ughtfully, "when I'll be
looking for a new job, so I'll bear it in mind. Not that they'd give
me a job at the office, for they would not; but by the name of him this
T. H. MacMurtrey 'll be a new man and unknown to me, which is quite
another matter--and I'll keep it in mind."

Sammy Durgan turned the sheet absently--and then, forgetful of the
obliging tie that propped his back, he sat bolt upright with a jerk.

"For the love of Mike!" observed Sammy Durgan breathlessly, with his
eyes glued to the paper.

It leaped right out at him in the biggest type the Big Cloud _Daily
Sentinel_ had to offer, which, if it had its limitations, was not to be
despised, since it had acquired a second-hand font or two from a
metropolitan daily east that made no pretense at being modest in such
matters.

Sammy Durgan's eyes began to pop, and his leathery face to screw up.

GHASTLY RAILROAD TRAGEDY

UNKNOWN MAN MURDERED IN STATEROOM
OF EASTBOUND FLYER

_No Clue to Assassin_

Sammy Durgan's eyes bored into the fine print of the "story." If the
style was a trifle provincial and harrowing, Sammy Durgan was not
fastidious enough to be disturbed thereby--it was intensely vivid.
Sammy Durgan's mouth was half open, as he read.

One of the most atrocious, daring and bloody murders in the annals of
the country's crime was perpetrated last night in a compartment of the
sleeping car on No. 12, the eastbound through express. It is a
baffling mystery, though suspicion is directed against a passenger who
gave his name as Samuel Starke of New York. The details, gathered by
the _Sentinel_ staff from Conductor Hurley, and Clements, the porter,
on the arrival of the train at Big Cloud, are as follows:

The car was a new-type compartment car, with the compartment doors
opening off the corridor that runs along one side of the length of the
car. As the train was passing Dam River, Clements, the porter, at the
forward end of the car, thought he heard two revolver shots from
somewhere in the rear. Clements says he thought at first he had been
mistaken, for the train was travelling fast and making a great uproar,
and he did not at once make any effort to investigate. Then he heard a
compartment door open, and he started down the corridor. Starke was
standing in the doorway of B compartment where the murdered man was,
and Starke yelled at Clements. "Here, porter, quick!" is what Clements
says Starke said to him: "There's a man bee