Walker leaned over, rested his elbows on the arms of his chair,
and linked his fingers together.

"That gave me a new flash on the creature. He was a slicker
article than I imagined. I was not to get off with a tip. He
was taking some pains to touch me for a greenback. I thought I
saw his line. It would not account for his hitting the
description of Mulehaus in the make-up of his straw-man, but it
would furnish the data for the dollar story. I had drawn the
latter a little before he was ready. It belonged in what he
planned to give me at two o'clock. But I thought I saw what the
creature was about. And I was right."

Walker put out his hand and moved the pages of his memoir on the
table. Then he went on:

"I was smoking a cigar on a bench at the entrance to Heinz's Pier
when the hobo shuffled up. He came down one of the streets from
Pacific Avenue, and the direction confirmed me in my theory. It
also confirmed me in the opinion that I was all kinds of a fool
to let this dirty hobo get a further chance at me.

"I was not in a very good humor. Everything I had set going
after Mulehaus was marking time. The only report was progress in
linking things up; not only along the Canadian and Mexican
borders and the customhouses, but we had also done a further
unusual thing, we had an agent on every ship going out of America
to follow through to the foreign port and look out for anything
picked up on the way.