He continued staring at David's open face, flushed with its fervid kinship. "If you're lying to me--!" he whispered. Then he held out his hand, and his thin fingers gripped about David's hand like tight-drawn wires. "During the month I've known you, you've seemed a white man. I think I believe you. But, man! don't play with me!" he burst out with sudden appeal. "If there's any trick in you, out with it now!" "If there was, now would be my time, wouldn't it?" They stood so for a moment, hands gripped, eyes pointed steadily into eyes. "Yes, I believe you!" Rogers breathed, and sank into a chair and let his head fall into his hand. David also sat down. Presently Rogers looked up. "I guess I was very harsh," he said weakly. "But you can't guess what I was going through. It was the moment I had feared for ten years. It seemed that the world had fallen from beneath me." "I understand," said David. "But you cannot understand the ten years of fear, of suspense--of fear and suspense that walk with you, eat with you, sleep with you." He sat looking back into the years. After a space, the hunger for sympathy, the instinct to speak his decade of repressed bitterness, prompted him on. "I was one of those thousands and thousands that never had a chance when boys. I had no very clear idea between right and wrong; there was no one to show me the difference. I was full of life and energy, and I had brains. I could easily have been turned into the right way--but there was no one. So I turned into the wrong. About that part of my life Halpin told you." "He said you were the cleverest man in your line." Rogers seemed not to hear the praise. "A man may begin to think while he is still a boy; if he has spirit and animal energy, he doesn't begin to think till later. I was twenty-seven. I had been two years in Sing Sing and had three more years to serve. It wasn't the warden's words that started me thinking, nor the chaplain's sermons. Chaplains!--bah!--frocked phonographs! It was two old men I happened to see there--mere cinders of men. The thought shot into me, 'There's what you're going to be at sixty-five!' "I couldn't get away from that thought. My mind forced me to study my friends; there was not one old man among them who was living a peaceful, comfortable life. That burnt-out, hunted old age--I revolted from it! I did a lot of thinking. I decided that, when I got out, prison gates should never have reason to close on me again. "Finally, I was discharged. I knew it was hard for an ex-convict to get work, but I thought it would be easy for me. I was willing, clever, adaptable. But--oh, God! you know what the fight is, Aldrich!" "I do!" said David. Rogers was on his feet now, his eyes once more glowing. He began to pace the floor excitedly.