“All I ask,” he said, “is why you hounded my gang, if you wasn’t after me?”

“I didn’t hound them.  I ran into Suds by accident.  We had trouble.  Then Levine.  Then Kennebec Lou tried to take a fall out of me.”

A note of whimsical protest crept into the voice of Donnegan.

“Somehow there’s always a fight wherever I go,” he said.  “Fights just sort of grow up around me.”

Lefty Joe snarled.

“You didn’t mean nothing by just ‘happening’ to run into three of my boys one after another?”

“Not a thing.”

Lefty rocked himself back and forth in an ecstasy of impatience.

“Why don’t you stay put?” he complained.  “Why don’t you stake out your own ground and stay put in it?  You cut in on every guy’s territory.  There ain’t any privacy any more since you hit the road.  What you got?  A roving commission?”

Donnegan waited for a moment before he answered.  And when he spoke his voice had altered.  Indeed, he had remarkable ability to pitch his voice into the roar of the freight train, and above or beneath it, and give it a quality such as he pleased.

“I’m following a trail, but not yours,” he admitted at length.  “I’m following a trail.  I’ve been at it these two years and nothing has come of it.”

“Who you after?”

“A man with red hair.”

“That tells me a lot.”

Donnegan refused to explain.

“What you got against him—­the color of his hair?”

And Lefty roared contentedly at his own stale jest.

“It’s no good,” replied Donnegan.  “I’ll never get on the trail.”

Lefty broke in:  “You mean to say you’ve been working two solid years and all on a trail that you ain’t even found?”

The silence answered him in the affirmative.

“Ain’t nobody been able to tip you off to him?” went on Lefty, intensely interested.

“Nobody.  You see, he’s a hard sort to describe.  Red hair, that’s all there was about him for a clue.  But if any one ever saw him stripped they’d remember him by a big blotchy birthmark on his left shoulder.”

“Eh?” grunted Lefty Joe.

He added:  “What was his name?”

“Don’t know.  He changed monikers when he took to the road.”

“What was he to you?”

“A man I’m going to find.”

“No matter where the trail takes you?”

“No matter where.”

At this Lefty was seized with unaccountable laughter.  He literally strained his lungs with that Homeric outburst.  When he wiped the tears from his eyes, at length, the shadow on the opposite side of the doorway had disappeared.  He found his companion leaning over him, and this time he could catch the dull glint of starlight on both hair and eyes.

“What d’you know?” asked Donnegan.

“How do you stand toward this bird with the birthmark and the red hair?” queried Lefty with caution.