Fred laughed a careless rejoinder and the janitor went down the hall, brushing the marble dado with his bedraggled feather duster.

Fred Starratt closed the door softly and sat down at his desk, trying to concentrate on his mail.  He felt a sudden chill.  But he managed, after a fashion, to fix his mind upon immediate problems.  Twice during the morning he made a move toward leaving to do some soliciting, but almost at once he invented an excuse which dissuaded him.

When he went out to lunch he passed a man loitering in the hall.  A crowded elevator shot past.  Fred decided to walk down the stairs ... the man followed at a nonchalant and discreet distance.  Starratt lingered in the marble-flanked doorway...  The man crossed the street and stood on the corner.

Fred decided to lunch at Hjul’s.  During the short walk to his destination he dismissed everything from his mind except the anticipation of food.  He discovered he was very hungry and it struck him that he had forgotten to breakfast.  He had come away from the house with the idea of getting a cup of coffee in a waffle kitchen on Kearny Street and his preoccupation had routed this vague plan.  He was chuckling over his lapse when he swung into Hjul’s and took a seat near the window.  He ordered a hot roast-beef sandwich and coffee as he shared his joke with the waitress.  She brushed some crumbs from the table with a napkin, laughed, and went scampering for the order.  Fred’s eyes followed her retreat and fell sharply upon the line of men drifting in the narrow entrance.  At the tag end loomed the figure of the man who had followed him down the stairs from his office.  Fred picked up a newspaper.  The man sat down at a table in a far corner.  Over the edge of the newspaper Fred stole a furtive glance.  The man was of slippery slenderness, with a rather round, expressionless face.  His eyes were beady and shifting, and his lips thin and pale and cruel.  The waitress came tripping back with Starratt’s order.  Fred fell to.

Presently Fred finished.  He rose deliberately, taking time to brush every crumb from his lap.  At the door he reached for a whisk broom and wielded it conspicuously.  He could not have said whether bravado or contempt was moving him to such flamboyant dawdling.  Or was he merely trying to persuade himself that he had nothing to fear in any case?  He stepped out into a shower of noonday sunshine flooding through a rift in the high fog of a July morning in San Francisco.  A delicious thrill from open spaces communicated itself to him.  No, he would not go back to the office—­it was Saturday, anyway, and, besides, he felt a vague desire for freedom and the tang of wind-clean air.  He would ride out to Golden Gate Park and stroll leisurely through its length to the ocean...  He walked briskly down Montgomery Street to Market, waited a few seconds at a safety station, and finally swung on a car...  He was standing before a tiny lake at the Haight Street entrance to the Park, watching a black swan ruffling its feathers, when he felt a presence near him.  He did not lift his eyes for some moments, but when he did look up it was to see his shifty friend of the morning pretending to be amused at a group of noisy sparrows quarreling over a windfall of crumbs...  Fred Starratt moved on.