IT is not always given to prescience, friendly or other, to reap where it has sown; or to the worthiest intention to see of the travail of its soul and be satisfied. But if the time, place, and manner of Brant’s sequestration had been foreordained from the beginning, the conditions could scarcely have been more favourable for bulwark building between an evil past and some hopeful future of better promise. The new mining district to which Hobart’s suggestion sent him was a sky-land wilderness unpeopled as yet, save by a few pioneer prospectors; his fellow-measurer of mining claims was a zealot of his profession, who was well content to take his friend’s friend at his friend’s valuation, asking no questions; and the work itself was such a fierce struggle with Nature in her ruggedest aspect as to afford a very opiate of antidotes to reflection, reminiscent or forecasting. So it came about that the heart-hardening past with its remorseful reminders withdrew more and more into the dimnesses of willing forgetfulness, and the bulwark between that which had been and that which might be grew with the uncalendared days and nights till it bade fair in time to shut out some of the remorseful vistas. The claim-measuring came to an end one flawless day in August, when the aspens were yellow on the high-pitched slopes and the streams ran low and summer clear in the gulches. Brant helped in the preparations for the retreat from the sky land of forgetfulness with a distinct sense of regret, which grew with every added mile of the day-long tramp toward Aspen, the railway, and civilization, until it became no less than a foreboding. Davenport, well satisfied with an assistant whose capacity for hard work was commensurate with his apparent love for it, had made him a proposal pointing to a partnership survey in a still more remote field, but Brant had refused. He knew well enough that his battle of reinstatement was yet to be fought, and that it must be fought in the field of the wider world. And toward that field he set his face, though not without misgivings--the misgivings of one who, having given no quarter, need expect none. “So you have made up your mind to go to Denver, have you?” said Davenport, when they were smoking the pipe of leave-taking in the lobby of the Aspen hotel. “Yes. I have made arrangements to go down on the night train.” Davenport looked at his watch. “It is about time you were moving,” he said. “I’ll walk over to the station with you if you don’t mind.” Brant did not mind. On the contrary, he was rather sorry to part from the man who had been the first to help raise the bulwark of forgetfulness. But their walk to the station was wordless, as much of their companionship had been.