idiot!" grunted Carleton again. "Why didn't you say so? I
never thought of it, or I wouldn't have let----"

"It doesn't matter," said P. Walton brightly. "I'm all right now"--and
he passed on into his own room.

When he left his desk again it was ten minutes of six, and Carleton had
already gone. P. Walton, with his neatly written order sheets, walked
across the tracks to the roundhouse, handed them over to Clarihue, the
night turner, who had just come in, and then hung around, toying in an
apparently aimless fashion with the various tools on the workbenches
till the whistle blew, while the fitters, wipers and day gang generally
washed up. After that he plodded across the fields to the Polack
quarters on the other side of the tracks from the town proper, stumbled
into the filthy, garlic smelling interior of one of the shacks, and
flung himself down on the bunk that was his bedroom.

"Lord!" he muttered. "I'm pretty bad to-night. Guess I'll have to
postpone it. Might be as well, anyway."

He lay there for an hour, his bright eyes fastened now on the dirty,
squalling brood of children upon the floor, now on the heavy,
slatternly figure of their mother, and now on the tin bowl of boiled
sheep's head that awaited the arrival of Ivan Peloff, the master of the
house--and then, with abhorrent disgust, he turned his eyes to the wall.

"Thank God, I get into a decent place soon!" he mumbled once. "It's
the roughest month I ever spent. I'd rather be back where"--he smiled
sort of cryptically to himself--"where I came from." A moment later he
spoke again in a queer, kind of argumentative, kind of self-extenuating
way--in broken sentences. "Maybe I put it on a little too thick
boarding here so's to stand in with Carleton and pay that ten back
quick--but, my God, I was scared--I've got to stand in with somebody,
or go to the wall."

It was after seven when Ivan Peloff came--smelling strong of drink, and
excitement heightening the flush upon his cheek.

"Hello, Meester Walton!" he bubbled out with earnest inebriety. "We
rise hell to-night--by an' by. Get him goods by midnight." Ivan
Peloff drew his fingers around his throat, and, in lieu of English that
came hard to him at any time, jerked his thumb dramatically up and down
in the air.

"Who?" inquired P. Walton, without much enthusiasm.

"Dam' robber--him by train come in," explained Ivan Peloff laboriously.

"Oh," said P. Walton, "talking of stringing him