Clearly something must be done, and that quickly. Concealment was the first necessity; James Harding must disappear at once and effectually. That preliminary safely got over, two sharp corners remained to be turned at whatever cost. The incriminating evidence now in Brant’s hands must be secured and destroyed, and Brant himself must be silenced before the avenger of blood should find and question him. The disguise was a simple matter. At one time in his somewhat checkered career Harding had been a supernumerary in a Leadville variety theatre. Hence, the smooth-shaven, well-dressed man who paid his bill at the Blake Street lodging house at ten o’clock that night bore small likeness to the bearded and rather rustic-looking person who engaged a room a few minutes later at a German _Gasthaus_ in West Denver. The metamorphosis wrought out in artistic detail, Harding put it at once to the severest test. Going out again, he sought and found the man from Taggett’s Gulch, and was unrecognised. Introducing himself as a farmer from Iowa, he persuaded the man to pilot him through the mazes of the Denver underworld, and when he had met and talked with a dozen others who knew the Professor rather better than he knew himself, he went back to the West Side _Gasthaus_ with a comforting abatement of the symptoms of strangulation. Having thus purchased temporary safety, the castaway began presently to look about him for the means to the more important end. Night after night he haunted the purlieus, hoping that a lucky chance might reveal Brant’s whereabouts. But inasmuch as Brant was yet walking straitly, nothing came of this, and in his new character Harding could not consistently ask questions. Twice he met William Langford face to face, and, knowing that the boy could probably give him Brant’s street and number, he was about to risk an interview with his _protégé_ in his proper person when the god of evil-doers gave him a tool exactly fitted to his hand. It was on the Sunday evening of Brant’s relapse. Harding had been making his usual round, and at Draco’s he met a man whose face he recognised despite its gauntness and the change wrought by the razor. A drink or two broke the ice of unfamiliarity, and then Harding led the way to a card room in the rear on the pretext of seeking a quiet place where they might drink more to their better acquaintance. In the place of withdrawal Harding kept up the fiction of bucolic simplicity only while the waiter was bringing a bottle and glasses. Then he said: “I reckon you’d be willing to swear you had never seen me before, wouldn’t you, Gasset?” The big man gone thin was in the act of pouring himself another drink, but he put the bottle down and gave evidence of a guilty conscience by starting from his chair, ready for flight or fight as the occasion might require. “Who the blazes are you, anyway?” he demanded, measuring the distance to the door in a swift glance aside.