Good friends he ever had among them, but they never claimed him, though, on many occasions, the men served him.

They recognized the fact that he had never been more than an adopted wanderer among them, and rather prided themselves upon him.
In later times he would occasionally exchange a word or two on that old life with some one who had grown outwardly respectable, with some one-time thug, later saloon-keeper and alderman and what may follow, and would be reminded of what happened on the night when the mirrors were all broken, and the Washington woman shot the man she was seeking, or when "we did the Coulson gang;" but it had long grown to seem unreal and dreamlike.

He grew away from the memory, and there was no glamour to him in what might attract some other men to evil-doing, because to him there could be no novelty.

He was a past-master in the ceremonials of fallen, reckless human nature, and the ritual bored him.

He deserved no credit further than that.