The process was a long one, and it was eked out by many more tiltings of the bottle. When it was wrought out to its conclusion the bottle was empty, but the man was not. Some glimmerings of sanity remained, but they pointed only to his bafflement, and not to the necessity for escape. When he staggered to his feet it was to determine what spoil, lacking the papers, would best repay his hazard. So he fell to rummaging again, and after much dubitation decided to carry off the easy-chair as the thing most greatly to be desired. Failing to get the chair through the opened window, he compromised upon a suit of clothes; and after trying vainly to roll them into a portable bundle, he cut that Gordian knot by struggling out of his own garments, kicking them into the depths of the closet, and arraying himself in the suit of black. That done--it took so long that the china clock on the mantel was tinkling out the midnight hour--he put the big revolver in his pocket and sat down on the edge of the bed to gather himself for the passage perilous over the crackling tin roof of the veranda and down the ladder. But in the midst of the gathering the foolishness of those who tarry long at the wine came upon him, and the bed transformed itself into his bunk in the West Denver _Gasthaus_. That being the case, there was no occasion for further efforts, perilous or other. He tried to remember how he had got out of the house of peril; how it was that he came to be sitting on the edge of his bunk in safety; but in the thick of it sleep laid its heavy hand on him, and when the china clock on the mantel chimed the quarter past twelve the man who had tarried too long was snoring brazenly with his head on Brant’s pillow. CHAPTER XXIV “WHOSO DIGGETH A PIT SHALL FALL THEREIN” IT was between two and three o’clock in the morning before Brant would consent, at Antrim’s solicitation, to give over, or at least to postpone, the search for William Langford. The midnight wanderings in the realm of Abaddon were a wholesome corrective for the chief clerk, whose late aberration lay heavy on his self-respect; but, as he himself phrased it to Brant, he knew when he had enough. One of the results of this glimpse into the deeper depths of the pit he had so narrowly escaped was a fresh stirring of the pool of gratitude, and at the home-going he sought to put his debt to Brant into fitting terms of speech. But Brant cut him off with curt brutality: “Let up on that. You don’t owe me anything.” “Yes, I do,” insisted the grateful one. “I say you don’t. But if you choose to think so, you can even things up by doing your part when we find this addle-brained boy.” “Oh, I’d do that anyway, and without charging it to your account. He is Isabel’s brother.”