“Safe-blower, Steve. My friend seems to have made his start as a ‘peterman’ and then branched out. He’ll blow a peter yet, they say, to keep his hand in; and he packs with him, when he thinks he’ll find trouble, the peterman’s tube of his trade—a little, corked bottle of soup for emergencies, Steve. Nitro-glycerine, that’s all. Interesting idea, what?”
“The nitro?”
“No, that the difference between us is the direction we wandered when we got loose—or were turned loose—twenty-five years ago in Lincoln Park. I walked straight into the bean business and he into blowing safes. Was that all there was to it—the angle our feet took across the grass in the park? What do you think, Steve?”
I shook my head.
“A man likes to think with Shakespeare that he is master of his fate,” Jerry went on, “and that fault or strength is in himself, not in his stars. There is no bunch of bunk I hate worse than that environment is to blame for crime and the individual has almost nothing to do with it.”
“Give Shakespeare credit for thinking it out further,” I said. ‘Julius Cæsar’ always was a favorite of mine and one thing I knew. “He said, ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.’”
Jerry nodded. “That’s right. My friend’s clever; he can see now, if he couldn’t when he was younger. Then there’s something else—a twist in his brain that’s not in mine? Yet I don’t know: maybe we’re identical, inwardly as well as outside. Maybe the difference is that I never knew what it was to want without being able, lawfully, to get. The cards are stacked in this game of civilization which we play.”
That hit one of my pet ideas, as I’ve mentioned; so I objected, “No, they’re not.”
“I remember what you think, Steve. I liked to think it too; but now I’ve gone from the side the cards favor to the side that gets the worst of the deal. What in the devil is law, Steve?”
“Law?” I said.