He slept badly in the earlier part of the night, but toward day he fell into a deep and dreamless slumber, and woke refreshed. It was later than usual, and he was solitary at breakfast save for the company of strangers. The corridors were well-nigh deserted when he came out with his unfolded newspaper in his hand,—he would not look at it earlier. Most of the members who sojourned at the same hotel had gone to the Capitol. The reading-rooms were quite empty, but for the presence of the sunlight in glittering white blocks upon the carpet. He had lighted a cigar and flung himself into a chair, nerving himself to read the accounts of the shooting and the comments, when suddenly one of his bondsmen came into the room with so precipitate a manner, so perturbed a face, that the trouble so cleverly manipulated assumed anew an indefinitely threatening aspect. He felt his muscles tighten, his pulses quicken as he asked hastily, “What’s up?” He could not mistake the nature of the look the man bent on him; it made him tingle from head to foot. And yet his errand was the last offices of friendship. “You’re too quick on the trigger in more ways than one, Harshaw,” he said. “Kinsard was not hit.” If Harshaw’s conscience had suffered one pang, this announcement might have weighed more with him than all that was to come. The extreme surprise told only on his nerves: his heart thumped heavily; his breath was short, his face flushed; he looked at his interlocutor with eyes that seemed lidless in their intentness. “Kinsard was not shot. He lost his balance and was stunned by the fall. They have been working with him all night long, but the doctor says he’ll pull through now.” The man faltered a little. It was hard to look into another man’s eyes and say this. “He revived once before you left. He saw you in the gaslight load his pistol with your cartridges. And then he fainted again. I thought I’d tell you. The whole town’s talking.” It was admirably managed,—Harshaw’s long, amazed stare, the slow rising from the chair, the rotund resonant laughter filling the room. It renewed his friend’s faith in him. “Lie, eh?” he asked anxiously. “Go away!” Harshaw bluffly waved him off. “I’m done with you. Coming to _Me_ with a cock-and-bull story like this,—the visions a stunned man saw between his faints!” As he took his way boldly down into the rotunda amongst the crowds of men assembled there, the effect of his presence, his manner, his bluff hilarious voice as he canvassed the story, did much to annul its credibility, in fact might have destroyed it but for the recollection of the clerk’s declaration—silently pondered—that the pistol loaned was new, had never been discharged; that the box of cartridges was unopened in his possession; that Kinsard went straight from him to the Capitol; that the shooting occurred within fifteen minutes.