"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 until after the book-keeper had shut himself into the telephone booth, presumably for a wire talk with Callahan. I shook my head. "None of the details. But I can learn." "Maybe you can, and maybe you can't. We'll try you out on the railroad desk, and Peters 'll show you what you don't know. Peel your coat and jump in. Hours eight to six; pay, sixty dollars a month: more bimeby if you're worth it." Robert Louis Stevenson's cheerful little opening verse: "Light foot and tight foot, And green grass spread; Early in the morning, And hope is on ahead," was ringing in my ears when I squared myself at the railroad desk and attacked the first big bunch of "flimsies," as the tissue copies of the waybills are called. It was almost unbelievable that my luck had turned so soon, and yet the fact seemed undeniable. I had a job to which I had been recommended by the one man in the city who knew my record. No questions had been asked, and the inference seemed to be that none were going to be asked. I was all of a busy week getting a firm working hold upon the routine of my desk, and during that time I didn't exchange a dozen words with Mullins, who appeared to be the head and front of Consolidated Coal, locally, at least, and whose word, in the office and about the yards, was law. None the less, the little mystery connected with this easy finding of a job in a strange city persisted, and it kept me from dwelling too pointedly upon the object for which I meant to live and work; namely, the squaring of accounts with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers.