the hotel the next morning, waking with a
vague sense of inexpressible relief, which was quickly followed by the
emotions which may come to a man regaining consciousness after he has
been sandbagged and robbed. At table in the breakfast-room the boy
brought me a morning paper. On the first page, in screaming headlines,
I saw the complete explanation of the mysteries of the previous
evening. Agatha Geddis had eloped with a married man notably prominent
in social and business circles. The newspaper had two reliable sources
of information. The deserted wife had been interviewed, and the guilty
pair had been followed on the train by a reporter.

I laid the paper aside and stared out of the breakfast-room window like
a man awakening from a horrid dream. Once again the submerging wave of
realization and relief rushed over me. Truly, I had been held up and
robbed; had in fact innocently financed this city-shaking elopement.
But, so far as Agatha Geddis's banishment from Denver and Colorado
could accomplish it, I was once more a free man.

XX

Broken Faith

"Sweet are the uses of adversity," sang the great bard who is supposed
to have known human nature in all its mutations; and humanity has
echoed the aphorism until it has come to believe in some sort that
bufferings are benedictions, and hard knocks merely the compacting
blows that harden virtues, as the blacksmith's hammer beats a finer
temper into the steel upon the anvil.

With all due respect for the shades of the mighty, and for the tacit
approval of the many, I beg leave to offer the _argumentum ad hominem_
in rebuttal. Fight the conclusion as I may, I cannot resist the
convincement that ill winds have never blown me any good; that, on the
contrary, the steady pressure of hardship and misfortune, during a
period when my life was still in a great measure in the formative
state, exerted an influence which was altogether evil, weakening the
impulses which should have been growing stronger, and giving free rein
to those which, under more favoring conditions, might never have been
quickened.

When I forsook the breakfast-table and the hotel, after having read the
newspaper story telling how effectively Agatha Geddis had removed
herself from my path, it was to make a joyous dash for the first train
leaving the capital for Cripple Creek. With shame I record it, I had
already forgotten my own culpable weakness in permitting a dastardly
fear of consequenc