"Why is it different?" asked his companion, half smiling at his earnest look.
Pippin's hair curled thick and close all over his head, like an elastic cushion. He ran his fingers through it and produced a small file.
"Anybody needs a file, you see!" he explained. "There's your nails, for one thing; a crook has to keep his nails and hands just so, or he'd lose his touch—and yet an honest man takes care of 'em too, or ought so to do! This file is a good friend to me!" He replaced it carefully, the other following his motions with wondering eyes. "But a jimmy, you see, sir," turning an animated face toward his companion, "is a crook's tool, and no one else's. Well! Where was I? Oh, yes, I had joined them fellers. Well, we made up a gang, and we got us a name; the Honey Boys we were. Crooks are real childish, or apt to be; I expect most folks are, one way or another, but there's lots of crooks that ain't all there, or maybe they wouldn't be crooks. Elder Hadley would say—but I haven't come to him yet. So we was the Honey Boys, and we was goin' to steal di'monds and jool'ry, and the kings of the earth wouldn't be in it with us."
"My! My!" said the stranger. "An' you lookin' like an honest feller! I'm real sorry—"
"I am an honest feller!" cried Pippin. He leaned forward and laid his hand on the other's knee. "Just look me in the eye! I couldn't pinch the Kimberley di'mond, not if it was stickin' out in your shirt front this minute. There's no pinch in me! Just you wait! Now was the time when the Lord began to take a hand. That is, of course He was playin' the game right along, but you couldn't see the cards; now they was on the table, so to say. He'd give me just so much rope, and that was all I was goin' to have. The first big job we undertook I got pinched and run in. Green grass! how mad I was! You see, it wasn't my fault. One of our gang had a hunch against me—I'd licked him one day when he robbed a kid. Brought home a little gal's bracelet he'd took off her at the movies; wouldn't that make your nose bleed? Well, I made his, I tell you, and he laid it up; kind of Dago he was, with an ugly streak in him. There was four of us on the job—country house job, and him and me was the two to go in while the others kep' watch. So we went through the rooms, did it in good shape too, got quite a lot of swag and didn't wake a soul till just as we was gettin' out the window. He got out first and I give him the bag; just then a door opened into the pantry where we was. He caught me on the sill, give me a shove with all his strength and knocked me back into the room, then he slammed the window and run off. I was too mad to move for a minute, and then before I could get the window open, there was a woman standin' by me—a tall woman she was, in a white gown. She just looked at me and says she, 'Why, it's a boy! Oh, your poor mother!' That took me kind of sudden, because I hadn't no mother, so to say—and I guess she see the way I felt. I believe she would have let me off, but just then her husband came in, and—well, it wasn't to be expected he would look at it any such way. So I was run in, and I got three years."
"In Shoreham?"
"In Shoreham! P'raps you know the place, sir?" Pippin's eyes lightened inquiringly.
The stranger shook his head. "I never was in it, but I've seen some that have been—and more that ought to be. Pretty hard place, I'm told!"
"It used to be!" said Pippin. "They tell tales—and there's things still that don't seem to belong, someway, to the Lord's world. Left-over barber—barberries—no! barbarisms, Elder Hadley calls 'em. That's it, barbarisms! Him and the Old Man—that's the Warden, sir—are doin' of 'em away as fast as they can, but you can't clean a ward with one pail of water. And there's old crooks that wouldn't understand; they—I dono—" Pippin shook his curly head, and was silent, seeing visions. His companion jogged him with his elbow. The story was proving interesting.
"You say you found the Lord there; or the Lord found you! How was that?"