“I am afraid it was the young fellow, after all,” he said at the summing up. “That guess fits the other guesses a little more as if it belonged. Nobody but a fool of a boy would do such a thing and get stone blind in the middle of it; and there is nobody else in the whole shooting match that Brant would go out of his way to shield. As for the clothes and the letter, they don’t count very hard. Even as big a fool as the boy would have sense enough not to wear his everyday clothes while he burgled a house.” So Jarvis concluded; and he did not change his mind when, later in the day, in another talk with Deverney, he learned that Harding’s unknown companion had always appeared in dingy “pepper-and-salt.” That was a mere coincidence, he argued; and the pattern was certainly common enough to warrant the supposition. It was in the evening of this same day that the reporter asked his chief to procure him an order to visit the prisoner, or, rather, asked if such an order could be procured. “I don’t know,” said the night editor. “It’s after hours. But we can try. What have you stumbled upon--anything new?” “Nothing much. Write me the request for an order, and I’ll tell you about it when I come back. I have an idea.” The request was written and Jarvis forthfared to the jail. His idea was but the piecing together of some irrelevant facts. He had learned from his chief that Brant had at one time taken a pistol from Harding, and from the editor’s description the weapon was a _facsimile_ of the one found on the floor of the card room after the murder. Out of this the reporter built a new theory, and an interview with Brant was needed to confirm or disprove it. CHAPTER XXXIII TE MORITURI SALUTAMUS IF it was late in the day when Jarvis left the Plainsman building armed with his chief’s request for an order to visit the prisoner in the jail, it was still later when the formalities were finally appeased and he gained access to the inner fastnesses of the city’s house of detention and to Brant’s cell. Having but now parted from Dorothy, Brant was in the seventh heaven of love’s aftermath when the cell door opened to admit the reporter; and since love breaks ground for far-reaching kindliness, the news-gatherer’s welcome was all that could be desired. “I wonder if any unlucky dog of them all ever had better friends or more of them than I have, Jarvis? The way you all stand by me would warm the cockles of a worse heart than mine ever was.” Thus the prisoner of good hope, love-tempered; and Jarvis laughed. “You don’t deserve to have any friends. May I sit on your bed? Thanks. A fellow that loses the combination on his tongue the way you have ought to be hanged on general principles. But you’ve got to talk to me, or thrash me, one of the two.” “I’ll do both, if you insist,” said Brant with cheerful levity. “Which will you have first?”