No matter what their natural and acquired handicaps; no matter if they elect to continue to "pick" a living, despite their fulsome lip service for men and measures through which they calculate to ease the going to, in, and from prison; no matter that they are baldly unskilled, and at heart unregenerate, as evidenced by the fact of their collective machinations to place the emphasis on the kind of prison activities that helped clamp them to crooked masts in free life. No matter, in short, what their industrial and social delinquencies, criminals must be fed up with a plethora of baseball, moving-pictures, bone-rattling, play-acting and prison banquets whereat "lifers" hurl anathema at hounds of the law, who had the unthinkable temerity to "pinch" them, caught at riding rough-shod over sun-lit thoroughfares. The ominous narrative particularizes the "buzz-wagon" packed with gun-hung thugs to whom ruthless murder is a mere incident of the chase. "On your way!" shouts a rider, or riders, as the speed clutch is thrown in, and the good God fend for those who would stop them. "Go after them! Get them! Give them the full length of the law!" Surely! Any genuine, game man sworn to do it feels the call to do no less. But would you, in the face of probable death and the facts that the chances are about three to one against your murderer being brought to trial, ten to one against his sentence by the book, and eighty to one that he will not suffer the death penalty? Essentially would you, if you pictured him in prison carrying off the rôle of one under undue duress, backed by would-be bellwethers of reform, who play up to his depraved instincts, and down to the security of the commonwealth? Certainty an agent of the law should execute the law, even unto the end, else yield his shield. Still, guardians of the peace are not supermen, but just humans, swayed with the great bulk of their brothers by impulse to protect those dear to and dependent upon them. However, the grand majority of peace officers would consummate under their oaths if society wouldn't maintain odds, all along the line so close to prohibitive in favor of the murderous parasite. So long as that is done, both in and out of prison, so long will those in the first line of public defense fight shy of the final alternative; and so long will the ratio of apprehended murderers go down, instead of up. And why not, when you cut to the heart of it? Why expect a man to leave the wife to grub for good kiddies, to the end that pseudo-reformers may chase chimeras in the clouds, while they speed by-choice criminals for the abyss? Yet it is done, though in the doing potential victims know that one of the chosen lays of the chamois-skin charlatan is to imbue crass criminals with contempt for the badge of authority; indeed, with contempt for any visible sign that is not shaped to the frayed garments of his mind, pendant-hung with non-reformative piffle.