There was no fire in my room, and it was cold; so there was no place to sit except in the barroom, which I found deserted but for one man, when I went back and sat down to think over my future.  Should I go back to the canal?  I hated to do this, though all my acquaintances were there, and the work was of the sort I had learned to do best; besides, here I was in the West, and all the opportunities of the West were before me, though it looked cold and dreary just now, and no great chances seemed lying about for a boy like me.  I was perplexed.  I had lost my desire for revenge on Rucker; and just then I felt no ambition, and saw no light.  I was ready, I suppose, to begin a life of drifting; this time with no aim, not even a remote one—­for my one object in life had vanished.  But something in the way of guidance always has come to me at such times; and it came now.  The one man who was in the bar when I came in got up, and moving over by me, sat down in a chair by my side.

“Cold day,” said he.

I agreed, and looked him over carefully.  He was a tall man who wore a long black Prince Albert coat which came down below his knees, a broad felt hat, and no overcoat.  He looked cold, and rather shabby; but he talked with a good deal of style, and used many big words.

“Stranger here?” he asked.

I admitted that I was.

“May I offer,” said he, “the hospitalities of the city in the form of a hot whisky toddy?”

I thanked him and asked to be excused.

“Your name,” he ventured, after clearing his throat, “is Vandemark.”

Then I looked at him still more sharply.  How did he know my name?

“I have been looking for you,” said he, “for some months—­some months; and I was so fortunate as to observe the fact when you made a call last evening on our fellow-citizen, Doctor Rucker.  I was—­ahem—­consulted professionally by the late lamented Mrs. Rucker—­I am a lawyer, sir—­before her death, for the purpose of securing my services in looking after the interests of her son, Mr. Jacob H. Vandemark.”

“Jacob T. Vandemark,” said I.

“Why, damn me,” said he, looking again at his book, “it is a ‘T.’  Lawyer’s writing, Jacob, lawyer’s writing—­notoriously bad, you know.”

I sat thinking about the expression, “the interests of Jacob T. Vandemark,” for a long time; but the truth did not dawn an me, my mind working slowly as usual.

“What interests?” I asked finally.

“The interest,” said he, “of her only child in the estate of Mrs. Rucker.”

Then there recurred to my mind the words in my mother’s last letter; that the money had been paid on the settlement of my father’s estate, and that she and Rucker were coming out West to make a new start in life.  I had never given it a moment’s thought before, and should have gone away without asking anybody a single question about it, if this scaly pettifogger, as I now know him to have been, had not sidled up to me.