“Why, it was this: George came up and asked me about those two fellows, and which room they were in, and I told him. Then I saw him go swinging up the middle of the big room with that get-out-of-my-road gait of his as plain as I see you now. Well, about two minutes afterward I got up to go and close a window in the far end of the hall, and when I got back to my chair at the door there he was yet, still going up the room the same as I’d seen him before. Blame me, if I didn’t think I’d got ’em again, for a minute!” “You are sure it was Brant?” said Jarvis, hungering and thirsting for the negative answer which he did not dare to so much as suggest. “Sure enough,” said the doorkeeper briefly. “At first I wasn’t so cocksure; it seemed like he’d gone thinner just in that minute or two, so that his clothes didn’t fit him so well; and he wasn’t swinging along any more--he was going cautiouslike, as if he were listening for something that he couldn’t hear. But of course it was George. It couldn’t have been anybody else, or I’d have seen him come up the stairs. See?” If the man craved buttressing in his own belief it was not denied him. “Of course, it couldn’t have been any one else,” Jarvis agreed. “Most likely George came back to ask you something, didn’t find you at the door, and went on again. Well, I must get a move. Good night.” Thus Jarvis, with every word of the nonchalant reply carefully weighted down with disinterest. But when he had left the latter-day Egyptian on the corner, repressed excitement found speech commensurate with the importance of the new miracle. “Holy Smoke! and yet they say there isn’t any such thing as a miracle nowadays! Why, good Lord! here there have been two of them within an hour--within fifteen minutes--and they go together like the foot and the shoe! Yes, it was Brant--like fits! It was his double in the stolen suit of black clothes--that’s what Binkie saw! And he has been keeping it dark because he was afraid of losing his job if he admitted that some one might have made a sneak on him.” This time Jarvis went straight to the editorial rooms of the Plainsman, and, finding them untenanted, sat down to wait with what patience he could muster for the others to come in. The interval was not ill spent. Before the reporter’s reverie was interrupted he had cleared up more of the mysteries--so many of them, indeed, that only one of any magnitude remained to baffle him. But that one was impregnable. If the unknown one were the murderer--and with this Jarvis had closed as with a fact assured--why had the man shot his late confederate? In the meantime Antrim had killed his hour, and had driven once more to Altamont Terrace. He found the judge ready to accompany him, and from the elder man’s grave preoccupation he argued that something of moment had occurred in the interval of slain time.