The railroad labor was strenuous, as it was bound to be; and for the first few days the thin, crisp air of the altitudes cut my already indifferent physical efficiency almost to the vanishing point. Nevertheless, there were two pieces of good fortune. My fellow-laborers in the grading gang were principally Italians from the southern provinces and their efficiency was also low. This helped, but a better bit of luck lay in the fact that the contractors on the job were humane and liberal employers; both of them with a shrewd and watchful eye for latent capabilities in the rank and file. Within a week I was made a gang time-keeper, and a fortnight later I became commissary clerk. Before I forget it, let me say that my first month's pay, or the greater part of it, went to replace the sixty-three dollars and a half in the little black pocketbook which I had stolen--I guess that is the honest word---from Horace Barton. I debated for some time over the safest method of returning the pocketbook and its restored contents to the wagon salesman. I realized that it wouldn't do to let him know where I was; and it seemed a needless humiliation to confess to him that I was the "hobo" who had posed, in his imagination, as the skilful sidewalk pickpocket. In casting about for a means of communication I thought of Whitley, the Springville minister. So I wrote him a letter, enclosing the pocketbook, with a truthful explanation of the circumstances in which it had come into my possession, and telling him what to do with it. I laid no commands upon his conscience, but begged him, if he could consistently do so, to suppress my name and whereabouts. And since I could not be quite sure as to what the ministerial conscience might demand, I added, rather disingenuously, I fear, that he needn't reply to my letter, as I had no permanent address. It was some little time after my promotion to the commissary that Dorgan came on the job as a track-laying foreman. He was a heavy-set, black-browed fellow with a sinister face and deeply caverned, brooding eyes looking out furtively under their bushy coverts, and his chief characteristic was a crabbed reticence which not even the exigencies of handling a crew of steel-layers seemed able to break. His face was one not to be easily forgotten; from the first sight I had of it, it was vaguely familiar, and a thoughtful ransacking of the cubby-holes of memory very shortly recalled it for me. Dorgan was an escaped convict.