Looking back I marvel at the ridiculous ease with which the thing was accomplished. Still more do I marvel at my own part in it. Brought up as I had been, shielded from the ill winds of existence, taught the perfunctory, conventional standards of behavior that suffice for those whose lives are lived according to a little-varying plan, I should have shrunk from further infraction of the law. Indeed it is no more than could have been expected had I refused absolutely to lend myself to Barreau’s desperate plan. Conscious that I had done no wrong I might have been moved to veto an enterprise that imperiled me, to protest against his drawing me further into his own troublous coil. But I did nothing of the sort. It did not occur to me. My point of view was no longer that of the son of a St. Louis gentleman. And the transition was so complete, so radical, and withal, so much the growth of the past three weeks, that I was unaware of the change. I know of no clearer illustration of the power of environment. Indubitably I should have looked askance at a man who tacitly admitted himself more or less of a criminal, making no defense, no denial. The traditions of my class should have kept me aloof, conscious of my own clean hands. This, I repeat, was what might have been expected of me: Put to me as an abstract proposition, I would have been very positive of where I should stand. But without being conscious of any deviation from my previous concepts of right and wrong, I found myself all agog to help Slowfoot George escape. For myself, there was no question of flight. That, we agreed upon, at the outset. I could gain nothing by putting myself at odds with Canadian law, for the law itself would free me in its meteing out of justice. But with him it was different; he admitted the fact. And even so I found myself making nothing of the admission. He conformed to none of my vague ideas of the criminal type. In aiding him to be free I seemed to be freeing myself by proxy, as it were; and how badly I desired to be quit of the strange tangle that enmeshed me, none but myself can quite appreciate. After all, so far as my help was concerned it consisted largely of what Barreau dryly termed, “moral support.” I acquiesced in the necessity. I stood on the lookout for interruptions. He did the work.