Mr. Binns hesitated, but there was no time to lose. It didn’t make any difference, so long as he connected with the incoming express, as the time-table showed that this did. He paid for his ticket and got aboard, but now an irritating thought came to him. Supposing other reporters from either the _News_ or one of the three afternoon papers were aboard, especially the _News_! If there were not he would have this fine task all to himself, and what a beat! But if there were others? He walked forward to the smoker, which was the next car in front, and there, to his intense disgust and nervous dissatisfaction, he spied, of all people, the one man he would least have expected to find on an assignment of this kind, the one man he least wanted to see--Mr. Collins, no less, red-headed, serene, determined, a cigar between his teeth, crouched low in his seat smoking and reading a paper as calmly as though he were not bent upon the most important task of the year. “Pshaw!” exclaimed Mr. Binns irritably and even bitterly. He returned to his seat nervous and ill composed, all the more so because he now recalled Collins’s venomous threat, “Wait’ll we get a real case some time, you and me.” The low creature! Why, he couldn’t even write a decent sentence. Why should he fear him so? But just the same he did fear him--why, he could scarcely say. Collins was so raw, savage, brutal, in his mood and plans. But why, in heaven’s name, he now asked himself as he meditated in his seat as to ways and means, should a man like Batsford send a man like Collins, who couldn’t even write, to interpret a story and a character of this kind? How could he hope to dig out the odd psychology of this very queer case? Plainly he was too crude, too unintellectual to get it straight. Nevertheless, here he was, and now, plainly, he would have this awful creature to contend with. And Collins was so bitter toward him. He would leave no trick unturned to beat him! These country detectives and sheriff and railroad men, whoever they were or wherever they came from, would be sure, on the instant, to make friends with Collins, as they always did, and do their best to serve him. They seemed to like that sort of man, worse luck. They might even, at Collins’s instigation, refuse to let him interview the bandit at all! If so, then what? But Collins would get something somehow, you might be sure, secret details which they might not relate to him. It made him nervous. Even if he got a chance he would have to interview this wonderful bandit in front of this awful creature, this one man whom he most despised, and who would deprive him of most of the benefit of all his questions by writing as though he had thought of and asked all of them himself. Think of it!