ntly for a second disappearance. After a
lunch-counter meal, eaten in a cheap restaurant within a block or so of
the City Hall, I made a round of the employment offices. In front of
one of them there was a bulletin-board demand for railroad grade
laborers on the Cripple Creek branch of the Colorado Midland.

At that time I knew next to nothing about the geography of the Rocky
Mountain States, and the great mining-camp at the back of Pike's Peak
was merely a name to me; though the name was familiar, in a way,
because the mine in which Abel Geddis had sunk his depositors' money
was said to be in the Cripple Creek district. What chiefly attracted
me in the bulletin-board notice was the announcement that free
transportation would be given to the work. With only a few dollars in
my pocket, the free ride became an object, and I entered the office.

The arrangement was easily made. I gave the agent his fee of two
dollars, and let him put a name--not my own or any part of my own, you
may be sure--on his list for the evening shipment. It appeared to cut
no figure with this employment shark that I bore none of the marks of a
successful pick-and-shovel man. All he wanted or cared for was his two
dollars and something on two legs and in the shape of a man to put into
his gang against the collected fee. I was told to show up at the Union
Station at six o'clock, sharp; and after spending the remainder of the
afternoon wandering about the city, I reported as instructed, was
passed through the gates with some twenty-five or thirty other
"pick-ups," and so turned my back upon the Queen City of the
Plains--for a time.

XI

Number 3126

In due deference to the "mugging" at police headquarters, I had
registered in the Denver employment office as "William Smith." But on
the work, which proved to be the construction of a branch feeder for
the Midland in the heart of the gold district, I took my own name--or
rather that part of it which had been given to the Denver police
inspector--arguing that the only way in which I could be traced would
be by means of the photograph. Against the photographic possibility,
my beard, which had been scraped off by the station barber during the
waiting interval between trains in St. Louis, was suffered to grow
again.

The railroad labor was strenuous, as it was bound to be; and for the
first few days the thin, crisp air of the altitudes cut my already
indifferent physical efficiency alm