f I should be lucky enough to find a train ready to
leave, I might yet hope to escape whatever trap it might be that the
bookkeeper and his official accomplice were going to set for me.

Reaching the station I found that the first train through would be a
westbound, and that it was not due for half an hour. The wait was
painfully trying. I did not dare to buy a ticket for fear Callahan
might have telephoned the ticket office. As the passengers for the
expected train straggled in I sought vainly to identify the spy who was
undoubtedly among them; and when the train thundered up to the platform
I made haste to board it and to lose myself quickly in the crowded
smoking-car. Later, when the conductor made his round, I paid a cash
fare to the end of the division, forbearing to draw a full breath of
relief until the cesspool city had faded to a smoky blur on the horizon.

With time to think, I began to puzzle anxiously over the new
development of mystery opened up by the overheard telephone talk. Who
or what was the "outfit" that had been meddling in my sorry
affair?--that was to be wired when my new destination should be
ascertained? One by one the suspicious circumstances remarshaled
themselves; the feeling that I had been spied upon, the speedy
publicity which my story had attained in the town where I had made my
earliest attempt at wage-earning, the memorandum which Chief Callahan
had consulted before sending me to the crooked coal company. It seemed
singular to me afterward that the one answer to all of these small
mysteries should not have suggested itself at once. But it did not.

The end of the conductor's run--the point which I had paid fare--came
at midday at the capital of the State, where there was a stop long
enough to enable the train's people--or those who chose to evade the
dining-car--to seek a lunch counter. I went with the others and had a
frugal sandwich and a cup of coffee, hastening afterward to the station
ticket office to buy a ticket to a town well over toward the western
boundary of my prison State, and chosen haphazard from its location on
the wall-map beside the ticket window. A little later, upon resuming
my seat in the train, I had a small shock. Sitting just across the
aisle, and once more barricaded behind his hand-baggage and buried in a
newspaper, was the round-faced salesman who had been my traveling
companion on the day of my release from prison.

Naturally, all the suspicions