if you will see him just for a few minutes it will be a
great favor to me. I feel confident, Dan, that he can be of service to
you--to the public at least--will you see him?"

The jailor had been extremely kind to the engineer and when he put the
matter as a personal request, Moran assented at once and Mr. Scouping
was ushered in. He was a striking figure with a face that was rather
remarkable.

"Now, what are you thinking about?" asked the visitor, as Moran held his
hand and looked him full in the face.

"Oh!" said the prisoner, motioning the reporter to a chair which the
jailor had just brought in, "I was thinking what a waste of physical
strength it was for you to spend your time pushing a pencil over a sheet
of paper."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure. What were you thinking about?"

"The trial of the robbers who held up the Denver Limited at Thorough-cut
some eight or ten years ago. You look like the man who gave one of them
a black eye, and knocked him from the engine, branding him so that the
detectives could catch him."

Moran smiled. He had been thinking on precisely the same subject, but,
being modest, he did not care to open a discussion of a story of which
he was the long-forgotten hero. "It strikes me," said Moran, "as rather
extraordinary that we should both recall the scene at the same time."

"Not at all," said the reporter. "The very fact that one of us thought
of it at the moment when our hands and eyes met would cause the other to
remember."

"Perhaps you reported the case for your paper, that we saw each other
from day to day during the long trial, and that I remembered your face
faintly, as you remembered mine. Wouldn't that be a better explanation?"

"No," said the journalist cheerfully. "I must decline to yield to your
argument, and stick to my decision. What I want to talk to you about,
Mr. Moran, is not your own case, save as it may please you, but about
the mysterious death of Engineer Cowels."

"I know less about that, perhaps, than any man living," said Moran
frankly.

"But you know the fireman's story?"

"No."

"Well, he claims that they were running at a maddening rate of speed,
that he and the engineer had quarrelled as to their relative positions
in the estimation of the public in general, the strikers in particular.
Cowels threw a hammer at the fireman, whereupon Guerin, as he claims,
caught the man by the left arm and by the back of the neck and shoved
his head out of t