In half an hour, Philip Ralston was breathing the air of freedom in the inter-urban tram speeding toward Vancouver.
It was the spring of the year. His worldly wealth was fifty dollars. His clothes were some years behind the latest model, but they were decent enough, clean and serviceable.
He put up at a third-rate hotel on Cordova Street and spent one glorious week sleeping, eating, strolling the busy streets and lounging in the parks and on the beaches. He spoke to few, although he had of a necessity to listen to many. At the hotel in the evenings, several transients told him their story, hoping thereby to hear his own as a time-chaser, but Phil, true to the sobriquet he had earned at Ukalla, remained silent.
At the end of a week, after paying his bed and board, his fifty dollars had dwindled to thirty. He knew he could not afford to let it go much lower, otherwise the 47 detectives, who seemed forever spying on him, would be arresting him on a vagrancy charge. Vancouver was chuck-full of detectives, many of whom Phil knew by sight, while the others he sensed. And he loathed and abhorred their entire breed.
Too many were the stories he had heard from fellow prisoners at Ukalla, who had tried honestly to take up some definite occupation after leaving jail, only to be hounded from position to position by these interfering sleuths who fancied it their duty to inform the erstwhile employer that the man who was working for him was an ex-jailbird and consequently should have a keen eye kept on him for a while. The inevitable, of course, followed; for what employer could afford to have an ex-convict on his staff?
And so, Phil did not attempt to secure work in Vancouver. He had a horror of the rush and buzz of the city anyway.
Policemen were everywhere; on the sidewalks watching everybody and everything; at the street corners directing the traffic.
Self-consciousness made Phil feel guilty almost. These men gave him the creeps, innocent of all guilt though he was. His one desire was to get as far away from them and all things connected with them as was possible.
He sat on a seat in the park one afternoon, trying to decide his future.
He thought of Graham Brenchfield, now Mayor of Vernock, evidently wealthy beyond Phil’s wildest dreams. He remembered the old partnership pact and the five hundred dollars he paid for it––five years, a pool and a straight division of the profits. He put his hand in his pocket, took out his money and counted it over;––twenty-four dollars and fifteen cents.