ve.
To be recaptured now would mean a return to prison and the serving out
of the remainder of the full five-year term, with an added penalty for
the broken parole. I knew well the critical watchfulness with which
the workings of the new law were regarded. The indeterminate sentence
itself was on trial, and the prison authorities and others interested
were resolved that the trial should be fair and impartial. Therefore I
might count confidently upon pursuit.

At first there seemed little likelihood that my midnight flight could
be traced. In the great city I had left behind I had been only an
uncounted unit in a submerged minority. It was doubtful if any one
besides Kellow and the keeper of the police records would know or
remember my name. There had been many travelers to board the through
train with me, and surely one might consider himself safely lost in
such a throng, if only by reason of the unit inconsequence.

But now I was to be brought face to face with a peril which constantly
besets the fugitive of any sort in an age of rapid and easy travel.
Under such conditions the smallness of the modern world has passed into
a hackneyed proverb. I had scarcely rubbed the sleep out of my eyes
and straightened up in the car seat which had served for a bed when
some one came down the aisle, a hand was clapped on my shoulder, and a
cheery voice said:

"Well, I'll be dog-daddled! Bert Weyburn--of all the people in the
world!"

There was murder in my heart when I looked up and recognized a Glendale
man whom I had known practically all my life; a rattle-brained young
fellow named Barton, who had tried a dozen different occupations after
leaving school, and had, at my last account of him, become a traveling
salesman for our single large factory--a wagon-making company.

Under the existing conditions Barton was easily the last man on earth
whom I should have chosen out of a worldful of men for a traveling
companion; but before I could do more than nod a surly response to his
greeting he had slipped into the empty half of the seat and was
offering me a cigar.

At first our talk was awkwardly constrained, as it was bound to be with
one party to it wishing fervently that the other were at the bottom of
the sea. But Horace Barton was much too good-natured, and too
loquacious, to let the constraint remain as a barrier. Working around
by degrees to the _status quo_--my _status quo_--he finally broke the
ice in the pon