Returning to Carbonado, his shrift was but a hand’s breadth longer. On the second day, when he was but barely beginning to draw breath of respite, he was recognised as the slayer of one William Johnson, was seized, dragged into the street, and after an exceedingly trying half hour was escorted out of camp and across the range by a guard of honour with drawn weapons. Under such discouragements he promptly determined to face the ills he knew, drank deeply at the well of desperation, and, making a forced march to the nearest railway station, boarded the first train for Denver. It was a hazardous thing to do. Brant was a man of his word, and the banished one had known him to go to extremities upon slighter provocation. But, on the other hand, Denver was a considerable city, and their ways might easily lie apart in it. Moreover, if the worst should come, it was but man to man, with plenty of old scores to speed the bullet of self-defence. So reasoning, Harding stepped from the train at the Denver Union Station in the gray dawn of an October morning, Argus-eyed, and with his hand deep buried in the pocket of his ulster. The time was auspicious, and he reached a near-by lodging house without mishap. Through one long day he remained in hiding, but after dark, when the prowling instinct got the better of prudence, he ventured out. In a kennel some degrees lower in the scale descending than Draco’s he met a man of his own kidney whom he had once known in the camps, and who was but now fresh from the Aspen district and from an outpost therein known as Taggett’s Gulch. This man drank with Harding, and when his tongue was a little loosened by the liquor grew reminiscent. Did the Professor recall the killing of a man in the Gulch a year or so back--a man named Benton, or Brinton? Harding had good cause to remember it, and he went gray with fear and listened with a thuggish demon of suffocation waylaying his breath. Assuredly, everybody remembered. What of it? Nothing much, save that the brother of the murdered man was in Colorado with the avowed intention of finding and hanging the murderer, if money and an inflexible purpose might contribute to that end. That was the gist of the matter, and when Harding had pumped his informant dry, he shook the man off and went out to tramp the streets until he had fairly taken the measure of the revived danger. Summed up, it came to this: sooner or later the avenger of blood would hear of Brant, and after that the end would come swiftly and the carpenters might safely begin to build the gallows for the slayer of Henry Brinton. Harding had a vivid and disquieting picture of the swift sequence of events. The brother would find Brant, and the latter would speedily clear up the mystery and give the avenger the proofs. Then the detective machinery would be set in motion, and thereafter the murderer would find no lurking place secret enough to hide him.