Of course there was danger of detection, and faced by this and the memory of his discomfort on the train down, he told himself he would certainly move the money. But back in the Argonaut Hotel his resolution weakened. Where would he move it to? He could bank it in San Francisco, but here again there were perils, of a kind he dreaded even more than the Sacramento trips. There was that question of references, and he feared the eyes of men, honest men, business men. He kept away from them; they were shrewd, bitterly hostile to such as he. So he invariably slipped back into a state where he said he must do something, waited until he had only a few dollars left, then, cursing and groaning, pulled the old clothes out of his trunk, packed his battered suitcase and told Ned Murphy he was going into the interior "on business." But outside all these lesser boredoms and anxieties there was another bigger than all the rest and growing every day: After the money was gone, what? It was a question that, in the past, he would have sheered away from as a horse shies from an obstacle intruding on a pleasant road. But time had taught him [Note: last word, 'far-righted' must be a typo] many things--the picaroon was becoming far-sighted; the grasshopper had learned of the ant. The spring of his youth was gone; the renewal of the old struggle too horrible to contemplate. And he would have to contemplate it or decide on something to forestall it. That was what he had been thinking about for the past week, shut up in his hotel room, his hands deep in his pockets, his eyes morosely fixed on space. At the Alston dinner an idea had germinated in his mind. It was only a seed at first, then it began to grow and had now assumed a definite shape. At first he had toyed with it, viewed it from different angles as something fantastic and irrelevant, but nevertheless having a piquancy of its own. Then his ill-luck and that necessary facing of the situation made him regard it more closely, compelled him to award it a serious consideration. He did not like it; it had almost no point of appeal; it was not the sort of thing, had chance been kinder, he would ever have contemplated. But it was inescapable, the angel with the flaming sword planted in his path.