eyes followed him while he crossed the
concrete floor of the concourse and passed through a gate. They
continued to watch until he had disappeared in the murk, going toward
where a row of parked sleepers stood at the far end of the train shed.

* * * * *

Yet another policeman is to figure in this recital of events. This
policeman's name is Caleb Waggoner and this Caleb Waggoner was and
still is the night marshal in a small town in Iowa on the Missouri
River. He is one-half the police force of the town, the other half
being a constable who does duty in the daytime. Waggoner suffers from
an affection which in a large community might prevent him from holding
such a job as the one he does hold. He has an impediment of the speech
which at all times causes him to stammer badly. When he is excited it
is only by a tremendous mental and physical effort and after repeated
endeavours that he can form the words at all. In other regards he is a
first-rate officer, sober, trustworthy and kindly.

On the night of the eighteenth of February, at about half past eleven
o'clock, Marshal Waggoner was completing his regular before-midnight
round of the business district. The weather was nasty, with a raw wet
wind blowing and half-melted slush underfoot. In his tour he had
encountered not a single person. That dead dumb quiet which falls upon
a sleeping town on a winter's night was all about him. But as he
turned out of Main Street, which is the principal thoroughfare, into
Sycamore Street, a short byway running down between scattered
buildings and vacant lots to the river bank a short block away, he saw
a man standing at the side door of the Eagle House, the town's
second-best hotel. A gas lamp flaring raggedly above the doorway
brought out the figure with distinctness. The man was not moving--he
was just standing there, with the collar of a heavy overcoat turned up
about his throat and a soft black hat with a wide brim drawn well down
upon his head.

Drawing nearer, Waggoner, who by name or by sight knew every resident
of the town, made up his mind that the loiterer was a stranger. Now a
stranger abroad at such an hour and apparently with no business to
mind would at once be mentally catalogued by the vigilant night
marshal as a suspicious person. So when he had come close up to the
other, padding noiselessly in his heavy rubber boots, the officer
halted and from a distance of six feet or so stared stea