A Private Chivalry

IT is conceivable that Henry Antrim clicked his "O. K. " at the close of the wire talk with Despatcher Disbrow with a lighter heart than he had carried for many a day. Truly, everything still hinged upon the capture of Gasset, but the blessed optimism of youth is always ready to make light of contingencies, and the chief clerk threw himself upon the night operator's bunk to snatch a few hours' rest, little thinking that the conclusion of the whole matter still hung in a balance whose beam would tip as his own energy and presence of mind might decide. And while he slept, the net spread so promptly by the whispering wires was already entangling the murderer.

With the criminal's instinctive distrust of small towns to narrow his choice of a refuge, Gasset had put his fate into the keeping of chance by spinning a coin: heads, to lose himself in the untabulated crowds thronging the streets and byways of Leadville; tails, to drop from the train at some lonely station in the mountains, whence he could make his way on foot to one of the more isolated camps. The chance of the spun coin sent him to Leadville; and when, on the second morning of his sojourn in the carbonate camp, he learned from the newspapers that his bad aim had disposed of an inconvenient accomplice without materially marring his plan of vengeance on Brant, he exulted openly, and from that on went his way without concealment, believing that he had safely outrun his evil hour.