d no
attention to me, so far as I could determine. Save for the few minutes
at noon when the interurban car stopped to permit its passengers to
snatch a hasty luncheon at a farm-town restaurant, he did not once leave
his place, which was two seats behind mine and on the opposite side of
the car. On the contrary, like a seasoned traveler, he made himself
comfortable behind the barricade of hand-baggage and wore out the entire
time with sundry newspapers and magazines. Moreover, at our common
destination he did not follow me to the one old-fashioned hotel; instead,
he led the way to it, and was buying a cigar at the little counter
show-case when I came up to bargain, with another of my precious dollars,
for the supper, lodging and breakfast which were to launch me upon the
new career.

After this, I saw the fat-faced traveling man but twice, and both times
casually. At supper he had a small table to himself in one corner of the
room; and the following morning, when I went out to lay siege to my new
world, he was smoking in the hotel office and again buried in a
newspaper. Two hours later I had found employment driving a grocer's
delivery wagon, and in the triumph of having so soon found even this
humblest of footholds in a workaday world, I had completely forgotten him.

Having thus made my cast for fortune and secured the foothold, it took me
less than a week to learn that I had made a capital mistake in choosing a
small town. Under that condition of my parole which required me to
report in my true character to the town marshal I assured myself that I
might as well have published my story in the county newspaper. Before
the end of the week half of my customers on the delivery route were
beginning to look askance at me, and when the Saturday night came I was
discharged. I knew perfectly well what was coming when the boss, a
big-bodied, good-natured man who had made his money as a farmer and was
now losing it as the town grocer, called me into his little box of an
office at the back of the shop.

"Say, Weyburn; when I asked you where you had been working before you
came here, you didn't tell me the truth," was the way he began on me.

"I told you I had worked in a bank in Glendale," I protested; "which was
and is the truth."

"I know; but you didn't tell me that you'd put in the last three years in
the pen, and were out on parole."

"No, I didn't tell you that. But I would have told you if you had asked
me.