His indignation was natural enough. He took heed, too, of contingencies of which his anxious friends, accustomed to him always in the character of assailant, lost sight. “I should be helpless,” he said, “if that man should attack me. I should be incapable of self-defense.” Suddenly he caught up a light spring overcoat, threw it over his arm, and left the room. As he went down the staircase into the rotunda of the hotel, he seemed the embodiment of handsome, gay, fortunate youth. His cheek was flushed; his eyes were very brilliant. He paced up and down the floor for a moment in front of the counter, for strangers were registering their names and the clerks were busy. The fountain tossed up its spray, and the tinkling drops fell into the basin; around it plants were blooming. Somebody journeying from the South had presented the hotel with a little alligator, that splashed about in the water and was a source of diversion to the out-comers and in-goers, many of whom paused to rouse it up with their canes and punch the head of the infant saurian. Kinsard walked presently to the desk. “I want to borrow a pistol,” he said to the clerk, to whom he was well known. The official, fancying that the guest contemplated a journey or a long nocturnal drive into the country, and that the request was a matter merely of precaution, turned with alacrity, took a pistol out of a drawer, and laid it on the counter. He was looking for the cartridges, when an acquaintance of Kinsard’s demanded casually, “What do you want a gun for?” Kinsard lifted his brilliant, reckless eyes. “To shoot Bob Harshaw,” he declared. The clerk turned hastily from his search and made a motion to clutch the pistol. Kinsard’s grasp had closed upon the handle. “Man alive!” he cried angrily, “do you think I would use it except for self-defense?” He hastily thrust it into his pistol-pocket and went out into the night. It was moonless and very dark, despite the myriads of scintillating stars. The Capitol was visible only as suggested in the irradiations of its great, flaring, yellow windows and the lights without on either side of the long flight of steps. As Kinsard ascended he noticed on the broad portico a group of men, separating at the moment, three of them going within and one approaching the steps. He could not fail to recognize Harshaw’s bluff manner, his portly figure, his long, yellow beard, and his brisk, light step; and as the younger man walked along the portico, Harshaw’s eyes, glancing out sharply from under the brim of his slouch hat, identified him. There was no one by to note how they should meet; the significance of the encounter might have rejoiced the lovers of sensation. Kinsard was about to pass without salutation, but Harshaw, whirling half round on his light heel, paused, and with a bantering smile on his dimpled pink face showing in the gaslight above their heads, “Great news!” he exclaimed. “They’ve appointed a committee to investigate ‘the jedge’!”