irled upon me to rap out an explosive
question.

"What did you say your name was?" and when I told him: "Aw right; you
come back here this afternoon and we'll see whether you stay or move on.
That's all. Now get out. I'm busy."

I went away and killed time as I could until the middle of the afternoon.
Upon returning to police headquarters I found the hard-faced chief tilted
in his chair with his feet on his desk, looking as if he hadn't moved
since my visit of the forenoon. When he saw who it was cutting off the
afternoon sunlight he straightened up with a growl, rummaged in a file of
papers and jerked out a typewritten sheet which he glanced over as one
who reads only the headings.

"James Bertrand Weyburn, eh?" he rasped. "I know all about you now, and
you may as well can all that didn't-do-it stuff. Forget it and come down
to business. You say you want to hit the straight-and-narrow: how would
a job in a coal yard fit you?--keepin' books and weighin'-in the coal
cars?"

I told him, humbly enough, that I was too nearly a beggar to be a
chooser; that I'd be only too glad to get a chance at anything at which I
might earn a living.

"Aw right," was the curt rejoinder. "You hike over to the Consolidated
Coal Company's yard on the West Side, and tell Mullins, the head
book-keeper, that I sent you, see? Tell him to call me on the 'phone if
he wants to know anything more about you. That's all. Pull your freight
out of here and get busy--if you don't want to get the 'move on' out of
this burg."

Notwithstanding this crabbed speech, matching all the other things this
man had said to me, I left police headquarters with a warm spot in my
heart, thinking that I had lighted upon a diamond in the rough and hadn't
had discernment enough to recognize it.

Yet there was a small mystery thrusting itself into this second interview
with the chief. What was the content of the typewritten sheet he had
consulted, and who had written it? If it had been a telegram I might
have concluded that he had wired the warden of the penitentiary for a
corroboration of my story. But it was not a telegram.

I was still puzzling over the mystery half an hour later when I found the
coal yard and the bookkeeper, Mullins, a red-faced Irishman who winked
solemnly when I told him that Chief Callahan had sent me.

"Know anything at all about the railroad end of the coal business?" was
the first inquiry shot at me; but it was not made unti