ls, both feeling
that the train was steaming ahead very fast. Fred's mind was a confusion
of images and ideas. Only two things were clear to him: the force of her
determination, and the belief that, handicapped as he was, he could do
better by her than another man would do. He knew he would always
remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile,
enough to turn the future into summer.

PART V. DR. ARCHIE'S VENTURE

I

DR. HOWARD ARCHIE had come down to Denver for a meeting of the
stockholders in the San Felipe silver mine. It was not absolutely
necessary for him to come, but he had no very pressing cases at home.
Winter was closing down in Moonstone, and he dreaded the dullness of it.
On the 10th day of January, therefore, he was registered at the Brown
Palace Hotel. On the morning of the 11th he came down to breakfast to
find the streets white and the air thick with snow. A wild northwester
was blowing down from the mountains, one of those beautiful storms that
wrap Denver in dry, furry snow, and make the city a loadstone to
thousands of men in the mountains and on the plains. The brakemen out on
their box-cars, the miners up in their diggings, the lonely homesteaders
in the sand hills of Yucca and Kit Carson Counties, begin to think of
Denver, muffled in snow, full of food and drink and good cheer, and to
yearn for her with that admiration which makes her, more than other
American cities, an object of sentiment.

Howard Archie was glad he had got in before the storm came. He felt as
cheerful as if he had received a legacy that morning, and he greeted the
clerk with even greater friendliness than usual when he stopped at the
desk for his mail. In the dining-room he found several old friends
seated here and there before substantial breakfasts: cattlemen and
mining engineers from odd corners of the State, all looking fresh and
well pleased with themselves. He had a word with one and another before
he sat down at the little table by a window, where the Austrian head
waiter stood attentively behind a chair. After his breakfast was put
before him, the doctor began to run over his letters. There was one
directed in Thea Kronborg's handwriting, forwarded from Moonstone. He
saw with astonishment, as he put another lump of sugar into his cup,
that this letter bore a New York postmark. He had known that Thea was in
Mexico, traveling with some Chicago people, but New York, to a Denver
man