ee my ticket. In consequence, the Colorado
destination was still my own secret.

In the Pullman wash-room Barton stood by me like a man, fetching his
own clean linen and tipping the porter to make him turn his back while
I had a wash and a shave and a change. One who has always marched in
the ranks of the well-groomed may never realize the importance of soap
and water in a civilized world. As a moral stimulus, the combination
yields nothing to all the Uplift Foundations the multi-millionaires
have ever laid. When I took my place at the table for two opposite
Barton in the diner, I was able to look the world in the eye, and to
forget, momentarily at least, in the luxury of clean hands and clean
linen, that I was practically an outlaw with a price upon my head.

Yearning like a shipwrecked mariner for home news, I led Barton on to
talk of Glendale and the various happenings in the little town during
my long absence. Though I had quartered the home State in all
directions for half a year he was, as I have said, the first Glendale
man I had met.

He told me many things that I was eager to know; how my mother and
sister were living quietly at the town place, which the income from the
farm enabled them to retain. For several years after her majority my
sister, older than I, had taught in the public school; she was now, so
Barton said, conducting a small private school for backward little ones
at home.

There were other news items, many of them. Old John Runnels was still
chief of police; Tom Fitch, the hardware man, was the new mayor; Buck
Severance, my one-time chum in the High School, was now chief of the
fire department, having won his spurs--or rather, I should say, his red
helmet and silver trumpet--at the fire which had destroyed the
Blickerman Department Store.

"And the bank?" I asked.

"Which one? We've got three of them now, if you please, and one's a
National."

"I meant the Farmers'," I said.

"Something right funny about that, Bert," Barton commented. "The old
bank is rocking along and doing a little business in farm mortgages and
note-shaving at the old stand, same as usual, but it's got a hoodoo.
The other banks do most of the commercial business--all of it, you
might say; still, they say Geddis and old Abner Withers are getting
richer and richer every day."

"Agatha is married?" I asked.

"No; and that's another of the funny things. Her engagement with young
Copper-Money was broken off-