He was throwing the locks of Archie’s cell from the big steel box by the door. Archie sprang to his feet, gave his cravat a final touch, and adjusted his coat. The steel door went gliding back in its hard grooves. He stepped out, thence through the other door, and there Danner waited. Archie held out his right hand, Danner slipped on the handcuff and its spring clicked. As they went out, cries came from the cells. "So long, Archie! Good luck to ye!" "Good luck!" came the chorus. Archie, standing in the strange light outside the prison, seemed to take on a changed aspect. He had grown fat during his two months’ idleness in jail; his skin was white and soft. Now in the gray light of the January morning, his face had lost the ruddy glow Blanco’s shaving had imparted to it, and was pale. The snow lay on the ground, the air was cold and raw. Archie gasped in the surprise his lungs felt in this atmosphere, startling in its cold and freshness after the hot air of the steam-heated jail. He filled his lungs with the air and blew it out again in frost. A shudder ran through him. Danner was jovial for once. "Fine day," he said. Archie did not reply. He hated Danner more than he hated most people, and he hated every one, almost--save Marriott and Gusta, and his father and mother and the kids, and Elizabeth, who, as Marriott had reported to him, wished him well. The air and the light gave him pain--he shrank from them; he had not been outdoors since that day, a month before, when he had been taken over with Curly to be arraigned. He looked on the world again, the world that was so strange and new. Once more there swept over him that queer sensation that always came as he stepped out of prison, the sensation of fear, of uncertainty, a doubt of reality, the blur before his eyes. The streets were deserted, the houses still. The snow crunched frigidly under his heels. The handcuff chain clicked in the frost. A wagon turned the corner; the driver walked beside his steaming horses and flapped his arms about his shoulders; the wheels whined on the snow. Archie looked at the man; it was strange, he felt, that a man should be free to walk the streets and flap his arms that way. XIII