This conceit restored good humor, and the unsteady coach resumed its journey. Before darkness fully closed in the scene the most dangerous portion of the route was traversed, and thenceforward, the course sloping downward, the mules jogged on at a more lively pace, the travelers reaching Minersville by nine o’clock at night, weary, sleepy, and as one of the number truly said, “as sharp set for supper as a gang of ravenous wolves.” When they alighted, the snow still descended, and the prospect seemed good for fine sleighing on the morrow over all the level country. Entering the principal hotel, McKenna judged that his dress and presence were again a bar to his introduction to respectable society. The gracious and affable landlord—gracious and affable to all excepting the roughly clad gentleman from Ireland—was with difficulty persuaded to allow him to remain in the house. But finally he did consent, and under its proper heading for the seventeenth of November, 1873, on the hotel register, the detective inscribed the following: “_Jas. McKenna, Denver, Colorado Ter._” The hotel-keeper was on the lookout for disreputable characters, as he should be, but his humanity, added to the protests of the detective’s late traveling companions, would not consent to his turning a person out in the snow, possibly to freeze to death, even though his clothing were poor and his face, hair, beard, and general appearance the opposite of prepossessing. A five dollar note, which the stranger had changed at the bar, while paying for a hot toddy for himself and the stage passengers—not forgetting the driver—after the bill had been closely scrutinized and pronounced not counterfeit, exerted its influence in determining the matter, and prompted the innkeeper to be generous, even though there was a remote chance that his business might suffer thereby. The young man, it was decided, should have food for his stomach and a place to sleep in. The supper was spread on a barrel-head, in the cold, dreary slab kitchen, at the rear of the cook-room proper, through the wide chinks in the walls of which the keen blast whistled mournfully, and the snow-flakes stole in with a whisk and a whirl, painting delicate and curiously enameled pictures on the greasy floor. His chair was like that upon which the late James Gordon Bennett, senior, sat, when writing his leading editorials for the embryo New York _Herald_—an inverted and empty nail keg—but the food was warm and palatable, and he ate it in silence, as he well knew that grumbling would result in no good. He was, for the occasion, a wandering refugee, and must necessarily put up with such treatment as those in his condition usually receive from the world’s people. He could plainly hear the tantalizing clatter of crockery, inhale the savory odor arising from epicurean dishes, and listen to the conversation of other and more favored guests, coming from