He stretched himself and breathed deeply of the warm free spring.  It tasted good after two long years of the prison’s sealed air.  He would have liked to shed his clothing and dive down for a brisk fight with the tingling water.  Larry had always taken pleasure in keeping his body fit.  He had not cared for the gymnasiums of the ward clubs where he would have been welcome; in them there had been too much rough horseplay and foulness of mouth, and such had always been offensive to him.  And though he had ever looked the gentleman, he had known that the New York Athletic Club and other similar clubs were not for him; they pried a bit too much into a candidate’s social and professional standing.  So he had turned to a club where really searching inquiries were rarely made; for years he had belonged to a branch of the Y.M.C.A. located just off Broadway, and had played handball and boxed with chunky, slow-footed city detectives who were struggling to retain some physical activity, and with fat playwrights, and with Jewish theatrical managers, and with the few authentic Christians who occasionally strayed into the place and seemed ill at ease therein.  He had liked this club for another reason; his sense of humor had often been highly excited by the thought of his being a member of the Y.M.C.A.

Having this instinct for physical fitness, he had not greatly minded being a coal-passer during the greater part of his stay at Sing Sing; better that than working in the knitting mills; so that now, though underfed and under weight, he was active and hard-muscled.

Larry Brainard could not have told why, and just when, he had turned to devious ways.  He had never put that part of his life under the microscope.  But the simple facts were that he had become an orphan at fifteen and a broker’s clerk at nineteen after a course in a business college; and that experiences with wash-sales and such devious and dubious practices of brokers, his high spirits, his instinct for pleasure, his desire for big winnings—­these had swept him into a wild crowd before he had been old enough to take himself seriously, and had started him upon a brilliant career of adventures and unlawful money-making in whose excitement there had been no let-up until his arrest.  He had never thought about such technical and highly academic subjects as right and wrong up to the day when Casey and Gavegan had slipped the handcuffs upon him.  To laugh, to dance, to plan and direct clever coups, to spend the proceeds gayly and lavishly—­to challenge the police with another daring coup:  that had been life to him, a game that was all excitement.

And now, after two years in which there had been plenty of time for thinking, his conscience still did not trouble him on the score of his offenses.  He believed, and was largely right in this belief, that the suckers he had trimmed had all been out to secure unlawful gain and to take cunning advantage of his supposedly foolish self and of other dupes.  He had been too clever for them, that was all; in desire and intent they had been as great cheats as himself.  So he felt no remorse over his victims; and as for anything he may have done against that impersonal entity, the criminal statutes, why, the period in prison had squared all such matters.  So he now faced life pleasantly and with care-free soul.