There was ample reason why he should take this tone with me if he felt like it. I looked like a derelict and was acting like one. Moreover, I was tormented to the verge of madness by the fear that the conductor might come along on a ticket-punching tour, and that by this means Barton would learn my ultimate destination--which would be equivalent, I fancied, to publishing it in the Glendale _Daily Courier_. "Cut it out!" I said gruffly. "If Glendale were the last place in the universe, I wouldn't go back there." He dropped the argument with perfect good-humor, and even made apology. "I take it all back; it's none of my business. Of course, you know best what you want to do. You're a free man, as I say, and can go where you please." His repetition of this "free man" phrase suddenly opened my eyes. He had forgotten, as doubtless a good many others had, all about the indeterminate sentence and its terms, if, indeed, he--and the others--had ever known anything about its conditions. It was not to be wondered at. Three years and a half will ordinarily blot the best of us out of remembrance--at least as to details. It was at this point that I twisted the talk by thrusting in a question of my own. "No; I haven't been in Glendale right lately--been out on the road for a couple of weeks," was Barton's answer to the question. "We've widened the old wagon-shop out some few lines since you knew us, and I've been making a round of the agencies. I was in the big city last night and got a wire to go to St. Louis. The wire got balled up somewhere, and I didn't get it until late at night. Made me hustle, too. I'd been out of the city for the day and didn't get back to the Marlborough until nearly midnight." This bit of detail made no impression upon me at the moment because I was too busy with the thoughts suggested by the fact that I might have Barton with me all day. Returning to Glendale at the end of his round, he would be sure to talk, and in due time the prison authorities would learn that I had been last seen in St. Louis. This accidental meeting with Barton figured as a crude misfortune, but I saw no way to mitigate it. About this time came the first call for breakfast in the dining-car, and I hoped this would relieve me of Barton's presence, for a while, at any rate. But I was reckoning altogether without my host. "Breakfast, eh?--that fits me all the way down to the ground," was his welcoming of the waiter's sing-song call. "Come along, old man, and we'll go eat a few things. This is on me." I tried to refuse. Apart from a frantic desire to be quit of him, I was in no condition to present myself in the dining-car. I showed him my grimy hands, and at that he made me forgive him in advance for all the harm he might eventually do me.