isheartening experience in a community where I had had
the help and countenance of a just and charitable head of the police
department, I went back to the smaller places. Merely because it
seemed foolish to take the time to learn a new trade when I already had
one, I still sought office work. There was little difficulty in
finding such employment--at humble wages; the unattainable thing was
the keeping of it. Though I could never succeed in running it down and
bringing it to bay, a pitiless Nemesis seemed to dog me from town to
town. Gossiping marshals there may have been, now and then, to spread
my story; but I had twice been given proof that another agency must be
at work--a mysterious persecution that I could neither fight nor
outwit, nor account for upon any reasonable hypothesis.

So the hopeless and one-sided battle went on as I fled from post to
pillar up and down and back and forth in the "permitted" area, doing a
bit of extra bookkeeping here and another there. The result was always
the same. Work of that kind necessarily carried more or less
responsibility, and in consequence I was never retained more than a few
days at a time.

It was borne in upon me more and more that I must sink lower, into some
walk in life in which no questions were asked. This conviction
impressed itself upon me with greater emphasis at each succeeding
failure, and the decision to drop into the ranks of the unidentified
was finally reached in a small city in the agricultural section of the
State where I had been employed for a few days in a hardware and
implement store as shipping clerk. Once more I was discharged,
peremptorily, and with a reproachful reprimand for having thrust
myself, unplacarded, upon well-behaved people.

"I don't admit your right to say such things to me, Mr. Haddon," I
protested, after the reproach had been well rubbed in. "I have given
you good service for small pay, and there was no reason why I should
have furnished you with an autobiography when you didn't ask it. In
the circumstances it seems that I am the one to be aggrieved, but I'll
waive the right to defend myself if you'll tell me where you got your
information."

The implement dealer was a thin, ascetic person, with cold gray eyes
and two distinct sets of manners; one for his customers and another for
his employees; and the look he gave me was meant to be withering.

"I don't recognize your right to question me, at all," he objected,
wit