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Look who's here!" was his greeting when we met on the bridge. For a silent moment it was I who did the looking. Kellow had grown a pair of curling black mustaches since his release; he was well-dressed, erect and alert, and was smoking a cigar the fragrance of which made me sick and faint with an attack of the long-denied tobacco hunger. "You're out, too, are you?"
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.
With that memory of little Polly Everton to drive me, I went doggedly back to the riverside slum and sought for Kellow where I had left him. He was gone, but the newly aroused resolution, the outworn swimmer's stubborn steeling of the nerves and muscles to make one more stroke before he drowns, persisted.
The free lunch had come and I was falling upon it like a famished wolf. I hadn't a penny in my pockets, and the bread and meat stood for breakfast, dinner and supper combined. Kellow swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and stood the empty glass bottom upward on the table. "Been trying the honest lay, I suppose handing in your name and number wherever you went?" he suggested.
I was conscious of a decent hope that Kellow wouldn't look up and recognize me as he did not but coincident with the hope the homicidal devil was whispering me to be ready with the pistol, without which I never went abroad any more, even to cross the street from my rooms to the office. And I was ready.
Part of the time I couldn't get enough to eat; and there were cold and blustering nights when I had not the few cents which would have given me a bed in a cheap lodging-house. It was in this deepest abyss in the valley of disheartenment that I met a former prison-mate named Kellow; a forger whose time of release from the penitentiary coincided nearly with my own. The meeting was wholly by chance.
Boyden gives us the salient details of her career. Mrs. Kellow is a resident of Cresco, Iowa, a church singer of note, and the possessor of a contralto voice of great volume. As a composer she has to her credit "marches, cakewalks, schottisches, and other styles of instrumental music." We are given a picture of Mrs. Kellow at work: "Mrs.
Another click, and I had dragged through the six months of degradation and misery, and saw myself sitting opposite Kellow in the back room of a slum saloon in a great city, shivering with the cold, wretched and hungry. Once again I saw his sneer and heard him say, "It's all the same to you now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't.
Sitting in a chair less than a dozen feet distant, smoking quietly and reading a newspaper, was a man whose face would have been familiar if I had seen it in the golden streets of the New Jerusalem or in the deepest fire-chamber of the other place; a face with boring black eyes, and with a cruel mouth partly hidden by freshly crimped black mustaches: the face, namely, of my sometime prison-mate, Kellow.
He was staging the old and time-honored swindle the gold-brick game and he needed a confederate. The fish was almost as good as landed, and with a little coaching I could step in and clinch the robbery. Kellow proposed to stake me for the clothes and the needful stage properties; and my knowledge of banking and finance, limited as it was, would do the rest.
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