e
widened the old wagon-shop out some few lines since you knew us, and
I've been making a round of the agencies. I was in the big city last
night and got a wire to go to St. Louis. The wire got balled up
somewhere, and I didn't get it until late at night. Made me hustle,
too. I'd been out of the city for the day and didn't get back to the
Marlborough until nearly midnight."

This bit of detail made no impression upon me at the moment because I
was too busy with the thoughts suggested by the fact that I might have
Barton with me all day. Returning to Glendale at the end of his round,
he would be sure to talk, and in due time the prison authorities would
learn that I had been last seen in St. Louis. This accidental meeting
with Barton figured as a crude misfortune, but I saw no way to mitigate
it.

About this time came the first call for breakfast in the dining-car,
and I hoped this would relieve me of Barton's presence, for a while, at
any rate. But I was reckoning altogether without my host.

"Breakfast, eh?--that fits me all the way down to the ground," was his
welcoming of the waiter's sing-song call. "Come along, old man, and
we'll go eat a few things. This is on me."

I tried to refuse. Apart from a frantic desire to be quit of him, I
was in no condition to present myself in the dining-car. I showed him
my grimy hands, and at that he made me forgive him in advance for all
the harm he might eventually do me.

"That's perfectly all right," he laughed. "Fellow can't help getting
that way on the road. My sleeper is the first one back, and the
dining-car's coupled on behind. You come along into the Pullman with
me and wash up. I've got a bunch of clean collars and a shirt, if you
want them; and if the Pullman man makes a roar I'll tell him you're my
long-lost brother and give him the best ten-cent cigar he ever
smoked--I get 'em at a discount from a fellow who makes a little on the
side by selling his samples." And when I still hung back--"Don't be an
ass, Bertie. This old world isn't half as mean as you'd like to think
it is."

I yielded, weakly, I was going to say; yet perhaps it wasn't altogether
weakness. For the first time since leaving the penitentiary I was
meeting a man from home; a man who knew, and apparently didn't care. I
went to the Pullman with Barton and was lucky enough to meet the
ticket-punching train conductor on the way. Barton was a step or two
ahead of me and he did not s