaming little diatribe against thievery and hypocrisy at that desperate moment. She, and her quiet college-professor father who had seemed so out of place teaching in a Glendale school, had dropped out of my life years before. But the fact remained, and at the memory, Kellow's bribe, gripped pocket-deep in my hand, burnt me like a coal of fire. With a gasp I realized that I was over the brink at last, stumbling and falling into the pit which has no bottom. With a single dollar of the thief's money spent and gone beyond recall, I should be lost.