“I haven’t quite persuaded Broadway that I am another Sardou. In fact the only creation of mine that ever saw the footlights is a melodrama, founded on our adventures that evening in Frisco. And I sold that for fifty dollars to a western syndicate. I have never heard from it since. I need hardly say it does not satisfy my aspirations.” “So you went back to reporting?” “Of a kind,” the young man replied with a sudden attempt to become important. “I am on the staff of _Bunker’s Magazine_.” “And they sent you here to interview me!” Brainard laughed again. “_Bunker’s_ thought that the public would be interested in your rapid rise into the limelight, and as I had some experience in the great West they sent me to extract from you the crude ore of a personal document article,” Farson explained with engaging impudence, glancing appreciatively at his subject. The interview happened to take place in the parlor of a suite in the same large hotel on Fifth Avenue from which almost exactly four years before Brainard had slunk away with the manuscript of his rejected play in his pocket, and had thence wended his way disconsolately homeward to meet the fate that whirled him on during four years of exciting adventure. Numerous trunks and other impedimenta cluttered the room, indicating that the miner, who in the words of Farson “had succeeded in climbing into the limelight” had but just arrived from Arizona and did not yet know that he needed a man servant. Through the open windows came the roar of the traffic on the avenue, so long unfamiliar to the miner’s ears. He rose from the table, where over a bottle of wine he had been telling the magazine man something about the wonderful Melody mine, and gazed out of the window into the seething stream of humanity below. This unexpected meeting with the reporter of the _Despatch_ who had helped him in his first exploit with Krutzmacht’s fortune had brought to his memory sharply the great contrast between his last appearance in New York and the present. His face, now adorned by a mustache and a short brown beard, which the hotel barber had not yet had an opportunity to trim to an artistic point, was reddened and roughened by exposure to the fierce Arizona sun. His hands were large and coarse, as if they had handled every instrument but the pen. His whole person had filled out solidly, and he walked with the awkward gait of one accustomed to the saddle rather than the motor car. But what occupied his mind at this moment was the curious consciousness of that other self, so vastly different, so inconceivably discouraged and weak, whom he could see down below on the pavement, dragging his thin body through the April mist. Whole worlds separated the two! . . . The magazine man disturbed his revery by a question. “You went out there after copper in the first place, didn’t you?”