they wouldn't let me see you. I wrote you, but they sent back the
letters. Mag went up, too, but had to come back. And that time I
brought you--"

My voice trailed off. In that minute I saw myself on the way up
to Sing Sing with the basket and all my hopes and all my schemes
for amusing him.

And this is what I'd have seen if they'd let me in--this big,
gruff, murdering beast!

Oh, yes--yes--beast is what he is, and it didn't make him look it
less that he believed me and--and began to think of me in a
different way.

"I thought you wouldn't go back on a feller, Nance. That's why I
come straight to you. It was my game to have you hide me for a
day or two, till you could make a strike somewhere and we'd light
out together. How're ye fixed? Pretty smart, eh? You look it, my
girl, you look--My eye, Nance, you look good enough to eat, and
I'm hungry for you!"

Maggie, if I'd had to die for it I couldn't have moved then.
You'd think a man would know when the woman he's holding in his
arms is fainting--sick at the touch of him. A woman would. It
wasn't my Tom that I'd known, that I'd worked with and played
with and--It was a great brute, whose mouth--who had no eyes, no
ears, no senses but--ah! . . .

He laughed when I broke away from him at last. He laughed! And I