“If you don’t, you are a greater donkey than I thought you were.” “Well, let that pass. But if another man hasn’t the inside track, art has.” “Oh, art be hanged! Once in a thousand years or so you may find a girl who is an artist first and a woman afterward, but you haven’t run up against the exception. If you will bear with me, I’ll dare say that Isabel is the merest _dilettante_; she can’t paint a little bit.” “She can’t, eh? That is all you know about it!” Antrim retorted hotly. “What the dickens do you know about art, anyway?” Brant chuckled joyously. “Nothing, my son--less than nothing. I did but skewer you to see if you were really jealous of Miss Isabel’s poor little passion. Go in and win, Harry, my boy; and may your house be decorated in many colours, as it is pretty sure to be.” In such heartening manner began a day fraught with many happenings. Brant completed the map in good time for the purposes of the general manager, and it was scarcely off the drawing-board when Colonel Bowran returned, summoned by wire to meet the other officials of the railway company. And since the colonel brought the Grotter notebook with plentiful data for more map work, the chance of enforced idleness, which Brant dreaded more than anything else, was pushed forward into an indefinite future. Moreover, the chief was well pleased with the work done on the yard map, and was gratified to be assured that he had at last found an office man who could go ahead on his own responsibility. So there was hearty approval and commendation for the draughtsman; and what with this, and the blessings which belong rightfully to those of the helping hand, Brant won through the day on the crest of the wave. But the purely personal point of view, pitched as it may be upon any hilltop of present satisfaction, is necessarily restricted; and beyond the ken of the satisfied one other things were happening which were to bear heavily upon his future. For one, the train speeding down the cañon on the day run from the region of mining camps was bringing Hobart and his wife to Denver. For another, Antrim’s purposed visit to Hollywood was postponed by order of the general manager. The party in the private car Aberystwyth was to go out on a tour of inspection, and, in the absence of his superior, Antrim was required to do the honours of the Western Division. Again, late in the afternoon Mrs. Langford wrote a letter which she put into the post office with her own hands. This was the third happening, and the fourth was still more portentous. At the moment when Mrs. Langford was mailing her letter, two men met behind a locked door in a West Denver lodging house to lay the train of a mine in which the explosives were already stored. In this conference behind the locked door there was a slight disagreement arising in a very natural reluctance on the part of one of the plotters to play the cat’s-paw for the other.