Her gaze rested upon an angry bruise on his cheek. It had not been there when last she saw him. She started to speak, then changed her mind. Clay seated himself beside her. "Chicago is a right big town, I reckon. If I can help you any, Miss Kitty, I'd be glad to do what I can." The girl did not answer. She was trying to work out this puzzle of why a man should get off before the train reached the station. "I'm a stranger myself, but I expect I can worry along somehow," he went on cheerfully. "Mr. Durand didn't say anything to me about getting off," she persisted. "He made up his mind in a hurry. Just took a sudden notion to go." "Without saying anything about his suitcases?" "Never mentioned 'em." "You didn't have--any trouble with him?" she faltered. "Not a bit," he told her genially. "Sorry our tickets take us by different roads to New York. Maybe we'll meet up with each other there, Miss Kitty." "I don't understand it," she murmured, half to herself. "Why would he get off before we reach the depot?" She was full of suspicions, and the bruise on the Westerner's cheek did not tend to allay them. They were still unsatisfied when the porter took her to the end of the car to brush her clothes. The discretion of that young man had its limits. While he brushed the girl he told her rapidly what he had seen in the vestibule. "Was he hurt?" she asked breathlessly. "No 'm. I looked out and seen him standin' beside the track j'es' a-cussin' a blue streak. He's a sho-'nough bad actor, that Jerry Durand." Kitty marched straight to her section. The eyes of the girl flashed anger. "Please leave my seat, sir," she told Clay. The Arizonan rose at once. He knew that she knew. "I was intendin' to help you off with yore grips," he said. She flamed into passionate resentment of his interference. "I'll attend to them. I can look out for myself, sir." With that she turned her back on him. CHAPTER III THE BIG TOWN When Clay stepped from the express into the Pennsylvania Station he wondered for a moment if there was a circus or a frontier-day show in town. The shouts of the porters, the rush of men and women toward the gates, the whirl and eddy of a vast life all about him, took him back to the few hours he had spent in Chicago. As he emerged at the Thirty-Fourth Street entrance New York burst upon him with what seemed almost a threat. He could hear the roar of it like a river rushing down a canon. Clay had faced a cattle stampede. He had ridden out a blizzard hunched up with the drifting herd. He had lived rough all his young and joyous life. But for a moment he felt a chill drench at his heart that was almost dread. He did not know a soul in this vast populace. He was alone among seven or eight million crazy human beings.