and took a seat
near the window. He ordered a hot roast-beef sandwich and coffee as he
shared his joke with the waitress. She brushed some crumbs from the
table with a napkin, laughed, and went scampering for the order.
Fred's eyes followed her retreat and fell sharply upon the line of men
drifting in the narrow entrance. At the tag end loomed the figure of
the man who had followed him down the stairs from his office. Fred
picked up a newspaper. The man sat down at a table in a far corner.
Over the edge of the newspaper Fred stole a furtive glance. The man
was of slippery slenderness, with a rather round, expressionless face.
His eyes were beady and shifting, and his lips thin and pale and
cruel. The waitress came tripping back with Starratt's order. Fred
fell to.

Presently Fred finished. He rose deliberately, taking time to brush
every crumb from his lap. At the door he reached for a whisk broom and
wielded it conspicuously. He could not have said whether bravado or
contempt was moving him to such flamboyant dawdling. Or was he merely
trying to persuade himself that he had nothing to fear in any case? He
stepped out into a shower of noonday sunshine flooding through a rift
in the high fog of a July morning in San Francisco. A delicious thrill
from open spaces communicated itself to him. No, he would not go back
to the office--it was Saturday, anyway, and, besides, he felt a vague
desire for freedom and the tang of wind-clean air. He would ride out
to Golden Gate Park and stroll leisurely through its length to the
ocean... He walked briskly down Montgomery Street to Market, waited a
few seconds at a safety station, and finally swung on a car... He was
standing before a tiny lake at the Haight Street entrance to the Park,
watching a black swan ruffling its feathers, when he felt a presence
near him. He did not lift his eyes for some moments, but when he did
look up it was to see his shifty friend of the morning pretending to
be amused at a group of noisy sparrows quarreling over a windfall of
crumbs... Fred Starratt moved on.

All afternoon Fred Starratt wandered about--sometimes dawdling
defiantly, sometimes dropping into a brisk pace, but at every turn his
new-found shadow followed at an inconspicuous distance. The afternoon
sun was gracious, tinged with a pleasant coolness, and far to the west
a blue-gray fog bank waited for evening to let down the day's warm
barriers. Fred Starratt's thoughts were abrupt and purp