Here he drew out his letter paper and laid it on the much-stained table before him, and, in a moment, had forgotten the almond-eyed attendant who was preparing his food.
He felt it necessary to answer Monica's letter at once. His purpose was definite and quite clear in his mind. The past, his past, their past was done with. He would face the world alone, and on his own resources. The letter was quite short and was finished before the Chinaman brought him his food.
His meal finished and bill settled, he waited until the lynx-eyed Mongolian was engaged elsewhere. Then he placed the letter and the five thousand dollars into an envelope and addressed it to Monica at Winnipeg. It was his intention to mail the packet from Toronto.
CHAPTER IV
ON THE RAILROAD
No man may serve a term of imprisonment in a modern prison and return to freedom on the same moral plane as he left it. A man may fall, but he may rise again, provided he is saved from that lifelong branding which a penal prison leaves upon its victim. Innocent or guilty the modern prison system is an invention which must rob its victim for ever of his confidence, his self-respect, almost of his hope. It is an institution set up to protect the free citizen, and terrorize the wrong-doer into better ways. And it does neither of these things. Instead, it pours upon society, daily, a stream of hopeless, hardened, bitter creatures, who, through its merciless process, have abandoned what little grip they ever had upon their moral natures, and drives them along the broad, ill-lit road of crime. Instead of being the deterrent it is supposed to be, it is the worst creator of crime known to civilization.
These were some of the reflections forced upon young Frank Burton after twelve months' bitter experience in Alston Penitentiary. And now, with each passing moment of his new freedom, the truth of these painful observations was more and more surely brought home to him. An innocent man, he had come out into the light of freedom, dreading and shrinking before every eye that was turned in his direction. His self-confidence was shaken. All his old trust and belief in the goodness of the life about him seemed to have melted into dark and painful suspicion, and, for the time at least, he was forced into those darkened purlieus which belong to the world of crime. The light was unendurable.
He had changed terribly from the buoyant lad he had been. He had seen so much, thought so much during those twelve long months, that now he was weighted down by a maturity that belonged to twice his years.
He knew he could never go back to the old life. That he had long since made up his mind up to. More than that, he could not accept benefits from those who belonged to it, whom he had known and loved. Even Phyllis, for all her ardent affection, she, too, belonged to a life that was wholly dead.