Sweetwater’s sensitive fingers closed on the package he held.  It did not feel like papers.

“Are you going?” asked the man.

Sweetwater looked up with a smile.  “Large pay for so slight a commission,” he ventured, turning the packet over and over in his hand.

“But then you will execute it at once, and according to the instructions I have given you,” retorted the man.  “It is your trustworthiness I pay for.  Now go.”

Sweetwater turned to go.  After all it was probably all right, and five dollars easily earned is doubly five dollars.  As he reached the staircase he stumbled.  The shoes he wore did not fit him.

“Be careful, there!” shouted the woman, in a shrill, almost frightened voice, while the man stumbled back into the room in a haste which seemed wholly uncalled for.  “If you let the packet fall you will do injury to its contents.  Go softly, man, go softly!”

Yet they had said it held papers!

Troubled, yet hardly knowing what his duty was, Sweetwater hastened down the stairs, and took his way up the street.  The town hall should be easy to find; indeed, he thought he saw it in the distance.  As he went, he asked himself two questions:  Could he fail to deliver the package according to instructions, and yet earn his money?  And was there any way of so delivering it without risk to the recipient or dereliction of duty to the man who had intrusted it to him and whose money he wished to earn?  To the first question his conscience at once answered no; to the second the reply came more slowly, and before fixing his mind determinedly upon it he asked himself why he felt that this was no ordinary commission.  He could answer readily enough.  First, the pay was too large, arguing that either the packet or the placing of the packet in a certain position on Mr. Gifford’s table was of uncommon importance to this man or this woman.  Secondly, the woman, though plainly and inconspicuously clad, had the face of a more than ordinarily unscrupulous adventuress, while her companion was one of those saturnine-faced men we sometimes meet, whose first look puts us on our guard and whom, if we hope nothing from him, we instinctively shun.  Third, they did not look like inhabitants of the house and rooms in which he found them.  Nothing beyond the necessary articles of furniture was to be seen there; not a trunk, not an article of clothing, nor any of the little things that mark a woman’s presence in a spot where she expects to spend a day or even an hour.  Consequently they were transients and perhaps already in the act of flight.  Then he was being followed.  Of this he felt sure.  He had followed people himself, and something in his own sensations assured him that his movements were under surveillance.  It would, therefore, not do to show any consciousness of this, and he went on directly and as straight to his goal as his rather limited knowledge of the streets would allow.  He was determined to earn this money and to earn it without disadvantage to anyone.  And he thought he saw his way.