“Yes, I saw that! And _that’s_ a part of the business I can’t understand,” he answered, puzzled by the stranger’s quiet smile. “Say, Durkin, you didn’t think it was your good looks and your Fifth Avenue talkin’ got you off, did you?” The younger man turned on him with half-angry eyes. But the stranger only continued to chuckle contentedly down in his throat. “You remind me of a hen who’s just laid an egg!” cried Durkin, in a sudden flash of anger. The other brushed the insult carelessly aside, with one deprecatory sweep of his fat hand. “Why, _I_ had Doogan fixed for you, you lobster!” he went on, as easily and as familiarly as before. “You’re the sort o’ man I wanted—I saw that, first crack out o’ the box. And a friend o’ mine named Cottrell happens to stand pat with Muschenheim. And Muschenheim is Doogan’s right-hand man, so he put a bee in the Boss’s ear, and everything was—well, kind o’ dropped!” The younger man gazed at him in dreamy wonder, trying to grope through the veil of unreality that seemed falling and draping about him. He was marvelling, inwardly, how jolting and unlooked for came the sudden ups and downs of life, when once the traveller is caught up out of the ordinary grooves of existence,—how sudden and moving the drama, when once the feral process is under way. Then he listened, with alert and quickly changing eyes, as the stranger—to make sure of his man, the discharged prisoner surmised—tapped with his knife on the edge of his chinaware plate. Durkin read the Morse easily—“Don’t talk so loud!” it warned him. And he nodded and wagged his now swimming head, almost childishly, over the little message. Yet all the time he felt, vaguely, that he was under the keen eyes of the stranger across the table from him. “Where’d you work, before you went to the Postal-Union?” “Up in the woods,” laughed the other carelessly, yet still clear-headed enough to feel inwardly ashamed of his laughter. “What woods?”