Gifford and I both said No, deferring to Barrett's better judgment. And since this talk was getting us nowhere and was wasting time which was worth ten dollars a minute, we broke it off and went to work.
It was in the latter part of this third week, on a night when my turn at the wagon guarding had come in regular course, that I was made to understand that no leaf in the book of a man's life can be so firmly pasted down that a mere chance thumbing of the pages by an alien hand may not flip it back again.
By imperceptible inchings we had been starting the wagon earlier and earlier on each successive trip; and on the evening in question it was no later than ten o'clock when I turned the consignment of ore over to the foreman at the reduction works. Ordinarily, I should have taken the road back to the hills at once, intent only upon getting to camp and between the blankets as speedily as possible. But on this night a spirit of restlessness got hold of me, and, leaving Barrett's shotgun in the sampling works office, I strolled up-town.
Inasmuch as a three-months' residence in a mining-camp is the full equivalent of as many years spent in a region where introductions precede acquaintance, I was practically certain to meet somebody I knew. The somebody in this instance proved to be one Patrick Carmody, formerly a hard-rock boss on the Midland branch construction, and now the working superintendent of a company which was driving a huge drainage tunnel under a group of the big mines of the district.
The meeting-place was the lobby of the hotel, and at the Irishman's invitation I sat with him to smoke a comradely cigar. Carmody was not pointedly inquisitive as to my doings; was content to be told that I had been "prospecting around." Beyond that he was good-naturedly willing to talk of the stupendous undertaking over which he was presiding, expatiating enthusiastically upon air-drill performance, porphyry shooting, the merits of various kinds of high explosives, deep-mine ventilation, and the like.
While he talked, I smoked on, luxuriating like a cat before a fire in the comfortable lounging-chair, the cheerful surroundings, the stir and bustle of the human ebb and flow, and the first half-hour of real idleness I had enjoyed in many days.
It was after Carmody had been dragged away by some fellow hard-rock enthusiast that I had my paralyzing shock. 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.
My shocked recognition of this man who tied me to my past annihilated time and distance as if they had never been. In a flash I was back again in a great stone building in the home State, working over the prison books and glancing up now and then to the cracked mirror on the opposite wall of the prison office which showed me the haggard features and cropped hair of the convict Weyburn.
The memory shutter flicked, and I saw myself walking out through the prison gates with the State's cheap suit of clothes on my back and the State's five dollars in my pocket, a paroled man. 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. You may think you can live the prison smell down, but you can't; it'll stick to you like your skin. Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."
It is a well-worn saying that life is full of paper walls. A look, a turn of the head, the recognition which would follow, and once more I should be facing a fate worse than death. Kellow knew that I had broken my parole. He would trade upon the knowledge, and if he could not use me he would betray me. I knew the man.