-morrow. But don't be a patient mother; confound it, I have to go to
Richmond on Sunday. I--I want to see a girl."

"Oh, don't mind me," I observed politely. "Personally, I wouldn't change
places with you. What's her name--North? South?"

"West," he snapped. "Don't try to be funny. And all I have to say,
Blakeley, is that if you ever fall in love I hope you make an egregious
ass of yourself."

In view of what followed, this came rather close to prophecy.

The trip west was without incident. I played bridge with a furniture
dealer from Grand Rapids, a sales agent for a Pittsburg iron firm and
a young professor from an eastern college. I won three rubbers out of
four, finished what cigarettes McKnight had left me, and went to bed
at one o'clock. It was growing cooler, and the rain had ceased. Once,
toward morning, I wakened with a start, for no apparent reason, and sat
bolt upright. I had an uneasy feeling that some one had been looking at
me, the same sensation I had experienced earlier in the evening at the
window. But I could feel the bag with the notes, between me and the
window, and with my arm thrown over it for security, I lapsed again into
slumber. Later, when I tried to piece together the fragments of that
journey, I remembered that my coat, which had been folded and placed
beyond my restless tossing, had been rescued in the morning from a
heterogeneous jumble of blankets, evening papers and cravat, had been
shaken out with profanity and donned with wrath. At the time, nothing
occurred to me but the necessity of writing to the Pullman Company and
asking them if they ever traveled in their own cars. I even formulated
some of the letter.

"If they are built to scale, why not take a man of ordinary stature
as your unit?" I wrote mentally. "I can not fold together like the
traveling cup with which I drink your abominable water."

I was more cheerful after I had had a cup of coffee in the Union
Station. It was too early to attend to business, and I lounged in the
restaurant and hid behind the morning papers. As I had expected, they
had got hold of my visit and its object. On the first page was a staring
announcement that the forged papers in the Bronson case had been
brought to Pittsburg. Underneath, a telegram from Washington stated that
Lawrence Blakeley, of Blakeley and McKnight, had left for Pittsburg the
night before, and that, owing to the approaching trial of the Bronson
case and the illness of John Gilmo