I did go over the wall in the end and take my hat off to society and admit I was wrong, but I didn’t do it because of discouragement, because I was afraid of the future, because of the police. I didn’t do it because I realized I was wrong; I knew I was wrong years before. I did it because⁠—but that’s a separate story, to be told later, in its place.

So, instead of following the waiter’s advice, I busied myself with a few careful hotel burglaries, got a small bankroll together again, bought some presentable clothes, and kept looking around for a decent piece of money. The booming mining town had its share of gamblers, women of the night, thieves, and hop fiends⁠—nearly all of them renegades or fugitives from the American side. Their leisure time was given to drinking or smoking hop. I had weaned myself from gambling. I was naturally a light drinker. So it fell out that, in this town of no amusements, the hop joint claimed me.

One afternoon as I lay smoking my day’s portion of hop a voice, a woman’s voice, strangely familiar, came to me through a thin partition from the adjoining room. When she finished talking to the Chinese boy that attended the hop layouts, I fell to wondering who the speaker could be. My contact with women had been very limited, and it didn’t take much elimination to fix the voice as that of the street girl of Chicago, the girl from whose crib I had carried the dead man; the girl I avoided because I believed she had carelessly killed him with an overdose of some drug. Just to satisfy myself that I was right, more than anything, I got up and stepped into her room. No mistake; it was she. She knew me instantly and I needed no introduction, no sponsor.