Bud and I were the only ones left.  All the others had had true bills found against them.

* * * * *

But there came an afternoon when the big, hulky sheriff, with the cruel, quizzical eyes, came to the back bars of our cell and summoned us up with a mysterious air....

“Well, boys,” he began, pausing to squirt a long, brown stream of tobacco juice, “well, boys—­” and he paused again.

My nerves were so on edge that I controlled with difficulty a mad impulse to curse at the sheriff for holding us in such needless suspense....

Taking another deliberate chew off his plug, he told us that after mature deliberation the grand jury had decided that there was not enough grounds for finding a true bill against us, and, as a consequence, we were to be let go free.

* * * * *

The following morning I had the satisfaction of hearing from old Jacklin, the jailer, that Womber, the owner of the warehouse, had himself gone before the grand jury and informed them that he did not wish to press the charge of burglary against us....

Womber, Jacklin said, had received my letter and at first had tossed it aside ... even thrown it contemptuously into the wastebasket.  But his wife and daughter had raked it out and read it and had, day and night, given him no peace till he had promised to “go easy on the poor boys.”

This was my triumph over Bud—­the triumph of romance over realism.

“I’m glad we’re getting out, but there’s more damn fools in the world than I thought,” he remarked, with a sour smile of gratification.

* * * * *

And now, with new, trembling eagerness, we two began waiting for the hour of our release.  That very afternoon it would be surely, we thought ... that night ... then the next morning ... then ... the next day....

But until a week more had flown, the sheriff did not let us go.  In order to make a little more profit on his feeding contract, averred our prisoners.

But on Saturday morning he came to turn us loose.  By this time we seemed blood brothers to the others in the cage ... negro ... mulatto ... white ... criminal and vicious ... weak, and victims of circumstance ... everything sloughed away.  Genuine tears stood in our eyes as with strong hand-grips we wished the poor lads good luck!

We stumbled down the jail stairway up which, three months before, we had been conducted to our long incarceration in the cage.  The light of free day stormed in on our prison-inured eyes in a blinding deluge of white and gold ... we stepped out into what seemed not an ordinary world, but a madness and tumult of birds, a delirious green of trees too beautiful for any place outside the garden of Paradise.

“Come on,” said Bud, “let’s go on down the main street and thank Womber for not pressing the case—­”