The travelling-man brought his hand down upon his knee with such vehemence that the solitaire blazed.

“So I was right after all, and if you’re not Adriance Hilgarde you’re his double.  I thought I couldn’t be mistaken.  Seen him?  Well, I guess!  I never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played the piano score of Proserpine through to us once at the Chicago Press Club.  I used to be on the Commercial there before I began to travel for the publishing department of the concern.  So you’re Hilgarde’s brother, and here I’ve run into you at the jumping-off place.  Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn’t it?”

The travelling-man laughed and offering Everett a cigar plied him with questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk to him about.  At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at a Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.

The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o’clock, late by a matter of four hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office over time on a summer night.  When Everett alighted from the train he walked down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what direction he should take to reach a hotel.  A phaeton stood near the crossing and a woman held the reins.  She was dressed in white, and her figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was too dark to see her face.  Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the switch-engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the head-light threw a strong glare of light on his face.  The woman in the phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins.  Everett started forward and caught the horse’s head, but the animal only lifted its ears and whisked its tail in impatient surprise.  The woman sat perfectly still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to her face.  Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaeton, crying, “Katharine, dear, what is the matter?”

Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hat and passed on.  He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most impossible places, especially from women.

While he was breakfasting the next morning, the head waiter leaned over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in the parlour.  Everett finished his coffee, and went in the direction indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor.  His whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique was not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface.  He was something below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built.  His thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show grey about the ears, and his bronzed face was heavily lined.  His square brown hands were locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities, yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidence in his address.