As prefigured, they drove by way of the Union Depot and stopped to pick up Hobart. The train was not yet in, and Antrim had time to run up to the telegraph office. When he came down he was scowling and cursing his luck. Whereupon the judge came out of his preoccupation enough to ask what had happened. “Oh, it’s that despatcher at Voltamo again; he is always getting sick at the wrong time. I’ve got to drop everything and ‘sub’ for him, and I suppose I shall have to go up on Seventeen. That lets me out of the conference, but I don’t know that I could do any good if I stayed. It isn’t going to make any difference. It’s all up with poor Brant.” The judge shook his head. “I must confess I don’t see any light; but since Dorothy has told me--” He broke off abruptly. “Do you know what she believes, Harry?” Antrim nodded. “I--I more than half believe it myself, now,” the judge admitted, and his voice had in it a tremulous quaver which was not of age. “It is the height of incredibility; it is more like a chapter out of some old romance of the dead-and-gone age of chivalry, but--but----” “I have believed it all along,” said Antrim. “I know; I know you have. As you say, I don’t see how we are to accomplish anything by talking it over again to-night, but this I have determined: when we have sifted it down to the last grain of evidence, I shall go to the Governor and get him reprieved, if one man may, with God’s help, move another to do a little deed of mercy.” “God bless you!” said Antrim fervently; and then: “After it’s all over I wish you would drive by and give the facts to the train despatcher upstairs--Disbrow, you know. He’ll wire them to me on Seventeen and I sha’n’t sleep much till I hear.” The judge promised, and a moment later caught sight of Hobart in the stream of outcoming passengers from the delayed train. There was no time sacrificed to the formalities, and when the assayer had shaken hands with an old friend and a new one, the judge passed quickly to the matter in hand. “You are barely in time, Ned; we had despaired of reaching you. Leave your valise at the check stand and come uptown with me. I can explain what we hope to do as we go.” As he promised, so he performed; and by the time they reached the editor’s room at the top of the Plainsman building, Hobart knew all that the judge could tell him. Forsyth welcomed the newcomer heartily, and then Jarvis was introduced. “Here is a young man whom I have been misjudging from the first,” said the night editor, by way of preface to what the reporter had to tell. “While we have been content to accept one theory, following it blindly to its present desperate conclusion, he has built up and torn down half a dozen, with the result that he is ready to-night to open a most astounding budget of discoveries.--Jarvis, do you begin at the beginning and go over the ground carefully, remembering that Mr. Hobart knows none of the details.”