ost to the vanishing point.
Nevertheless, there were two pieces of good fortune. My
fellow-laborers in the grading gang were principally Italians from the
southern provinces and their efficiency was also low. This helped, but
a better bit of luck lay in the fact that the contractors on the job
were humane and liberal employers; both of them with a shrewd and
watchful eye for latent capabilities in the rank and file. Within a
week I was made a gang time-keeper, and a fortnight later I became
commissary clerk.

Before I forget it, let me say that my first month's pay, or the
greater part of it, went to replace the sixty-three dollars and a half
in the little black pocketbook which I had stolen--I guess that is the
honest word---from Horace Barton. I debated for some time over the
safest method of returning the pocketbook and its restored contents to
the wagon salesman. I realized that it wouldn't do to let him know
where I was; and it seemed a needless humiliation to confess to him
that I was the "hobo" who had posed, in his imagination, as the skilful
sidewalk pickpocket.

In casting about for a means of communication I thought of Whitley, the
Springville minister. So I wrote him a letter, enclosing the
pocketbook, with a truthful explanation of the circumstances in which
it had come into my possession, and telling him what to do with it. I
laid no commands upon his conscience, but begged him, if he could
consistently do so, to suppress my name and whereabouts. And since I
could not be quite sure as to what the ministerial conscience might
demand, I added, rather disingenuously, I fear, that he needn't reply
to my letter, as I had no permanent address.

It was some little time after my promotion to the commissary that
Dorgan came on the job as a track-laying foreman. He was a heavy-set,
black-browed fellow with a sinister face and deeply caverned, brooding
eyes looking out furtively under their bushy coverts, and his chief
characteristic was a crabbed reticence which not even the exigencies of
handling a crew of steel-layers seemed able to break. His face was one
not to be easily forgotten; from the first sight I had of it, it was
vaguely familiar, and a thoughtful ransacking of the cubby-holes of
memory very shortly recalled it for me. Dorgan was an escaped convict.

His jail-break dated back to my second year in the penitentiary, to a
period just after I had been slated for the prison office work.
Dorga