After such a disheartening experience in a community where I had had the help and countenance of a just and charitable head of the police department, I went back to the smaller places. Merely because it seemed foolish to take the time to learn a new trade when I already had one, I still sought office work. There was little difficulty in finding such employment-at humble wages; the unattainable thing was the keeping of it. Though I could never succeed in running it down and bringing it to bay, a pitiless Nemesis seemed to dog me from town to town. Gossiping marshals there may have been, now and then, to spread my story; but I had twice been given proof that another agency must be at work-a mysterious persecution that I could neither fight nor outwit, nor account for upon any reasonable hypothesis.

So the hopeless and one-sided battle went on as I fled from post to pillar up and down and back and forth in the "permitted" area, doing a bit of extra bookkeeping here and another there. The result was always the same. Work of that kind necessarily carried more or less responsibility, and in consequence I was never retained more than a few days at a time.

It was borne in upon me more and more that I must sink lower, into some walk in life in which no questions were asked. This conviction impressed itself upon me with greater emphasis at each succeeding failure, and the decision to drop into the ranks of the unidentified was finally reached in a small city in the agricultural section of the State where I had been employed for a few days in a hardware and implement store as shipping clerk. Once more I was discharged, peremptorily, and with a reproachful reprimand for having thrust myself, unplacarded, upon well-behaved people.

"I don't admit your right to say such things to me, Mr. Haddon," I protested, after the reproach had been well rubbed in. "I have given you good service for small pay, and there was no reason why I should have furnished you with an autobiography when you didn't ask it. In the circumstances it seems that I am the one to be aggrieved, but I'll waive the right to defend myself if you'll tell me where you got your information."

The implement dealer was a thin, ascetic person, with cold gray eyes and two distinct sets of manners; one for his customers and another for his employees; and the look he gave me was meant to be withering.

"I don't recognize your right to question me, at all," he objected, with the air of one who brushes an annoying insect from his coat-sleeve. "It is enough to say that my source of information is entirely reliable. By your own act you have placed yourself outside of the pale. If you break a natural law, Nature exacts the just penalty. It is the same in the moral field."

"But if any penalty were due from me I have paid it," I retorted.

"No; you have paid only a part of it-the law's part. Society still has its claims and they must be met; recognized and satisfied to the final jot and tittle."

Though this man was a church member, and a rather prominent one in Springville-we may call the small city Springville because that isn't its real name-I did not accuse him, even mentally, of conscious hypocrisy. What I said, upon leaving him, was that I hoped he'd never have to pay any of the penalties himself. I did not know then-what I learned later-that he was a very whited sepulchre; a man who was growing rich by a systematic process of robbing his farmer customers on time sales.

Turned out once again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do what I had done so many times before-take the first train and vanish. But a small incident delayed the vanishing-for the moment, at least. On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time in my native State than it is now, I am glad to be able to say; a young, farmer-looking fellow overcome by liquor, reeling and stumbling and finding the sidewalk far too narrow. He was coming toward me, and I yielded to the impulse which prompts most of us at such times; the disposition to give the inebriate all the room he wants-to pass by, like the priest and the Levite, on the other side.

Just as I was stepping into the roadway, the drunken man collided heavily with a telephone pole, caught clumsily at it to save himself, and fell, striking his head on the curbstone and rolling into the gutter. It was a case for the Good Samaritan, and, as it happened, that time-honored personage was at hand. Before I could edge away, as I confess I was trying to do, a clean-cut young man in the fatigue uniform of the Church militant came striding across the street.

"Here, you!" he snapped briskly to me. "Don't turn your back that way on a man needing help! That fellow's hurt!"

We got the pole-bombarder up, between us, and truly he was hurt. There was a cut over one eye where he had butted into one of the climbing-steps on the pole, and either that, or the knock on the curbstone, had made him take the count. Since Springville wasn't citified enough to have a hospital or an ambulance, I supposed we would carry the wounded man to the nearest drug store. But my Good Samaritan wasn't built that way. Hastily commandeering a passing dray, he made me help him load the unconscious man into it, and the three of us were trundled swiftly through a couple of cross streets to a-to a church, I was going to say, but it was to a small house beside the church.

Here, with the help of the driver, we got the John Barleycorn victim into the house and spread him out on a clean white bed, muddy boots, sodden clothes, bloody head and all. I asked if I should go for a doctor, but the Samaritan shook his head. "No," he said; "you and I can do all that is necessary." Then he paid the dray driver and we fell to work.

It was worth something to see that handsome, well-built young theologue-it didn't seem as if he could have been more than a boy freshly out of the seminary-strip off his coat and roll up his sleeves and go to it like a veteran surgeon. In a few minutes, with such help as I could render, he had the cut cleaned and bandaged, the red face sponged off, and the worst of the street dirt brushed from the man's clothing.

"That is about all we can do-until he gets over the double effects of the hurt and the whiskey," he said, when the job was finished; and then, with a sort of search-warrant look at me: "Are you very busy?"

I told him I was not.

"All right; you stay here with him and keep an eye on him while I go and find out who he is and where he belongs." And with that he put on his coat and left the house.

He was gone for over an hour, and during that time I sat by the bed, keeping watch over the patient and letting my thoughts wander as they would. Here was a little exhibition of a spirit which had been conspicuously absent in my later experiences of the world and its peopling. Apparently the milk of human kindness had not become entirely a figure of speech. One man, at least, was trying to live up to the requirements of a nominally Christian civilization, and if this bit of rescue work were a fair sample, he was making a success of it.

I took it for granted that he was the minister of the next-door church, and that the house was its parsonage or rectory. It was a simple story-and-a-half cottage, plainly furnished but exquisitely neat and home-like. There were books everywhere, and an atmosphere about as much of the place as I could see to make me decide that it was a man's house-I mean that the young minister wasn't as yet sharing it with a woman. You can tell pretty well. A woman's touch about a house interior is as easily distinguishable as the stars on a clear night.

From my place at the bedside I could look through an open door into the sitting-room. There were easy-chairs and a writing-table and a general air of man-comfort. Among the pictures on the walls was one of a stately group of college buildings; another was a class picture taken with a church, or perhaps it was the college chapel, for a background.

When the hour was about up, the man on the bed began to stir and show signs that he was coming out of the unconscious fit. Pretty soon he opened his eyes and asked, in a liquor-thickened voice, where he was. I told him he had had an accident and was in the hands of his friends; and at that he dropped off to sleep, and was still sleeping when a farm wagon stopped at the cottage gate and the Good Samaritan came in. His search had been successful. Our broken-winged bird was a young farmer living a few miles out of town. The young minister had found his team, and a friend to drive it, and both friend and team were at the gate ready to take the battered one home.

With the help of the volunteer driver we got the young farmer up and out and into the wagon; and there the Samaritan outreaching ended-or I supposed it was ended. But as a matter of fact, it was merely transferring itself to me. As I was moving off to resume my interrupted dash for the railroad station, Whitley-I read his name on the notice board of the near-by church-stopped me.

"What's your hurry?" he asked; adding: "I haven't had time to get acquainted with you yet."

I answered briefly that I was leaving town, and this brought the questioner's watch out of his pocket.

"There is no train in either direction before nine o'clock this evening," he demurred. And then: "It is nearly six now: if you haven't anything better to do, why not stay and take dinner with me? I'm a lone bachelor-man, and I'd be mighty glad of your company."

The wagon had driven off and the street was empty. I looked my potential host squarely in the eyes and said the first thing that came uppermost.

"I have just been discharged from Mr. Haddon's store-for what Mr. Haddon considers to be good and sufficient cause. I don't believe you want me at your dinner-table."

His smile was as refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer day.

"I don't care what Mr. Haddon has said or done to you. If you can't give any better reason than that--"

"But I can," I interposed. "I am a paroled convict."

Without another word he opened the gate and drew me inside with an arm linked in mine. And he didn't speak again until he had planted me in the easiest of the big chairs before the grate fire in the cozy sitting-room, and had found a couple of pipes, filling one for me and the other for himself.

"Now, then, tell me all about it," he commanded, "You are having plenty of trouble; your face says that much. Begin back a bit and let it lead up to Mr. Zadoc Haddon as a climax, if you wish."

It had been so long since I had had a chance really to confide in anybody that I unloaded it all; the whole bitter burden of it. Whitley heard me through patiently, and when I was done, put his finger on the single omission in the story.

"You haven't told me whether you did or did not use the bank's money for your own account in the mining speculation," he said.

I shook my head. "I have learned by hard experience not to say much about that part of it."

"Why?" he asked.

"If you knew convicts you wouldn't ask. They will all tell you that they were innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced."

He smoked in silence for a minute or two and then said: "You are not a criminal, Weyburn."

"I am not far from it at the present time-whatever I was in the beginning."

Another silence, and then: "It seems incredible to me that you, or any man in your situation, should find the world so hard-hearted. It isn't hard-hearted as a whole, you know; on the contrary, it is kind and helpful and charitable to a degree that you'd never suspect until you appeal to it. I know, because I am appealing to it every day."

Again I shook my head.

"It draws a line in its charity; and the ex-convict is on the wrong side of that line." I was going on to say more, but at that moment a white-haired old negro in a spotless serving jacket came to the door to say that dinner was ready, and we went together to the tiny dining-room in the rear.

At dinner, which was the most appetizing meal I had sat down to in many a long day, Whitley told me more about himself, sparing me, as I made sure, the necessity of further talk about my own wretched experiences. He was Southern born and bred-which accounted for the old negro serving man-and Springville was his first parish north of the Ohio River. He was enthusiastic over his work, and he seemed to forget completely who and what I was as he talked of it.

Later, when we had come again to the sitting-room with its cheerful fire, we talked of books, finding common ground in the field of autobiography and travel. Whitley's reading in this field had been much wider than mine, and his knowledge of far countries and the men who wrote about them was a revelation to such a dabbler as I had been. Book after book was taken from the shelves and dipped into, and before I realized it the evening-so different from any I had enjoyed for months and years-had slipped away and the little clock on the mantel was chiming the half-hour after eight. It was time for me to efface myself, and I said so-a bit unsteadily, perhaps, for the pleasant evening had been as the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

"No," said Whitley, quite definitely. "You are not going to-night. I have a spare bed upstairs and I want you to stay-as my guest. Beyond that, you are not going to leave Springville merely because Mr. Haddon has seen fit to deny you your little meed of justice and a fair show."

"It's no use," I said. "The story is out, and it will follow me wherever I go-doubtless with Mr. Haddon's help. You'd best let me go while the going is easy."

"No," he Insisted. "You are a part of my work-one of my reasons for existence. Christianity means something, Weyburn, and I am here to define its meaning in specific cases. There is a little legacy of common justice due you, and I shall take it upon myself to see that you get it. As for Zadoc Haddon, you needn't worry about him. I am ashamed to say that he is a member of my own church, but that doesn't prevent him from being a wolf in sheep's clothing. I have told him so to his face, and he has tried to get me ousted-without success, so far."

I saw difficulties and more difficulties for this generous young fellow who was so ready to champion my cause, and it seemed only decent to spare him if I could. But at the end of my protest he summed the situation up in a single sentence:

"What you say about me is all beside the mark; somebody has got to give you the chance you are needing, and the fight may just as well be made here in Springville as anywhere. Sit down again and let's dig a little deeper into that Mexican book of Enock's. I do like his blunt English way of describing things; don't you?"

Though the next three days were full of hopes and despairings for me I shall pass over them lightly. Each day, though he did not tell me in detail what he was doing, I knew that Whitley was trying his best to find a place for me; and I knew, too, that he was meeting with no success. He was such a fine, upstanding fellow, and so full of holy zeal and enthusiasm, that it was hard for him to acknowledge defeat. But on the third evening, after a dinner at which he had tried vainly to bridge the gaps that were continually opening out in the talk, he threw up his hands.

"Weyburn," he began, when the pipes were lighted and he had poked the grate fire into a roaring blaze, "don't you know, these last three days have come mighty near to making me lose faith in my kind. It's simply wretched-miserable!"

"I would have saved you if you had been willing to let me," I reminded him.

"The question is much bigger than Bert Weyburn or John Whitley, or both of them put together," he asserted soberly. "It involves the entire fabric of Christianity, and our so-called Christian civilization. The Church is here to shadow forth the spirit and teachings of Christ, or it isn't-one of the two. If it falls in its mission it is a hollow mockery; a thing beneath contempt. I go to my fellow Christians with a simple plea for justice for a man who needs it, and what do I get? I am told, with all the sickening variations, that it won't do; that the thing I am proposing is one of the things that 'isn't done'; that society must be protected, and all that!"

"The mills of the gods," I suggested.

"Nothing of the sort! It's a radical defect in the existing scheme of things. Heavens and earth, Weyburn, you are not a pariah! Assuming that you really did the thing for which you were punished-and I don't believe you did-is that any reason why we should stultify ourselves absolutely and deny the very first principles of the religion we profess? But I mustn't be unfair. Perhaps the fault is partly mine, after all. Perhaps I haven't done my duty by these people."

"No; the fault is not yours," I hastened to say.

"I'm hoping it is; some of it, at least. Just the same, the wretched fact remains. You might be the biggest villain unhung-if only you hadn't passed through the courts and the penitentiary. As you thought probably was the case, your story is known all over town; though how it has got such a wide publication in so short a time is more than I can fathom. Men whom I would bank on; men to whom I have felt that I could go in any conceivable extremity, have turned me down as soon as I mentioned your name. The prison story is like a big, brutal, inanimate mountain standing squarely in the way; and I-I haven't the faith needful for its removal!"

Being under the deepest obligation to this dear young fellow who was bruising himself for me, I said what I could to lighten his burden. But in the midst of it he got up and reached for his hat and overcoat.

"I have just thought of something," he explained hastily; "something that may throw a good bit of light on this thing. You sit right here and toast your shins. I'm going out for a little while."

He was gone for the better part of an hour, during which interval I obeyed his injunction literally, sitting before the fire and basking in its home-like warmth; making the most of the comfort of it all before I should again go forth to face an inclement world. When Whitley came in and flung himself into a chair on the opposite side of the hearth his dark eyes were blazing.

"Weyburn," he began abruptly, "what I have to tell you will stir every evil passion you've ever harbored; and yet, in decent justice to you, it must be told. Have you ever suspected that your fight for reinstatement has been deliberately handicapped, right from the beginning?"

"I have suspected it at times; yes," I returned. "But there is no proof."

"There is proof," he shot back. "By the merest chance I stumbled upon it a few minutes ago. I went out with the intention of going to Zadoc Haddon and making him tell me where he got the information that you are the desperate criminal he professes to believe you to be. While we were sitting here it struck me all at once that this thing was being helped along by some one who had an object in view. At Haddon's house the doorman told me that Haddon had an appointment with an out-of-town customer and had gone to the hotel to keep it; and rather than wait, I went over to the Hamilton House to try to find my man. I didn't find him; but in the lobby of the hotel somebody found me. As I was turning away from the desk after asking for Haddon, a heavy-set young man, neatly dressed, stepped up and asked if my name was Whitley. I admitted it. Then he asked if I would give him a few minutes, and we went aside to sit facing each other in a couple of the lobby chairs. Weyburn, that young man is in the employ of a private detective agency, and what he wished to do, and did do, was to warn me that I was sheltering a dangerous criminal in my house!"

In a flash all the small mysteries that had been befogging me for months made themselves transparently clear: the man I had called a traveling salesman who had followed me from the prison gates to the scene of my first humble effort; the memorandum Chief Callahan had consulted; the "outfit" that was to be notified when my next destination was known; the second appearance of the "salesman" on the train at the capital, and his disappearance when he had learned from the conductor the name of my next stopping-place; and after this the long series of hitherto unaccountable blacklistings. My mouth was dry, but I contrived to tell Whitley to go on.

"I will," he conceded; "but you must promise me to control yourself. Naturally, my first impulse, when this scamp began on me, was to cut him off short and tell him what I thought of the despicable business to which he was lending himself. But the second thought was craftier, and I hope I may be forgiven for yielding to it. By leading him on I got the entire brutal story. It seems that the two old men upon whose complaint you were indicted knew when you were to be paroled. They profess to believe that you are a menace to society; that the prison authorities were at fault in releasing you short of the limit of your sentence. Hence, through his employers, they have set this man upon your track to see to it-I use his own words-that you do not have an opportunity to rob some one else."

I suppose I should have been driven mad with vindictive fury at this plain revelation of the true cause of most of my misfortunes, but there is a point beyond which the beaten man cannot rise to renew the fight, and I had reached and passed it. Wherefore I found myself saying, quite calmly:

"Neither Abel Geddis nor Abner Withers would spend one copper penny for any such altruistic reason as this man has given you, Whitley. Their motive is strictly selfish and personal. They are either afraid that I may go back to Glendale and try to expose them; or that I may take the shorter and surer way of balancing the account by killing them-as, at one time, I meant to."

"Oh, but my dear fellow!" Whitley protested. "In that case they would hardly take a course which was calculated to drive you to desperation!"

"You don't understand it all," I rejoined. "Everything has been done secretly, and it is only by the merest chance that I have now learned the truth. This man you have been talking to has been following me, or keeping track of me, ever since I left the penitentiary. I have seen him twice, and I took him to be a traveling salesman-as he doubtless intended I should. You can see how it was designed to work out. With a sufficient amount of discouragement it was reasonable to assume that the prison bird would finally yield to the inevitable; become a criminal in fact and get himself locked up again out of harm's way."

"You think that was the motive?"

"I am as certain of it as I should be if I could read the minds of those two old plotters in my home town. You see, I've summered and wintered them. The only thing I can't understand is why I have been so blind; why I didn't assume all this long ago and act accordingly."

"But why, why should they be so utterly lost to every sense of right and justice; to all the promptings of common humanity? It's hideously incredible!"

"I have given you two reasons, and you may take your choice. It is either the fear of death-the fear of the vengeance of a man whose life they have ruined, or else the transaction in which they involved me, and in which they made me their scapegoat, was more far-reaching than I, or anybody in Glendale, supposed it was."

Whitley sat for a full minute staring absently into the fire. Then he said, very gently: "Now that you know the truth, what will you do?"

"I know well enough what I ought to do. We may pass over the fellow at the Hamilton House; he is only a poor tool in the hands of the master workmen. I bear him no malice of the blood-letting sort. But really, Whitley, I ought to go back to Glendale and rid the earth of those two old villains who have earned their blotting-out."

Again there was a pause, and then: "Well, why don't you do it?"

I laughed rather bitterly.

"Because all the fight has been taken out of me, Whitley. That is the reason and the only reason."

His smile was beatific. "No, it isn't," he denied. "You know you couldn't do it; you couldn't bring yourself to do it. Maybe, in the heat of passion ... but to go deliberately: no, Weyburn; if you think you could do such a thing as that, I can tell you that I know you better than you know yourself."

"I merely said that that was what I ought to do. I know well enough that I shan't do it, but the reason is far beneath that which you are good enough to hint at. I'm a broken man, Whitley; what I have gone through in the past few months has smashed my nerve. You can't understand that-I don't expect you to. But if I should meet those two old men when I leave this house, I should probably run away from them and try to hide."

"But what will you do?" he queried.

"What can I do, more than I've been doing?"

Again a silence intervened.

"I wish I knew how to advise you," Whitley said at length. "If there were only some way in which you might shake off this wretched hired spy!"

"I can't. If I dodge him, he has only to wait until I report myself again to the prison authorities. The one thing I can do is to relieve you of my threatening presence, and I'll do that now-to-night, while the going is good."

He was at the end of his resources, as I knew he must be, and he made no objections. But at train-time he got up and put on his overcoat to accompany me as far as the station. It was a rough night outside, and I tried to dissuade him, but he wouldn't have it that way. "No," he said; "it's my privilege to speed the parting guest, if I can do no more than that," and so we breasted the spitting snow-storm which was sweeping the empty streets, tramping in silence until we reached the shelter of the train-shed.

It was after the train had whistled for the crossing below the town that Whitley asked me again what I intended doing. I answered him frankly because it was his due.

"It has come down to one of two things: day-labor, in a field where a man is merely a number on the pay-roll-or that other road which is always open to the prison-bird."

He put his hand on my shoulder. "You are not going to take the other road, Weyburn," he said gravely.

"I hope not-I hope I shan't be driven to."

"You mustn't make it conditional. I know you are not a criminal; you were not a criminal when you were convicted. You can't afford to begin to be one now."

"Neither can I afford to starve," I interposed. "Other men live by their wits, and so can I, if I'm driven to it. But I'll play fair with you, Whitley. So long as I can keep body and soul together, with a pick and shovel, or any other implement that comes to hand, I'll stick. I owe you that much, if only for the reason that you are-with the single exception of an old police chief who lives at the other edge of the State-the one really human being I've met since I shook hands with the warden."

The train was in and the conductor was waving his lantern. Whitley grasped my hand and wrung it. "Be a man, and God bless you!" he said in low tones. "And when the pinch comes again and you are tempted to the limit, just remember that there is a fellow back here in Springville who believes in you, and who will limp a little all the rest of his days if you stumble and fall and refuse to get up. Good-night and good-by!"