Branded

ownwa

et to the farthest corner of the State, when I suddenly remembered that I was running away with an additional handicap to be added to all the others. Leaving

learly to any one who might ask. I had a job, and I must be able to give my reason for quitting it. With this new entanglement to put leaden shoes on my feet, I retraced my steps through the

told him I wished to have a talk with him. Without a word he grabbed me by the arm and dra

en the door was shut. "If my work has been satisfacto

pipe, and he stopped to refill an

or an Irishman he was always e

the climate doesn't

" he shot back; and

letter of re

ver gi

r. Mullins, you are going to make

you, we

not f

ord. You're fixing to go back t

new that he did. But that is neither here nor there; I want my letter, and I

o you?-if I tell you to g

s-all of them, mind you--and write a lett

ld have killed me. There was manslaughter in his littl

price," he rasped; and then went to the district manager's desk and wro

out of the yard it occurred to me that I had still left a loaded weapon in Mullins's hands. Though the threat of exposure might tie him and his grafting coal company up,

the hold I had acquired upon the coal company. The office was empty when I reached it, and at first I thought Mullins had gone out. But at a second glance I

him here; he might talk too loud and get somebody to believe him-some fool in a Federal grand jury, for instance. Let him go-with a

lessly and ran for the railroad station. If I should be lucky enough to find a train ready to leave, I might yet

cket office. As the passengers for the expected train straggled in I sought vainly to identify the spy who was undoubtedly among them; and when the train thundered up to the platform I made haste to board it and to lose myself qui

n should be ascertained? One by one the suspicious circumstances remarshaled themselves; the feeling that I had been spied upon, the speedy publicity which my story had attained in the town where I had made my earliest attempt at wage-earning

d a frugal sandwich and a cup of coffee, hastening afterward to the station ticket office to buy a ticket to a town well over toward the western boundary of my prison State, and chosen haphazard from its location on the wall-map beside the ticket window. A little late

onnected from my vis-à-vis across the aisle when the salesman gathered his belongings and disappeared; left the train-as I made sure by looking out of the window and seeing him cross the station

ing meanwhile, if one of the consequences of my hideously disarranged life was

ted on the evening of my arrival, was of a type exactly opposite to the grafting brute from whose jurisdiction I had fled; a promoted town-marshal, like John Run

't any part of my job to bruise the broken reed n'r quench the smokin' flax. You don't look like a thief, and, anyways, if you're tryin' to make an honest livin', that settles all the old

My experience had all been in office work, and since business was good in the small city, I had little difficulty in finding employment. Yet in each case-and there were five of them, one after another-I secured work only to lose it a

ing his head. "There's something sort o' queer about this pull-down of yours, Weyburn," he commented. "I

a s

a heap o' times. Have you tried cha

o good. It seems

d somebody houndin' you out o' sheer spite. Is

open my eyes. Truly, Abel Geddis and Abner Withers had used me ruthlessly as their criminal stop-gap, but since I had paid the penalty and still bore

old men I have named. And now that it is all over, I can see tha

hought; and then: "You're goin'

haired old angel, who seemed so vastly out of place as the head of

evenin'. I'll have my buggy ready and we'll drive over to Altamont, so you can take the train there instead

the disappearance was planned, so it was carried out. In the dusk of the evening the good old man drove me the ten miles ac