It was nearly closing time on Tuesday when Burke, the store manager at the Central City Market, sought Joe in the shipping room. “There’s an order to go out to the North Side, Joe. None of the teams is going that way, so you’d better hustle out on your wheel. The name’s Jordan. Smithy’s putting it up now.” Joe nodded. He didn’t relish the errand, however, for it had been raining all day and was still at it, and the North Side streets were none too good under the best of weather conditions. But he made no protest and sought Smithy. The address on the slip read “W. H. Jordan, Orcutt Road, 1 h’se beyond Drayton place.” Joe had to look in the directory in the office before he could locate Orcutt Road. The directory informed him that it ran west from Line Street in Bowker’s Addition. With such meager intelligence he set forth at a few minutes past five, his carrier weighted down with bundles. It was a good twenty minutes journey to Line Street, the latter part of it through a dejected and even unsavory part of town, and, having reached that street, an unpaved thoroughfare sparsely inhabited by truck farmers in a small way, he sought further enlightenment. It was still raining desultorily and the street was deserted by pedestrians. Finally he leaned his bicycle against a rickety fence and pushed through a gate beyond which a small dwelling, built largely of second-hand material, showed in the early twilight. The man who cautiously, even suspiciously, opened the unpainted door to him, proved to be Italian, and Joe had much difficulty in making his wants known. In the end, however, he learned that Orcutt Road was nearly a half-mile further on. The road was a veritable quagmire now, and he was frequently forced to dismount and push his bicycle through the muddy pools and over the uneven roadbed. Even the dwellings of the truck farmers ceased presently and the road――Joe had long since stopped referring to it as a street――stretched interminably away before him toward the darkening horizon with little to break its monotony save an occasional tree or group of bedraggled bushes. Eventually, though, a tumble-down farmhouse came into sight from under a slope of field well away from the road, and Joe decided that it must be the Drayton place. If it was, Orcutt Road could not be much further. Nor was it. Some fifty yards beyond the falling gate giving on to the farmhouse lane, an ill-defined wagon track led to the right and at its junction with the road a leaning post held a board bearing the nearly illegible inscription: “Orcutt Road.” Joe gave up the idea of riding the bicycle any further and detached the laden carrier and set it on his shoulder. The Jordan residence was further along the grass-grown track than he had supposed, and he had to shift his burden more than once before the house came into sight.