drug in the market, after all the bills
had been paid, and, just to help their neighbors out of a hole, as they
put it, the two old skinflints went around buying it back. I don't
know what they paid; different prices, I suppose. But Hawkins, our
manager, told me that he sold his for twenty-five cents on the dollar,
flat, and was blamed good and glad to get that much out of it."

It was just here that my breakfast threatened to choke me. If I had
been as guilty as everybody believed I was, I should still have been a
white-robed angel with wings compared with these two old Pharisees who
had deliberately robbed their friends and neighbors, catching them both
coming and going. And yet I was a hunted outlaw, and they were honored
and respected--or at least they were out of jail and able to live and
flourish among their deluded victims.

The choking was only momentary. Barton was in a reminiscent mood, and
he went rambling on about people in whom I was most deeply interested.
It was like a breath of the good old home air in my nostrils just to
sit and listen to him.

But it seems as though there has to be a fly in everybody's pot of
sweetened jam. In the midst of things, at a moment when I was
gratefully rejoicing in the ability to push my wretched
life-catastrophe a little way into the background, I had a glimpse of a
new face at the farther end of the dining-car. A large-framed man with
drooping mustaches had just come in from the Pullman, and the
dining-car steward was looking his car over to find a place for the
newcomer at the well-filled tables.

I did not have to look twice to identify the man with the drooping
mustaches. For three long and weary years I had seen him dally in the
office of the State penitentiary. His name was William Cummings, and
he was the deputy warden.

IX

The Cup of Trembling

Why I should have chosen, haphazard, and solely because it chanced to
be the first that offered, a train which numbered among its passengers
not only a man from my home town of Glendale, but also the deputy
warden of the penitentiary, is one of those mysteries of coincidence
which we discredit impatiently when we run across them in fiction, but
which, nevertheless, are constantly recurring in every-day life.

For the moment I was desperately panic-stricken. It seemed blankly
impossible that Cummings should not see and recognize me at once. I
could have sworn that he was looking straight at me whi