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 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.