A tall man with shrewd blue eyes twinkling behind goldrimmed glasses came out and stood in the pleasant warmth of the sun.  He had a lot of mail under his arm and a San Francisco paper spread before him.  Jack slanted a glance or two toward the paper, and at the second glance he gulped.

“Los Angeles Auto Bandits Trailed” stared out at him accusingly like a pointed finger.  Underneath, in smaller type, that was black as the meaning that it bore for him, were the words:  “Sensational Developments Expected.”

Jack did not dare look again, lest he betray to the shrewd eyes behind the glasses a guilty interest in the article.  He took his cigarette from his mouth and moistened his lips, and tried to hide the trembling of his fingers by flicking off the ash.  As soon as he dared he walked on down the street, and straightway found that he was walking himself out of town altogether.  He turned his head and looked back, saw the tall man glancing after him, and went on briskly, with some effort holding himself back from running like a fool.  He felt that he had blundered in coming down this way, where there was nothing but a blacksmith shop and a few small cottages set in trim lawns.  The tall man would know that he had no business down here, and he would wonder who he was and what he was after.  And once that tall man began to wonder....

“Auto Bandits Trailed!” seemed to Jack to be painted on his back.  That headline must mean him, because he did not believe that any of the others would think to get out of town before daylight as he had done.  Probably that article had Jack’s description in it.

He no longer felt that he had lost himself; instead, he felt trapped by the very mountains that five minutes ago had seemed so like a sheltering wall between him and his world.  He wanted to get into the deepest forest that clothed their sides; he wanted to hide in some remote canyon.

He turned his head again and looked back.  A man was coming behind him down the pathway which served as a pavement.  He thought it was the tall man who had been reading about him in the paper, and again panic seized him—­only now he had but his two feet to carry him away into safety, instead of his mother’s big new car.  He glanced at the houses like a harried animal seeking desperately for some hole to crawl into, and he saw that the little, square cottage that he had judged to be a dwelling, was in reality a United States Forest Service headquarters.  He had only the haziest idea of what that meant, but at least it was a public office, and it had a door which he could close between himself and the man that followed.

He hurried up the walk laid across the neat little grass plot, sent a humbly grateful glance up to the stars-and-stripes that fluttered lazily from the short flagstaff, and went in as though he had business there, and as though that business was urgent.