He paused for a moment and wiped the perspiration from his face.

"Sir," said Mason, "this is all drivel, infantile drivel. What you
are is of no importance. How to get out is the problem, how to get
out."

Samuel Walcott leaned forward, poured out a glass of brandy and
swallowed it.

"Well," he said, speaking slowly, "my right name is Richard Warren.
In the spring of 1879 I came to New York and fell in with the real
Samuel Walcott, a young man with a little money and some property
which his grandfather had left him. We became friends, and
concluded to go to the far west together. Accordingly we scraped
together what money we could lay our hands on, and landed in the
gold-mining regions of California. We were young and
inexperienced, and our money went rapidly. One April morning we
drifted into a little shack camp, away up in the Sierra Nevadas,
called Hell's Elbow. Here we struggled and starved for perhaps a
year. Finally, in utter desperation, Walcott married the daughter
of a Mexican gambler, who ran an eating house and a poker joint.
With them we lived from hand to mouth in a wild God-forsaken way
for several years. After a time the woman began to take a strange
fancy to me. Walcott finally noticed it, and grew jealous.

"One night, in a drunken brawl, we quarreled, and I killed him. It
was late at night, and, beside the woman, there were four of us in
the poker room,--the Mexican gambler, a half-breed devil called
Cherubim Pete, Walcott, and myself. When Walcott fell, the half-