In a few minutes the train was off, and its living freight—­the just and the unjust, the reformed and the rescued, the happy and the anxious.  With many of the passengers, the episode of the night was already a thing of the past.  Sinclair sat by the side of his wife, to whose cheeks the color had all come back; and Sally Johnson lay in her berth, faith still, but able to give an occasional smile to Foster.  In the station on the Missouri the reporters were gathered around the happy superintendent, smoking his cigars, and filling their note-books with items.  In Denver, their brethren would gladly have done the same, but Watkins failed to gratify them.  He was a man of few words.  When the train had gone through, and a friend remarked:  “Hope they’ll get through all right, now,” he simply said:  “Yes, likely.  Two shots don’t ’most always go in the same hole.”  Then he went to the telegraph instrument.  In a few minutes, he could have told a story as wild as a Norse saga, but what he said, when Denver had responded, was only—­

“No. 17, fifty-five minutes late.”

JAUNE D’ANTIMOINE
--------------------
BY THOMAS ALLIBONE TANVIER

Thomas Allibone Janvier (born in Philadelphia in 1849) began work as a journalist in his native city in 1870.  In 1881 he went to spend several years in Colorado, and New and Old Mexico—­sojourns which left their impression upon his literary work, A well-known writer of short stories, Janvier is especially skilled in the delineation of the picturesque foreign life of New York.

JAUNE D’ANTIMOINE
BY THOMAS ALLIBONE JANVIER
[Footnote:  By permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons.  From “Color
Studies and a Mexican Campaign,” copyright, 1891.]

Down Greenwich way—­that is to say, about in the heart of the city of New York—­in a room with a glaring south light that made even the thought of painting in it send shivers all over you, Jaune d’Antimoine lived and labored in the service of Art.

By all odds, it was the very worst room in the whole building; and that was precisely the reason why Jaune d’Antimoine had chosen it, for the rent was next to nothing:  he would have preferred a room that rented for even less.  It certainly was a forlorn-looking place.  There was no furniture in it worth speaking of; it was cheerless, desolate.  A lot of studies of animals were stuck against the walls, and a couple of finished pictures—­a lioness with her cubs, and a span of stunning draught-horses—­stood in one corner, frameless.  There was good work in the studies, and the pictures really were capital—­a fact that Jaune himself recognized, and that made him feel all the more dismal because they so persistently remained unsold.  Indeed, this animal painter was having a pretty hard time of it, and as he sat there day after day in the shocking light, doing honest work and getting no return for it, he could not help growing desperately blue.