On the night of the eighteenth of February, at about half past eleven o'clock, Marshal Waggoner was completing his regular before-midnight round of the business district. The weather was nasty, with a raw wet wind blowing and half-melted slush underfoot. In his tour he had encountered not a single person. That dead dumb quiet which falls upon a sleeping town on a winter's night was all about him. But as he turned out of Main Street, which is the principal thoroughfare, into Sycamore Street, a short byway running down between scattered buildings and vacant lots to the river bank a short block away, he saw a man standing at the side door of the Eagle House, the town's second-best hotel. A gas lamp flaring raggedly above the doorway brought out the figure with distinctness. The man was not moving--he was just standing there, with the collar of a heavy overcoat turned up about his throat and a soft black hat with a wide brim drawn well down upon his head. Drawing nearer, Waggoner, who by name or by sight knew every resident of the town, made up his mind that the loiterer was a stranger. Now a stranger abroad at such an hour and apparently with no business to mind would at once be mentally catalogued by the vigilant night marshal as a suspicious person. So when he had come close up to the other, padding noiselessly in his heavy rubber boots, the officer halted and from a distance of six feet or so stared steadfastly at the suspect. The suspect returned the look. What Waggoner saw was a thin, haggard face covered to the upper bulge of the jaw-bones with a disfiguring growth of reddish whiskers and inclosed at the temples by shaggy, unkempt strands of red hair which protruded from beneath the black hat. Evidently the man had not been shaved for weeks; certainly his hair needed trimming and combing. But what at the moment impressed Waggoner more even than the general unkemptness of the stranger's aspect was the look out of his eyes. They were widespread eyes and bloodshot as though from lack of sleep, and they glared into Waggoner's with a peculiar, strained, hearkening expression. There was agony in them--misery unutterable. Thrusting his head forward then, the stranger cried out, and his voice, which in his first words was deep and musical, suddenly, before he had uttered a full sentence, turned to a sharp, half-hysterical falsetto: "Why don't you say something to me, man?" he cried at the startled Waggoner. "For God's sake, why don't you speak to me? Even if you do know me, why don't you speak? Why don't you call me by my name? I can't stand it--I can't stand it any longer, I tell you. You've got to speak." Astounded, Waggoner strove to answer. But, because he was startled and a bit apprehensive as well, his throat locked down on his faulty vocal cords. His face moved and his lips twisted convulsively, but no sound issued from his mouth.