He had no theories about work or idleness; he accepted either as it came; he had little conscious thought about anything, except finding Slim again. And one thing worried him: Slim, who was supposed to be looking for Looney, even as Looney was looking for Slim, left no mark. He was forever looking for it, searching for the traces of Slim's knife--a name, a date, a destination, a message bidding Looney to follow or to wait--on freight sheds and water tanks, and known and charted telegraph poles and the tool houses of construction gangs. But Slim, always just ahead of him, as he thought, continually returning and passing him, ever receding in the distance, left no mark, no wanderer's pateran, behind. Looney left his own marks everywhere, but, strangely enough, it seemed that Slim never saw them. Looney remembered that one time when he and Slim were together Slim had wished to meet and confer with the Burlington Crip, and had left word to that effect, penciled and carved and sown by the speech of the mouth, from the Barbary Coast to the Erie Basin. And the Burlington Crip, with his snaggle teeth and his stump where a hand had been, had joined them on the Brooklyn waterfront within two months. It had been simple, and Looney wondered why Slim omitted this easy method of communication. Perhaps Slim was using it and Looney was not finding the marks. He knew himself for stupid, and set his failure down to that, never to neglect on Slim's part. For Slim was Slim, and Slim could do no wrong. His habit of searching for some scratched or written word of Slim's became known to his whole section of the underworld, and furnished material for an elaboration of the standing jest at his expense. When ennui descended upon some chance gathering in one of the transient hangouts--caravanserai as familiar to the loose-foot, casual guests, from coast to coast, as was ever the Blackstone in Chicago or the Biltmore in New York to those who read this simple history--it was customary for some wag to say: “Looney, I seen a mark that looked like Slim's mark on a shed down in Alexandria, Virginny, right by where the Long Bridge starts over to Washington.” And it might be that Looney would start at once, without a word, for Alexandria. Therein lay the cream of this subtle witticism, for its perpetrators--in Looney's swift departures. Or it might be that Looney would sit and ponder, his washed-out eyes interrogating the speaker in a puzzled fashion, but never doubting. And then the jester would say, perhaps: “Why don't you get a move onto you, Looney? You're gonna miss Slim again.” And Looney would answer, perchance: “Slim, he ain't there now. The' was one of them wobblies' bump-off men sayin' he seen Slim in Tacoma two weeks ago, an' Slim was headin' this way. I'm gonna wait fer him a while longer.”