The Old Man, Pages 77 - 113 Summary

Two convicts are whiling away their time in a Mississippi plantation where the prisoners are forced work rather than reside in prison cells. The first, a tall, relatively young man has been there eight years, since he was nineteen. He is full of resentment because he feels that he is not entirely responsible for his crime. He was convicted of robbing a train but claims that he was misled and unduly influenced by the various paperback novels he read as a young child, which romanticized such robberies and, moreover, made them seem very easy. He did not actually kill anyone nor did the robbery even last very long; he was arrested as soon as he stepped foot into the part of the train where the passengers' possessions were kept.

The second convict is an old...