Singlebury, who did a good reporter's job and wrote a great story, was never to have the small consolation of knowing that after all he had not committed criminal libel, nor that he had not got his names or his facts twisted, nor even that his story did appear in _The Clarion_. Without stopping long enough even to buy a copy of the paper, he ran away, a fugitive, dreading the fear of arrest that had been conjured up in another's imagination and craftily grafted upon his beguiled intelligence. And he never stopped running, either, until he was in Denver, Colorado, where he had to make a fresh start all over again. While he was making it the girl in San Jose, California, got tired of waiting for him and broke off the engagement and married someone else. What is the moral of it all? You can search me. CHAPTER IX PERSONA AU GRATIN To every town, whether great or ungreat, appertain and do therefore belong certain individualistic beings. In the big town they are more or less lost, perhaps. In the smaller town they are readily to be found and as readily to be recognised. There is, for example, the man who, be the weather what it may and frequently is, never wears underwear, yet continues ever to enjoy health so robust as to constitute him, especially in winter time, a living reproach to all his fleece-lined fellow citizens. There is the man who hangs round somebody's livery stable, being without other visible means of support, and makes a specialty of diagnosing the diseases of the horse and trimming up fox terrier pups, as regards their ears and tails. Among the neighbouring youth, who yield him a fearsome veneration, a belief exists to the effect that he never removes the tails with an edged tool but just takes and bites them off. There is the man who, because his mother or his wife or his sister takes in sewing, has a good deal of spare time on his hands and devotes it to carving with an ordinary pocketknife--he'll show you the knife--a four-foot chain, complete with solid links and practical swivel ornaments, out of a single block of soft pine, often achieving the even more miraculous accomplishment of creating a full-rigged ship inside of a narrow-mouthed bottle.