With time to think, I began to puzzle anxiously over the new development of mystery opened up by the overheard telephone talk. Who or what was the "outfit" that had been meddling in my sorry affair?—that was to be wired when my new destination should be ascertained? One by one the suspicious circumstances remarshaled themselves; the feeling that I had been spied upon, the speedy publicity which my story had attained in the town where I had made my earliest attempt at wage-earning, the memorandum which Chief Callahan had consulted before sending me to the crooked coal company. It seemed singular to me afterward that the one answer to all of these small mysteries should not have suggested itself at once. But it did not.
The end of the conductor's run—the point which I had paid fare—came at midday at the capital of the State, where there was a stop long enough to enable the train's people—or those who chose to evade the dining-car—to seek a lunch counter. I went with the others and had a frugal sandwich and a cup of coffee, hastening afterward to the station ticket office to buy a ticket to a town well over toward the western boundary of my prison State, and chosen haphazard from its location on the wall-map beside the ticket window. A little later, upon resuming my seat in the train, I had a small shock. Sitting just across the aisle, and once more barricaded behind his hand-baggage and buried in a newspaper, was the round-faced salesman who had been my traveling companion on the day of my release from prison.
Naturally, all the suspicions I had been harboring for the past few hours leaped alive again at the sight of this man. But at the second train stop in the westward flight they were promptly disconnected from my vis-à-vis across the aisle when the salesman gathered his belongings and disappeared; left the train—as I made sure by looking out of the window and seeing him cross the station platform. In the short run from the capital he had not so much as looked in my direction, emerging from his newspaper only once for a word with the conductor at the moment of ticket-collecting.
After he was gone I was able to smile grimly and call it a coincidence, wondering meanwhile, if one of the consequences of my hideously disarranged life was to be a lapse into chittering cowardice; an endless starting aside at shadows.
The new field of endeavor, chosen blindly at the ticket window in the capital, proved to be a small manufacturing city. Here the chief of police, to whom I reported on the evening of my arrival, was of a type exactly opposite to the grafting brute from whose jurisdiction I had fled; a promoted town-marshal, like John Runnels of Glendale; a shrewd-eyed, kindly old man who heard my story patiently and gave me a word of encouragement that was like a draft of cold water in the desert.
"You're goin' to get a square deal in this town, my boy," he said, after I had enlarged upon my story sufficiently to make it include my late experience with Callahan and Mullins. "It ain't any part of my job to bruise the broken reed n'r quench the smokin' flax. You don't look like a thief, and, anyways, if you're tryin' to make an honest livin', that settles all the old scores—or it ort to. Go find you a job, if you can. What you've told me stays right in here"—tapping his broad chest—"leastwise, it won't be used against you as long as you walk straight."
Under such kindly auspices it did seem as if I ought to be able to dig a quiet little rifle-pit in the field of respectability and good repute and to hold it against all comers. But, oddly enough, I couldn't do it—not to save my life. My experience had all been in office work, and since business was good in the small city, I had little difficulty in finding employment. Yet in each case—and there were five of them, one after another—I secured work only to lose it almost immediately. By some means my story had got out, and it spread through the town like an epidemic. After the fifth failure I went back to the fatherly old chief of police to confess defeat and to notify him that I was leaving town.
In this interview he made me tell him more about my trial and conviction, and when I finished he was shaking his head. "There's something sort o' queer about this pull-down of yours, Weyburn," he commented. "I gave you my word not to talk unless you went back on me, and I've kept it. You hain't told anybody else?"
"Not a soul."
"Still, it's been told—not once, but a heap o' times. Have you tried chasin' it back to its startin' point?"