possible chance can a released man
have to secure honest employment? Fortunately for me, I was still only
twenty-eight--young and hopeful; and I started out to do my best, saying
only that nothing should tempt me to go back to Glendale where, I was
told, my mother and sister were still living in retirement and under the
shadow of the family disgrace.

Knowing that the released convict usually heads for the largest city he
can reach, thus obeying the common-sense instinct which prompts him to
lose himself quickly in a crowd, I planned to do the opposite thing. I
told myself that I was not a criminal, and therefore would not follow the
criminal's example. I would board an interurban trolley and expend a
portion of my five dollars in reaching some obscure town in a distant
part of the State, where I would begin the new life honestly and openly
in any employment that might offer.

There was nobody to meet me as I forthfared from the prison gates, but I
was not expecting any one and so was not disappointed. None the less, on
my way to the central trolley station I had a half-confirmed conviction
that I was followed; that the follower had been behind me all the way
from the prison street.

After making several fruitless attempts I finally succeeded in fixing
upon the particular person in the scattering sidewalk procession who made
all the turns that I made, keeping always a few paces in the rear. He
was a man of about my own age, round-faced and rather fleshy. In my
Glendale days I should have set him down at once as a traveling salesman.
He looked the part and dressed it.

Farther along, upon reaching the interurban station, I was able to
breathe freer and to smile at the qualms of my new-liberty nervousness.
Just as I was parting with two of my five dollars for a ticket to the
chosen destination my man came up to the ticket window, followed by a
hotel porter carrying a grip and a sample case. I saw then how facilely
easy it was going to be to take fright at shadows. Evidently the young
man was a salesman, and his apparent pursuit of me had been merely a
coincidence in corner turnings. And in the recoil from the apprehensive
extreme I refused to attach any significance to the fact that he was
purchasing a ticket to the same distant town to which I had but now paid
my own passage.

During the leisurely five-hour run across the State the object of my
suspicions--my foolish suspicions, I was now calling them--pai