There was an easy answer to the query, and if Brant had guessed it he would have been careful to choose the well-lighted streets on the way up town. If he had chanced to remember that a thick curling beard, unkempt and grizzled, would mask the cruel mouth and ugly jaw, he would have recognised the face though it chanced that he had seen it but once, and then in a moment of fierce excitement. And if he had reflected further that a beard may be donned as well as doffed, and that the wig-maker’s art still flourishes, he would have realized that out of a very considerable collection of enemies made in the day of wrath none were more vindictive or desperate than the two who kept him in sight as he made his way back to Mrs. Seeley’s. They closed upon him, or made as if they would, when he reached the gate, and he fingered his pistol and waited. The few hours which overlaid his late meeting with Dorothy had gone far toward undoing the good work of the preceding months of right living. While he waited, the man-quelling fiend came and sat in the seat of reason, and it was Plucky George of the mining camps rather than Colonel Bowran’s draughtsman who stood at Mrs. Seeley’s gate and fingered the lock of the ready weapon. As if they had some premonition of what was lying in wait for them, the two men veered suddenly and crossed the street. Had Brant known who they were and why they had followed him, it is conceivable that their shadows would never have darkened the opposite sidewalk. As it was, he opened the gate and went in with a sneer at their lack of courage in the last resort. “Two to one, and follow a man a mile at midnight without coming to the scratch,” he scoffed. “I have a good mind to go over and call their bluff alone. It would serve them right to turn the tables on them, and I’d do it if I thought they had anything worth the trouble of holding them up.” CHAPTER XV WHEN HATE AND FEAR STRIKE HANDS WHEN he was suffered to escape after his attempt upon Brant’s life in the private room at Elitch’s, James Harding tarried in Denver only so long as the leaving time of the first westward bound train constrained him. Nevertheless, he went as one driven, and with black rage in his heart, adding yet another tally to the score of his account against the man who had banished him. But, like Noah’s dove, he was destined to find no rest for the sole of his foot. Having very painstakingly worn out his welcome in the larger mining camps, he was minded to go to Silverette, hoping to pick a living out of the frequenters of Gaynard’s. Unluckily, he was known also in Silverette; and unluckily again, word of his coming preceded him from Carbonado, the railway station nearest to the isolated camp at the foot of Jack Mountain. Harding walked up from Carbonado, was met at a sharp turn in the wagon road by a committee from the camp above, and was persuaded by arguments in which levelled rifles played a silent but convincing part to retrace his steps.