ght times. Suddenly, he
uttered an exclamation:

"Ah, I see. They ARE maps. But these should not have come here. They are
to go to the regular office for distribution." He wrote a new direction
on the label of the package: "Take them to that address," he went on.
"I'll keep this one here. The others go to that address. If you see Mr.
Darrell, tell him that Mr. Derrick--you get the name--Mr. Derrick may
not be able to get around this afternoon, but to go ahead with any
business just the same."

The young man departed with the package and Lyman, spreading out the map
upon the table, remained for some time studying it thoughtfully.

It was a commissioner's official railway map of the State of California,
completed to March 30th of that year. Upon it the different railways
of the State were accurately plotted in various colours, blue, green,
yellow. However, the blue, the yellow, and the green were but brief
traceries, very short, isolated, unimportant. At a little distance
these could hardly be seen. The whole map was gridironed by a vast,
complicated network of red lines marked P. and S. W. R. R. These
centralised at San Francisco and thence ramified and spread north, east,
and south, to every quarter of the State. From Coles, in the topmost
corner of the map, to Yuma in the lowest, from Reno on one side to San
Francisco on the other, ran the plexus of red, a veritable system of
blood circulation, complicated, dividing, and reuniting, branching,
splitting, extending, throwing out feelers, off-shoots, tap roots,
feeders--diminutive little blood suckers that shot out from the main
jugular and went twisting up into some remote county, laying hold
upon some forgotten village or town, involving it in one of a myriad
branching coils, one of a hundred tentacles, drawing it, as it were,
toward that centre from which all this system sprang.

The map was white, and it seemed as if all the colour which should have
gone to vivify the various counties, towns, and cities marked upon
it had been absorbed by that huge, sprawling organism, with its ruddy
arteries converging to a central point. It was as though the State had
been sucked white and colourless, and against this pallid background the
red arteries of the monster stood out, swollen with life-blood, reaching
out to infinity, gorged to bursting; an excrescence, a gigantic parasite
fattening upon the life-blood of an entire commonwealth.

However, in an upper corner of the map