Whereat one may picture unacclimated loquacity gasping and silenced, with the owner of the "Chincapin" and other listed properties going on to read his letters and telegrams in peace. The process furthered itself in the sequence of well-ordered dispatch until a message, damp from the copying-press and dated at Leadville, came to the surface. It covered two of the yellow sheets in the spacious handwriting of the receiving operator, and Denby read it twice, and yet once again, before laying it aside. Whatever it was, it was not suffered to interrupt the orderly sequence of things; and Denby had read the last of the letters before he held up a summoning finger for a bell-boy. "Go and ask the clerk the name of the man who was shot, will you?" The information came in two words, and the querist gathered up his papers and sent the boy for his room key. At the stairhead he met the surgeon and stopped him to ask about the wounded man. "How are you, Doctor? What is the verdict? Is there a fighting chance for him?" "Oh, yes; much more than that. It isn't as bad as it might have been; the skull isn't fractured. But it was enough to knock him out under the circumstances. He had skipped two or three meals, he tells me, and was under a pretty tense strain of excitement." "Then he is conscious?" The physician laughed. "Very much so. He is sitting up to take my prescription,--which was a square meal. Whatever the strain was, it isn't off yet. He insists that he must mount and ride this afternoon if he has to be lashed in the saddle; has already ordered a horse, in fact. He is plucky." "Then he is able to talk business, I suppose." "Able, yes; but if you can get anything out of him, you'll do better than I could. He won't talk,--won't even tell what the row was about." "Won't he?" The man of affairs crossed the corridor and tapped on the door of Number Nineteen. There was no response, and he turned the knob and entered. The shades were drawn and there was a cleanly odor of aseptics in the air of the darkened room. The wounded man was propped among pillows on the bed, with a well-furnished tea-tray on his knees. He gave prompt evidence of his ability to talk. "Back again, are you? I told you I had nothing to say for publication, and I meant it." This wrathfully; then he discovered his mistake, but the tone of the careless apology was scarcely more conciliatory. "Oh--excuse me. I thought it was the reporter." Bartrow's correspondent found a chair and introduced himself with charitable directness. "My name is Denby. I am here because Mr. Richard Bartrow wires me to look you up." Jeffard delayed the knife and fork play long enough to say: "Denby?--oh, yes; I remember. Thank you," and there the interview bade fair to die of inanition. Jeffard went on with his dinner as one who eats to live; and Denby tilted his chair gently and studied his man as well as he might in the twilight of the drawn shades. After a time, he said:--