Page:9009 (1908).djvu/105

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
9009

the chapel. But I was on the square about that chapel business. I wouldn’t stand fer their graft. And so they tried to job me, but my friends on the outside who’d got me religion, they beat them to it and got me paroled.

“Well, I learned all about that parole snap in short order. The first month I was in the city I got pinched six times by the perlice fer jobs I didn’t know nothing about. Every time a bull or detective passed me, he pinched me fer luck; and between them and their stool-pigeons I was ready to jump out of the State. But then I got to the Whosoever Will Mission where they take in ex-cons. They treated me good, and I lived wit’ them. And then——

“1 met a girl there.”

9009 thought of Nell, and swiftly, as usual, he put the thought from him.

“I met a girl there. She’d been on the town and turned straight. Ye know that kind; if they turn square, and it’s on the square wit’ them, they’re so straight all hell couldn’t touch them. Well, that was her. A slip of a girl, and she was

[ 93 ]