for any of your pipe dreams. I'm doing it," he arose, and added
softly, "I'm doing it for the fun of the damn thing. Good night, Mr.
Genius!"

Long, long afterwards, Brent continued to sit in the back-tilted chair,
gloomily staring through the window which framed his dim vision of the
world. Later, somewhere on the other side of the house, the moon came
up; and far out across the country a dog howled. Yet, by another hour,
when that disk of lifeless white had floated higher in the sky, the
trees framed by his window dropped their robe of mourning for a more
soothing green and silver.

"I don't reckon it's such a somber old world, after all," he stood up,
stretching;--then went to bed, and slept.

But, across the hall, Dale had not slept. Excited, boyishly happy to
have escaped the consequences of his madness, he had tossed throughout
the night; building up castles of greatness equal to those of his
beloved Clay and Lincoln.

Now a robin piped its three first waking notes, and the mountaineer's
eyes opened wide. The interior of the room was beginning to be touched
with gray, and he sprang up, throwing back the eastern shutters and
gazing on that first faint flush of dawn which stirs within man's breast
a feeling of the Omnipotent. With lips apart, he watched the coming of
delicate layers of salmon, and saw them merge to a soft and satiny rose.
Vermillion now touched the highlights, as though some unseen brush, wet
from a palette below the horizon, had reached up and made a bold stroke
across this varying canvas. More slowly followed blue--and then a bluer
blue.

His thoughts, coloring with the sky, were whimsically curious. A day was
coming! It would come and go, and never in all eternity come
again--would this day! It was coming: to some, bringing ungrudging
pleasure, sweet happiness; to others, unsparing misery, bitter despair!
Before days were, it had been arranged that this one should appear--it
had been nicely calculated that this very dawn should glorify the sky at
this precise moment; and that e'er the sun of this day set, thousands
upon thousands of human beings should raise their smiling lips in
rapture, or their bloodshot eyes in pain! How many now, out across this
big, beautiful, blushingly awakening world, were undreaming of their
approaching joy--or unconscious of their creeping doom? Over and over in
his mind Dale weighed these thoughts. The universe was becoming a
fascinating, tremendous force to him