So ran the prefigurings, but the event was altogether different from the forecasting, as prefigured events are prone to be. For three days Brant made shift to sink his trouble in a sea of hard work, but on the fourth he had a note from the front, saying that the chief engineer’s absence would be extended yet other days. At the same time, lacking the data contained in the field notes carried off by the colonel, he ran out of work. After that the days were empty miseries. In the first idle hour he began to brood over the peculiar hardness of his lot, as a better man might, and with the entrance of the remorseless devil of regret such poor forgetfulness as he had been able to wring out of hard work spread its wings and fled away. At the end of twenty-four hours he was fairly desperate, and on the second day of enforced idleness he wrote a long letter to Hobart: “The devil has another job for me,” he began, “and if it wasn’t for my promise to you I should take it. Things have turned out precisely as I knew they would, and you are to blame; first, for dragging me out of the pit when I wasn’t worth saving, and next, for telling me that I might come to Denver when I should have gone to the ends of the earth. By which you will understand that my sins have found me out. I don’t know that you care to hear the story, but I do know that I shall presently go mad if I don’t tell it to somebody. If it bores you, just remember what I say--that you are to blame. “Before I begin I may as well tell you that it is about a woman, so you can swear yourself peaceful before you come at the details. I met her on the train the day I came down from the Colorow district--the day of my return to civilization. Nothing came of that first meeting, save that I got a glimpse of the gulf that separates a good woman from a bad man; but later, after I had begun to look ahead a little to the things that might be, we met again--this time in her own home, and I with an introductory godfather. “That was two months ago. Up to last Wednesday everything went as merry as a marriage bell. The father liked me, the mother tolerated me, and the young woman--but let that pass. I was welcome enough, and sufficient unto the day was the good thereof. As a matter of course, I was living in a fool’s paradise, walking daily over a mine that any chance spark might explode. I knew all that, and yet I was happy till last Wednesday. That was when the mine was fired. “It came about in the most natural way, but the story is too long to write out, and I don’t mean to weary you needlessly. It is enough to say that the mother found me out. You can guess what happened. I went to the house, knowing nothing of what was in store for me. There was a little scene in which I played the heavy villain to the mother’s part of outraged virtue--and the end of it is that I am once more a pariah.