He shouldn't have. For each word, each line, was one more link binding their destinies. Jeans could hardly believe his eyes, but, as though hypnotized, he read on. Measles … scarlet fever … nearsightedness … the parents dying young … the frequent short trips away from home … almost to the day … the time spent with grandparents, or at school.

Jeans slammed the cabinet shut. "It's nothing!" he told himself. "It doesn't mean a thing! Just a lot of coincidences!"

But he couldn't forget Thompson, or keep away from him. And the more they talked together, the more it seemed that their lives were incredible echoes of each other, as if they'd been planned by the same chart. Thompson might have been his twin brother!

Like that time they were talking about girls. It was visitor's day, and most of the men were excited and cheerful, encouraged by the small gifts from, and the kind words of, their sweethearts or wives.

"It makes a man wish he was married!" Willie burst out.

"Ever consider it?"

"Sure–" he paused. "Only she wouldn't have me! She was cute, too, a red-head–"

But Jeans wasn't listening. His mind raced back … back to Mary Gordon, and the day she'd said no! That's when he'd decided to take up criminology, to forget his own troubles in the troubles of others.

Willie was still talking. "That's when I pulled my first job … after we broke up. I was too upset to work steady, and anyway, nothing mattered any more."

So that was how Fate had brought them on the opposite sides of the law! Just one wrong turn, and he, Jeans, might have been a second Thompson. And with it all, they'd ended up in the same place!

Jeans' brain was in a whirl as he left. He'd heard of such things, of powers that govern men, of destinies that can twist a life like a paper straw. But, he couldn't, he wouldn't believe it.

"It's just coincidence," he grumbled to himself. "Probably all the prisoners have been jilted–or fallen off sleds."

A week later, he stopped pretending. It was the morning he woke up with that throbbing pain over one eye–and his fingers too numb to hold a razor. When two aspirins didn't help, he managed to call the prison doctor.

He waited a long time for the doctor's voice. "Hello?"

"Hello! This is Jeans! Listen–"

"Can I call you back, warden? I've got a patient now–Willie Thompson!"

Jeans knew the doctor's next words before they came.

"It's a headache!" the voice was saying. "Migraine, a very rare sort. Splitting pain over one eye, and a numbness of the fingers! I've studied it in the books, but this is the first case I've ever seen!"

Jeans couldn't control his shaking hand. There was only one hope–one must have caught it from the other.

"Is it contagious?" His voice faltered.

"Oh, no! And very rare–as I said!"

Jeans slammed down the receiver.