He read it deliberately; then re-read it, and sat and stared at the paper. A slow grim smile came to his lips, and he took his chin in his hand, musingly. The eyes narrowed, the face darkened, the jaw thrust itself forward.
"Dead, huh?" he grunted, and stared about him, with a slow, twisting movement of the head. "Well—I might just as well be, as buried alive in a jay-dump at the tail-end of all creation!" Once again the Powers of Darkness swooped down and wrestled with and for him; and knowing what I knew, sick at heart, I trembled for him.
"What am I doing here, anyhow?" he snarled with his lips drawn back from his teeth. "Piddling with bugs—Me! Patching up their dinky little wings and stretching out their dam' little legs and feelers—me being what I am, and they being what they are! Say, I've got to quit this, once for all I've got to quit it. I'm not a man any more. I'm a dead one, a he-granny cutting silo for lady-worms and drynursing their interesting little babies. My God! Me!" And he threw his hands above his head with a gesture of rage and despair.
"Hanging on here like a boob—no wonder they think I'm dead! If I could just make a getaway and pull off one more good job and land enough—"
"You couldn't keep it, if you did land it—your sort can't. You know how it went before—the women and the sharks got it. There'd be always that same incentive to pull off just one more to keep you going—until you'd pulled yourself behind bars, and stayed there. And there's the drug-danger, too. If you escaped so far, it was because so far you had the strength to let drugs alone. But the drugs get you, sooner or later, do they not? Have you not told me over and over again that 'nearly all dips are dopes'? That first the dope gets you—and then the law? No. You can't pull off anything that won't pull you into hell. We have gone over this thing often enough, haven't we?"
"No, we haven't. And I haven't had a chance to pull off anything—except leaves for bugs. Me! I want to get my hand in once more, I tell you! I want to pull off a stunt that'll make the whole bunch of bulls sit up and bellow for fair—and I can do it, easy as easy. Think I've croaked, do they? And they can all snooze on their peg-posts, now I'm a stiff? Well, by cripes, I just want half of a half of a chance, and I'll show 'em Slippy McGee's good and plenty alive!"
"Come out into the garden, my son, and feel that you are good and plenty alive. Come out into the free air. Hold on tight, a little while longer!"
I laid my hand upon his shoulder compellingly, and although he glared at me, and ground his teeth, and lifted his lip, he came; unwillingly, swearing under his breath, he came. We tramped up and down the garden paths, up and down, and back again, his wooden peg making a round hole, like a hoofmark, in the earth. He stared down at it, spat savagely upon it, and swore horribly, but not too loudly.
"I want to feel like a live man!" he gritted. "A live man, not a one-legged mucker with a beard like a Dutch bomb-thrower's, puttering about a skypilot's backyard on the wrong side of everything!"
"Stick it out a little longer, John Flint; hold fast!"