"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 I went back to the fatherly old chief of police to confess defeat and to notify him that I was leaving town. In this interview he made me tell him more about my trial and conviction, and when I finished he was shaking his head. "There's something sort o' queer about this pull-down of yours, Weyburn," he commented. "I gave you my word not to talk unless you went back on me, and I've kept it. You hain't told anybody else?" "Not a soul." "Still, it's been told--not once, but a heap o' times. Have you tried chasin' it back to its startin' point?" "Yes; but it is no good. It seems to be in the air." "Well, it's a dum shame. It looks as if you had somebody houndin' you out o' sheer spite. Is there anybody back behind that would do that?" I suppose I was bat-blind; but the suggestion, even when it was added to the mysterious entanglements that were tripping me at every step, failed to open my eyes. Truly, Abel Geddis and Abner Withers had used me ruthlessly as their criminal stop-gap, but since I had paid the penalty and still bore the criminal odium, I could postulate no possible reason why they should reach out across the three-year interval to add cruel persecution to injury. "No," I said, after a reflective pause. "There are only the two old men I have named. And now that it is all over, I can see that they were only shoving me into the breach to save themselves." He nodded, half-doubtfully, I thought; and then: "You're goin' to try again somewheres else?" I replied that there was nothing else to do; whereupon this white-haired old angel, who seemed so vastly out of place as the head of even a small city's police department, made an astounding proposal.