I had been harboring for the past few
hours leaped alive again at the sight of this man. But at the second
train stop in the westward flight they were promptly disconnected from
my _vis-a-vis_ across the aisle when the salesman gathered his
belongings and disappeared; left the train--as I made sure by looking
out of the window and seeing him cross the station platform. In the
short run from the capital he had not so much as looked in my
direction, emerging from his newspaper only once for a word with the
conductor at the moment of ticket-collecting.

After he was gone I was able to smile grimly and call it a coincidence,
wondering meanwhile, if one of the consequences of my hideously
disarranged life was to be a lapse into chittering cowardice; an
endless starting aside at shadows.

The new field of endeavor, chosen blindly at the ticket window in the
capital, proved to be a small manufacturing city. Here the chief of
police, to whom I reported on the evening of my arrival, was of a type
exactly opposite to the grafting brute from whose jurisdiction I had
fled; a promoted town-marshal, like John Runnels of Glendale; a
shrewd-eyed, kindly old man who heard my story patiently and gave me a
word of encouragement that was like a draft of cold water in the desert.

"You're goin' to get a square deal in this town, my boy," he said,
after I had enlarged upon my story sufficiently to make it include my
late experience with Callahan and Mullins. "It ain't any part of my
job to bruise the broken reed n'r quench the smokin' flax. You don't
look like a thief, and, anyways, if you're tryin' to make an honest
livin', that settles all the old scores--or it ort to. Go find you a
job, if you can. What you've told me stays right in here"--tapping his
broad chest--"leastwise, it won't be used against you as long as you
walk straight."

Under such kindly auspices it did seem as if I ought to be able to dig
a quiet little rifle-pit in the field of respectability and good repute
and to hold it against all comers. But, oddly enough, I couldn't do
it--not to save my life. My experience had all been in office work,
and since business was good in the small city, I had little difficulty
in finding employment. Yet in each case--and there were five of them,
one after another--I secured work only to lose it almost immediately.
By some means my story had got out, and it spread through the town like
an epidemic. After the fifth failure